The arrival of AI is a chance to remind kids that the joy of creativity is not in what you made, but in the process of making it
Somewhere in the middle of the last school holidays, as I was attempting to work from home, the kids came bounding down the stairs armed with a new song they had written. The lyrics were nonsensical (as you’d expect from a pair of preteens), but there was a surprising crispness to the rhyming structure.
“We got ChatGPT to write it,” the eldest said. This was neither a confession nor a boast. Every 12-year-old knows the AI shortcut. Two minutes earlier, they didn’t have a song. Now they had something ready to perform. Admittedly the improvised melody could best be described as “indeterminate”, but the right prompt could have fixed that.
