Author and academic Katherine Rundell is pushing back against the spread of generative AI in schools and universities, arguing that the technology is damaging young people's ability to think independently. In a new essay drawing on her work with children and students, she describes AI as a threat to learning, democracy, and intellectual freedom - and calls on educators to treat it with urgency.
"If you set out to design from scratch a tool to facilitate authoritarian rule, it would look exactly like AI," she writes. "You would cherish it for its ability to destabilise our shared reality and its creation of disinformation on a scale unprecedented in human history."
What the research shows about AI and learning
Rundell, who writes fiction for children and holds a fellowship at Oxford University, says she has seen firsthand how generative AI has infiltrated young people's lives. She cites multiple studies showing that AI-assisted learning makes students give up sooner and think less deeply.
One study found that after just "10 minutes of AI-assisted problem-solving, people who lost access to the AI performed worse and gave up more frequently than those who never used it." An MIT study showed that test groups using ChatGPT had the lowest brain activity and "consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioural levels."
"We undergo not just cognitive offloading, but cognitive surrender: we forget what was possible," Rundell writes.
The classroom problem
Rundell describes a classroom environment where students increasingly hand in AI-generated work - sometimes without even deleting the chatbot's signature phrases. A friend who teaches maths at a London university told her students submit essays with AI's "jaunty 'Happy to help!' at the start."
The deeper problem, she argues, is that AI-generated work no longer reflects what students actually understand. "If the work a child produces is no longer an indicator of their understanding, we have put them in a situation that makes them vulnerable to their desire for speed and to their anxiety about looking stupid," she writes.
She also warns that ed tech will widen inequality. Rich schools, she predicts, will follow Sweden and Norway in moving toward non-tech learning, "while poorer schools are left to make ever-greater use of LLM technology."
For those interested in the broader debate about AI's role in education, the AI for Education tag tracks ongoing coverage of how schools and universities are responding.
A threat to universities - and democracy
University teaching staff, Rundell writes, are already feeling the impact. Students arrive having read fewer books and struggle to parse complex text. The arrival of large language models has changed the stakes entirely.
"This is the first time in history that sentences do not need to have humans behind them," she writes.
She quotes Professor Paul Musgrave of Georgetown University, who describes the difference in course discussions when most students have done the reading versus when only a few have: "The former is no chablis, but it is more palatable."
Rundell is scathing about political inaction. "MPs have been largely silent on the threat to our capacity to think independently, boldly and confidently - which is, ultimately, a threat to democracy."
What should replace AI in the classroom
Rundell rejects the argument that students must learn AI or be left behind. "The tech of today looks nothing like it will in five or even two years' time: it's the equivalent of selling your child's intellectual liberty in exchange for a penny-farthing bicycle."
She recounts asking a contact who runs a billion-dollar tech company what he would teach his sons. "He said he wouldn't teach his children to use AI, because it will prepare them for nothing. He would teach them the humanities."
Her advice to young people: read. "Reading for pleasure and delight are vital - but alongside that and even more urgently: reading for power."
Teachers looking for practical ways to navigate this shift may find useful guidance in the AI for Teachers learning path, which covers how educators can approach AI tools critically and responsibly.
Why this matters for educators
For teachers and education professionals, Rundell's argument reframes the AI debate: the question is not simply whether to use the technology, but what it does to the minds of the people using it. Her essay suggests that schools should treat critical thinking and reading as core defenses against AI's cognitive effects - not as optional additions to the curriculum, but as the foundation of it.
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