With AI becoming more commonplace in our everyday lives, arguments for teaching children skills that go beyond the capabilities of AI are becoming more frequent, with many concerned that autonomous machines will likely replace human counterparts in most future professions. Dr Lucinda McKnight , a Senior Lecturer in Education at Deakin University, Australia, has examined this story in greater detail. Sputnik: Could you tell us more about your research and the impact AI is having on writing? Lucinda McKnight: My research involves working with teachers, and working in schools, interviewing teachers in schools, and talking to them about how they teach writing, how they plan for writing the kinds of activities that they do, and this is in secondary schools in Victoria, which is a state in Australia. I’ve found in my recent research with schools that teachers are feeling very constrained in their teaching of writing, that our national testing regime means that teachers feel pressure to teach writing in very formulaic ways. Students have to write in essays of five paragraphs and no more, with an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. They’re not allowed to have more than three ideas, each of those paragraphs has to…