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
S
omewhere 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.
All I could say was: “You’ve missed the fun part!”
