What we have here is a failure of imagination

I was wishing for a high school English class with whom to discuss irony when I read this last week:

That master of horror himself Stephen King is throwing the towel on fighting the monster is just a little too on the nose here. 

I am not going to recapitulate the arguments I have already made regarding how opposed to the values we claim to hold in education generative AI is; you can read that here from earlier this year. Audrey Watters is out here every week continuing to make the arguments; 

More and more, I am concluding that we have here is less a lack of knowledge about technology, and more a lack of one of the first steps of human education: fairy tales. 

As Terry Pratchett¹ in defending children reading fantasy put it: 

The morality of fantasy and horror is, by and large, the strict morality of the fairy tale. The vampire is slain, the alien is blown out of the airlock, the evil Dark Lord is vanquished and, perhaps at some loss, the Good triumph -- not because they are better armed, but because Providence is on their side. Let there be goblin hordes, let there be terrible environmental threats, let there be giant mutated slugs if you really must, but let there also be Hope. It may be a grim, thin hope, an Arthurian sword at sunset, but let us know that we do not live in vain.

Classical written fantasy might introduce children to the occult, but in a healthier way than might otherwise be the case in our strange society. If you're told about vampires, it's a good thing to be told about stakes at the same time.

"The wolf is already here so we should give in" is not the story of Little Red Riding Hood or of the Three Little Pigs. "The evil queen already took over and so we should give in" is not the story of Snow White. We must understand that "generative AI is here and so we have to use it" is the same sort of nonsense. If something is objectively bad for us, no, we do not teach children "how to use it effectively." We teach them not to use it at all; we teach them to fight it. 

One has to fight in order to have to get to the "happily ever after." 

¹ in the same essay in which he concludes by quoting G.K. Chesterson, about teaching children that monsters can be killed. When Neil Gaiman cites Chesterson, it appears he's actually remembering Pratchett.