What happened
This news piece, published by The Guardian on September 2, 2025, features two letters from readers, Murray Dale of Hayle, Cornwall, and Ignacio Landivar of Berlin, Germany, responding to a previous article by Imogen West-Knights. Both authors express concerns about the increasing reliance on Artificial Intelligence...
Key Concerns and Arguments:
Potential Benefits Acknowledged:
Imogen West-Knights is absolutely right about us losing our brain power to the artificial intelligence bots (ChatGPT has its uses, but I still hate it – and I’ll tell you why). I too believe creative imagination is a muscle, which needs its exercise. She is also right that it can revolutionise scientific endeavour.
My field of weather forecasting will soon be revolutionised by machine learning – a type of AI – where we recognise enough past weather patterns so that we can predict what weather will be coming. But writing best-man speeches, leaving speeches for work colleagues, letters to a dear friend? Do we really want to dissolve into brain-lazy folk who use AI to be the understudy to our own emotions?
If I say “I love you” to someone, would they like to hear it from me or a bot? There is also another concern: AI output has no audit trail, no clues to its source. Its source is the wild west. Anyone – good, bad, indifferent – can feed into it, program it, bias it. If, as you say Imogen, you do end up in the woods in an “analogue manner” with your ability to think intact, I’ll happily join you.
Hopefully others will too.Murray DaleHayle, Cornwall Imogen West-Knights shares her hatred of offloading to ChatGPT the tasks that make us human. And while I share her concerns (I couldn’t have put them better myself), there is an additional one that troubles me: if students go through their entire school lives with this all-knowing and all-solving technology at their fingertips, how will their critical thinking skills develop?
Students in literature class are not given books such as The Great Gatsby so they can regurgitate the plot 20 years later at a dinner, but rather so that they can understand the interconnection of class disparities, wealth and the social atmosphere after the first world war, and so they can trace parallels with the present day.
They learn multivariable calculus not because they will need it to buy groceries but to make their brains strong and malleable, so that grasping and implementing new concepts and ideas will become easier, whatever the subject.And they don’t learn history so they can repeat over and over “Victoria 1837, Edward VII 1901, George V 1910, Edward VIII 1936, George VI 1936, Elizabeth II 1952”, but to understand how sequences of events have led to wars, legislative changes and economic crises, and can do so again.
Technologies that make work easier have always been seductive, and always will be. AI usage is already rampant in secondary schools and universities.But as ChatGPT turns three years old in a few months, preschoolers are also starting to go to kindergartens. And I wonder how in the years to come we will ensure that their answer to everything is not “I will ask ChatGPT.
”Ignacio LandivarBerlin, Germany
Source coverage
This news piece, published by The Guardian on September 2, 2025, features two letters from readers, Murray Dale of Hayle, Cornwall, and Ignacio Landivar of Berlin, Germany, responding to a previous article by Imogen West-Knights. Both authors express concerns about the increasing reliance on Artificial Intelligence...
Key Concerns and Arguments:
Deeper analysis
Full source content
Imogen West-Knights is absolutely right about us losing our brain power to the artificial intelligence bots (ChatGPT has its uses, but I still hate it – and I’ll tell you why). I too believe creative imagination is a muscle, which needs its exercise. She is also right that it can revolutionise scientific endeavour.
My field of weather forecasting will soon be revolutionised by machine learning – a type of AI – where we recognise enough past weather patterns so that we can predict what weather will be coming. But writing best-man speeches, leaving speeches for work colleagues, letters to a dear friend? Do we really want to dissolve into brain-lazy folk who use AI to be the understudy to our own emotions?
If I say “I love you” to someone, would they like to hear it from me or a bot? There is also another concern: AI output has no audit trail, no clues to its source. Its source is the wild west. Anyone – good, bad, indifferent – can feed into it, program it, bias it. If, as you say Imogen, you do end up in the woods in an “analogue manner” with your ability to think intact, I’ll happily join you.
Hopefully others will too.Murray DaleHayle, Cornwall Imogen West-Knights shares her hatred of offloading to ChatGPT the tasks that make us human. And while I share her concerns (I couldn’t have put them better myself), there is an additional one that troubles me: if students go through their entire school lives with this all-knowing and all-solving technology at their fingertips, how will their critical thinking skills develop?
Students in literature class are not given books such as The Great Gatsby so they can regurgitate the plot 20 years later at a dinner, but rather so that they can understand the interconnection of class disparities, wealth and the social atmosphere after the first world war, and so they can trace parallels with the present day.
They learn multivariable calculus not because they will need it to buy groceries but to make their brains strong and malleable, so that grasping and implementing new concepts and ideas will become easier, whatever the subject.And they don’t learn history so they can repeat over and over “Victoria 1837, Edward VII 1901, George V 1910, Edward VIII 1936, George VI 1936, Elizabeth II 1952”, but to understand how sequences of events have led to wars, legislative changes and economic crises, and can do so again.
Technologies that make work easier have always been seductive, and always will be. AI usage is already rampant in secondary schools and universities.But as ChatGPT turns three years old in a few months, preschoolers are also starting to go to kindergartens. And I wonder how in the years to come we will ensure that their answer to everything is not “I will ask ChatGPT.
”Ignacio LandivarBerlin, Germany
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