Reading about the role of artificial intelligence in higher education, the landscape looks bleak. Students are cheating en masse in our assessments or open-book, online exams using AI tools, all the while making ourselves stupider. The next generation of graduates, apparently, are going to complete their degrees without ever having so much as approached a critical thought.

Given that my course is examined entirely through closed-book exams, and I worry about the vast amounts of water and energy needed to power AI datacentres, I generally avoid using ChatGPT. But in my experience, students see it as a broadly acceptable tool in the learning process. Although debates about AI tend to focus on “cheating”, it is increasingly being used to assist with research, or to help structure essays.

There are valid concerns about the abuse and overuse of large language models (LLMs) in education. But if you want to understand why so many students are turning to AI, you need to understand what brought us to this point – and the educational context against which this is playing out.

In March 2020, I was about to turn 15. When the news broke that schools would be closing as part of the Covid lockdown, I remember cheers erupting in the corridors. As I celebrated what we all thought was just two weeks off school, I could not have envisioned the disruption that would mar the next three years of my education.

That year, GCSEs and A-levels were cancelled and replaced with........

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