IT IS A Sunday, and I am at the kitchen table with a stack of postgraduate assignments and a cooling cup of tea.

The references are clean, I’m happy the structure works, and even the prose is competent. Yet something is missing, call it the absence of struggle, or the absence of a person behind the page. I have marked enough of these over enough years to know what a mind working through difficulty actually looks like in writing, and this is not it.

Colleagues of mine, writing here recently, called this the front line of a war on human thought. It is a serious argument, made seriously, and parts of it I agree with. But the assignments worrying me most on a Sunday afternoon are not the ones that smell of ChatGPT. They are the ones that always read like this, polished, correct, hollow, long before any chatbot existed.

That is the part of this debate we are not having.

Let us concede the obvious. Writing is thinking, and students who use AI to skip the struggle are robbing themselves of something they cannot get back. Smartphones have done damage to attention spans that predate this whole debate by a decade. The instinct to protect the classroom as a place where something slower and harder can happen is a good one, and I share it.

But the harder question, the one underneath the AI panic, is this. Were the assignments we set actually measuring thinking? Or were they measuring something easier to measure that we hoped was a reasonable proxy? Because if AI can pass them in 30 seconds, that tells us something uncomfortable about the assignment, not just about the tool.

An analogue education

The classic university essay, written alone,........

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