A very engaging read -- Thank you!

Two thoughts popped up:

1) Regarding critical thinking

As I mentioned in my response to another reader/writer Natasha MH's comment, our formal education is still riding on the conformity-style and resulting methodology of education that came with the Industrial Revolution and to some extent the Confucius-style of education in East Asia . Particularly here in Japan, critical thinking is a concept lost in most educational circles. This is just feedback to your article, so I don't want to start an essay here - haha - but critical thinking and metacognitive reflections (as you mentioned) is an area where students can truly evolve into real students. Similar to your ideas, I'd suggest that students, for example, use class time to discuss, then compare/contrast and evaluate two or more literary or academic works, explain the implications of their findings, or provide anecdotes from their own lives to support their arguments. (If AI can generate anecdotes for them, THAT would be seriously creepy tho.) hhh

2) Plagiarism

I don’t want to climb a slippery slope on this one, but even if the programming wiz's can come up with a much better plagiarism-detecting, AI-operated program, the line between what's original and what's not is too fine to see, as you've already pointed out. In fact, I might even say that it doesn't exist. Nothing is truly original. You can't credit everyone either for your work. It becomes an exhausting task to do so just to make the lawyers happy counting their revenue from copyright lawsuits. It really is a war that can't be won. Instead of worrying (too much) about and looking for plagiarism, educators should think outside the box (since our so-called education leaders don't seem to) and embrace AI to inspire us to higher, untapped levels of thinking. imho