Don’t Let AI Empty Your Students

I picked up his GP essay this week, hoping to see a shift.

Last week, he had promised me he would try. No more outsourcing everything to AI. Try to think it through first. Try to struggle a little.

But as I read the first paragraph, I already knew.

The structure was too neat. The phrasing too familiar. The arguments perfectly balanced, but somehow going nowhere. When I asked him about it, he said he wrote it himself. Then hesitated. Then admitted he had “just used a bit of help.”

I did not need the admission.

I have been picking up essays for thirty years. I know what thinking looks like on a page. And I know what the absence of thinking looks like.

Emails from people I used to recognise. Polished, structured, grammatically perfect, and strangely empty. You can tell when no real thinking has taken place. Even adults are doing this now. Producing more than ever before, but saying less.

AI is powerful. It should be used. It sharpens language, fixes structure, and can even push thinking further.

And we must not take it away from our students. This is their future.

But we are now walking a very fine line.

If they start outsourcing their thinking before they have built it, we are not accelerating them. We are emptying them.

Twelve years ago, I started All Gifted on a simple belief: that all children are gifted. Over the years, we saw children who did not fit into elite systems thrive when given the right environment. We saw students once destined for vocational routes pursue their dream of becoming doctors. We saw school refusal cases return, and eventually step into universities, joining choirs and bands, finding their place again.

We built around the child.

Now, we must do the same with AI.

At All Gifted, we are changing the way we teach. We are moving from serving digital natives to serving AI natives — children who will never know a world without artificial intelligence.

We recently visited China to study how the country intends to integrate AI into learning. We are in conversation with partners in this space and hope to bring these new approaches to our students in the near future.

We must integrate AI deeply into how they learn. Teach them to use it, question it, direct it.

But never let it replace them.

Because AI is not the differentiator.
The human behind it is.

If we cannot help our students find their voice, their thinking, their way of seeing the world — then there is nothing for AI to extend.

They will not lose to AI.

They will lose to the quiet kid in the back who used AI to check his logic, but kept his soul.