The curious case of engineered errors

T he future of education, I recently discovered, arrived not in a government white paper or a Silicon Valley keynote, but in the bedroom of my twelve-year-old nephew. He had been assigned an essay, a perfectly ordinary school task, designed to cultivate clarity, argument, and intellectual temperamant. He opened his laptop, summoned a chatbot, and issued an instruction that was at once comic and chilling: “Write the essay, but make a few small mistakes so my teacher doesn’t realise it wasn’t written by me.”