‘This is the future, my wife says./ We are already there, and it’s the same/ as the present.’ So begins Ciaran O’Driscoll’s poem ‘Please Hold’, about a husband talking to a telephone robot and becoming ever more frustrated at the mind-numbing automation of modern-day life. There’s a lot of ‘Your call is important to us’ and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and ‘We appreciate your patience’, until eventually the speaker resigns himself to the fate of growing old while on hold.

This same reluctant acquiescence can be seen with AI: this is the future, and we are already there. Except instead of asking us to hold, it’s always asking us how it can help, how it can further infiltrate our lives.

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AI has already transformed how students learn and schools evaluate. Yet our universities continue to bury their heads in the sand. There has been lots of talk (though not much action) about how AI is undermining the validity of undergraduates’ work and grades. Less has been said about how students are using it to get into university in the first place.

AI is being used at every step of the application process. Personal statements are no longer created on a computer but by a computer. For many teenagers the temptation to ‘collaborate’ with ChatGPT is simply too great. Why labour for weeks........

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