AI is going to make us ignorant and uneducated long before it becomes an actual lethal threat.

JOANNE JACOBS: Let AI do it: High schoolers don’t need to write essays any more.

“Good-bye and good riddance” to teaching students to write essays, writes Daniel Herman in The Atlantic. Herman, who teaches English at a private school in Berkeley, welcomes our new robot overlords. Starting this year, he’s shifting his focus from writing to reading.

His 12th-grade class spends a semester (!) reading Moby-Dick. Last year, a student spent weeks working on a research paper analyzing “whaling and the exploitations of global capitalism,” writes Herman. On the day before it was due, the student watched ChatGPT produce a similar paper in seconds.