March 4, 2025
Humanities teaching will have to adapt to AI | Artificial intelligence (AI)
I agree with Prof Andrew Moran and Dr Ben Wilkinson (Letters, 2 March) that cheap and easy‑to‑use AI tools create problems for universities, but the reactions of many academics to these new developments remind me of the way some people responded to the arrival of cheap pocket calculators in the 1970s. Reports of the imminent death of maths teaching in schools proved exaggerated. Maths teachers had to adapt, not least to teach students the longstanding rule “garbage in, garbage out”; if students had no idea of the fundamental principles and ideas behind maths, they would not realise their answer was meaningless.