Far too often, 'working smarter' is simply being used as a respectable-sounding excuse for not doing the work at all, writes the GB News presenter
This summer, kitchen tables across Britain will become stress zones once again, with parents sitting beside seemingly unteachable children wrestling with homework, coursework and reading lists.
Normally, the fight is between the demands of homework and the allure of phones or games consoles. This year, however, there's another guest at the table, and we aren't sure if they are welcome: artificial intelligence. Is it your child's valuable tutor or merely a means of cheating?
Nobody seems to know, not least teachers who are clueless about how to offer rules for parents.
Is it even possible to write rules when the capabilities of sites such as ChatGPT to assist with coursework advance almost daily?
How do we even have a national conversation about this when some parents whizz their way around multiple AI sites every day whilst others are still satisfied by something we used to call 'Googling'?
A remarkable story from Brown University in the United States should be ringing alarm bells far beyond academia.
Professor Roberto Serrano, who has taught economics at Brown for more than three decades, thought he was being compassionate towards his recently traumatised students following the tragic shooting on campus during a revision session last December. Serrano changed his usual in-person exams to take-home papers, giving students an 11-hour window to complete what would ordinarily have been a two-hour test. It was intended as an act of understanding, easing pressure on students after an awful event.
In my opinion, that was mistake number one: treat kids as victims and they will believe you. Lower the bar to meet the needs of the weakest and you open the door to every student expecting less from themselves.
His mollycoddling decision opened the door to industrial-scale cheating. The results were extraordinary, but not remotely surprising for anyone with a teenager. The average mark on the sat-at-home midterm exam was 96 per cent. Forty students achieved perfect scores — something he said was completely unlike anything he had seen in decades of teaching, where averages typically ranged between 65 per cent and 80 per cent.
The experienced professor also noticed that some answers appeared strikingly similar to those produced when he entered his own exam questions into ChatGPT. Funny that. Rather than immediately accuse individual students, he warned the entire class that he believed widespread cheating had taken place. He announced that the final exam would instead be held in person under traditional closed-book conditions.
What happened next only deepened his concerns: of the 86 students who sat the online midterm exam, 27 dropped the course entirely before the final exam. Unsurprisingly, according to Professor Serrano, 22 of those students had previously scored 100 per cent.
Those who remained then sat a supervised exam, and the average mark collapsed to just under 49 per cent. Nineteen students failed entirely.
Professor Serrano reported his concerns to Brown's academic integrity committee, expecting a formal investigation. Instead, he says weeks passed with no acknowledgement of his submission. Frustrated by the silence, he decided to write publicly about what had happened.
First came an article in Spain's El País, which attracted huge international attention. Then Inside Higher Ed picked up the story. Soon, newspapers, education journals and commentators around the world were discussing his experience. Only after the story went viral, Professor Serrano says, did the university request further evidence and begin formally investigating the students involved.
Whether every one of his conclusions ultimately proves correct is for Brown University to determine. But if they have time and money to waste on this AI-enabled cheat-a-thon, so be it.
The broader issue this brave professor raises is impossible to ignore: technology has moved at breakneck speed, but education has not. Most classrooms — especially in the UK — look remarkably like they did in Victorian England: one teacher looking after 30 children; rows of pupils with subjects divided into periods; homework set daily; end-of-course examinations; and children being rewarded largely for retaining and recalling knowledge.
Against this archaic system, parents are being left to make ethical decisions in their own homes about AI with almost no support whatsoever. Many mums and dads use AI every day in their own jobs: drafting emails, summarising reports, organising meetings or brainstorming ideas. They've been encouraged to embrace it because it saves time and improves productivity.
They then turn around and tell their twelve-year-old not to use exactly the same technology for schoolwork. But kids can see that parents know they are being hypocritical. Why shouldn't they also be learning to use AI to generate content in a meaningful and positive way? Can anyone blame children for feeling confused? Ask teenagers about it and you'll often hear the same phrase: "Work smarter, not harder."
It's become the slogan of the AI generation. Except, far too often, "working smarter" is simply being used as a respectable-sounding excuse for not doing the work at all. There's an enormous difference between using AI as a tutor, a note-taker or a research tool and using AI as a ghostwriter with bad grammar.
We are risking a generation that no longer values understanding. Instead, as long as the words appear on the page, they are satisfied that they will earn a grade. The problem is that adults are still trying to work out where the line between AI learning support and plagiarism actually sits. It's equally tough for teachers. They're expected to prepare children for a future dominated by artificial intelligence while simultaneously preventing them from relying on it. They're told to embrace technology but preserve academic integrity. They're asked to mark work they increasingly suspect wasn't written by the child sitting in front of them.
Perhaps the biggest question of all is this: what exactly are teachers supposed to be teaching now?
For generations, education has rewarded remembering facts: learn your times tables, memorise Shakespeare quotations and recall chemical formulae. But almost overnight, remembering information has started to feel futile and irrelevant.
When any fact can be produced in seconds, the value of simply recalling information inevitably changes. That doesn't mean knowledge no longer matters. You can't judge whether AI is right unless you already know enough to question it. Perhaps schools should now place far greater emphasis on judgement, reasoning, curiosity, communication and critical thinking than simply rewarding children for storing information they can instantly retrieve from a machine.
Of course, historically, when cheap printed books became widely available, people worried memory would decline.
Calculators prompted fears that children would never learn arithmetic. The internet transformed research forever. We are now baffled by the memory that the Encyclopaedia Britannica on a shelf was a symbol of intellectual aspiration so valuable that parents would literally take out a loan to invest in such a resource!
Each technological leap forced schools to adapt, and eventually they did. But AI is different — it's a machine that can imitate thinking itself. It does so much of the heavy lifting that it renders the user (almost) redundant. British education, for all its historical strengths, changes extremely slowly, and it is a race against time that we are all losing.
Meanwhile, parents are left navigating all of this with precious little guidance, asking questions with no simple answers. This summer, they'll ask themselves impossible questions: Should I let my son use AI to check his science homework? Should my daughter use it to help structure an English essay? If I know she's copied too much, do I make her start again?
Professor Serrano explains that even the country's top universities are confused: "Brown, like other schools, is struggling with how to integrate AI so that it advances rather than compromises the university's mission... Brown's inaugural Generative AI in Teaching and Learning Committee circulated a useful document to explain to the university community how AI should and should not be used, including advising that professors should 'avoid highly restrictive and punitive rules around GenAI use'."
He says that he agrees with this advice, but worries about the ethical implications as witnessed in his own experience with mass cheating.
"We must try to strike the right balance," he says. "In particular, when an incident of this magnitude (or even of much lesser magnitude) happens, the system must be ready to uphold the value of academic integrity and be ready to implement necessary punishments to improve future behaviour."
Perhaps the hardest question of all for parents is this: am I preparing my child for the future or helping them avoid learning altogether? We are trying to answer all these questions alone, with frustrated children lacking clear expectations. Teachers need practical guidance, and schools need consistent policies. Because in the absence of clear boundaries and an education system fit for the future, children are deciding what is best for them — and that is a recipe for conflict, moral degradation and intellectual demise.
And by the time we realise we've confused convenience with education, we'll have produced a generation who know how to ask brilliant questions of a chatbot, but struggle to answer life's important questions for themselves.
