Bristol-based illustrator and designer Adam Birch was one of the first to make a public statement. He was cautious because he wanted to be, indicating that he didn’t believe the choice was malevolent but rather misguided. However, he kept returning to a question that was more difficult to ignore than the anatomical errors on the cover: why learn creative skills if the organization endorsing those classes doesn’t value them enough to bother commissioning even a photograph, let alone a real human illustration? “Something devoid of creativity is being used to promote creativity,” he stated. It was the type of sentence that didn’t require embellishment.

In addition to the cover, the booklet included about ten other AI-generated images. And there was a big backdrop to it all. In 2023–2024, Bristol’s cultural sector had an economic impact of £892.9 million. Nearly 90% of the council’s £134 million fine art collection is hidden away in storage. Just weeks prior to the backlash over the pamphlet, the council’s Head of Culture, Philip Walker, had publicly stated that Bristol’s creative community was a “vital part of how we live, connect, and grow.” There was enough space for a bus to pass between that language and a four-fingered AI illustration on a pamphlet about painting classes.

Wick, South Gloucestershire-based illustrator and artist Luke Oram expressed the worry that elevates this beyond a local embarrassment. He described the 22-year-old recent art school graduate who is attempting to establish himself in a field that is already challenging under typical conditions. Careers start with those entry-level commissions, such as the booklet cover, the small council project, or the community publication. They don’t have any prestige. They are frequently underpaid. However, their existence is important, and when organizations choose to use an AI tool instead, the claim that the work isn’t worth paying for becomes self-fulfilling in a way that intensifies over time.

Speaking to the BBC, an unnamed artist from Leamington Spa claimed that his CEO had instructed them to incorporate AI into their work. “We’re being told to bring our heads out of the sand,” he replied. However, he had a different opinion about who really gains from that training. The people who will benefit from AI are not the ones being advised to use it. Additionally, his portrayal of the technology as “fast-food”—never pausing to consider whether we should, only whether we could—landed more forcefully than the majority of the official statements made by both sides of the dispute.

Reading the Bristol response gives the impression that the city recognized the decision’s symbolic significance in a way that the council did not at first. Eventually, council leader Tony Dyer acknowledged the “strong feelings expressed by residents” and announced that AI guidelines had been revised. For his part, Birch kept going back to a straightforward solution: use pictures from the real classes. Showcase the artwork created by the students who participate. When people show up, let the cover be a celebration of their creations. It would have been practically free. It would have made the appropriate statement. Additionally, it would have had the right number of fingers.

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For many years, the question of how physical space influences creative thought has been growing in both research and practice, but Harvard’s involvement with it has taken on a new degree of seriousness. The Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies held a half-day event at the GSD in April 2026 to examine how design, from a single shared kitchen to an entire neighborhood, can reorganize how individuals of various ages, backgrounds, and disciplines interact with one another. The topic of discussion at the event, which was organized by Jennifer Molinsky, Jenny French, and Tim Love, ranged from the legalization of mid-rise single-stair construction in Massachusetts to multigenerational housing models. Beneath all of this, however, was a single, unifying argument: most of our existing spaces make decisions that we haven’t consciously considered, and how we design shared space is a cultural decision rather than merely a technical one.

French, an assistant professor in practice of architecture whose firm French 2D designed Bay State Cohousing in Malden, Massachusetts, frequently brought up the term “setting up preconditions” because it touches on a point that most architectural thinking ignores. Interaction is not forced in a good collaborative space. It increases the likelihood of low-friction interaction. With its cozy wood cabinets and a layout that makes it genuinely hard to avoid the neighbors, the shared kitchen at Bay State Cohousing is anything but decorative generosity. It is a thoughtful debate about what occurs when individuals of different ages are given an excuse to be in the same space at the same time.

Ethan Bernstein’s seminal study on open office architecture from Harvard Business School, which has been referenced almost 550 times, discovered something that defies the logic of most office redesigns. Face-to-face interaction actually decreased, sometimes by as much as 70%, when businesses removed walls and made their spaces completely open. People put on their headphones. They withdrew behind screens. The architecture that was meant to foster unplanned cooperation instead created a learned avoidance and social defensive posture. Since then, research published in the Harvard Business Review has made the counterargument that dynamic shared space—rooms, hallways, and common areas that serve multiple purposes and invite people in without requiring them to collaborate on cue—is what actually fosters spontaneous creative interaction rather than openness per se.

How much of what emerged from the GSD event maps onto that finding is difficult to ignore. James Stockard, who has spent more than 50 years living in Common Place, a twelve-unit cooperative housing community, explained how the kids there were raised to view shared living as normal, not radical or ideological, just something people do. He claims that one of the most important results of the architectural decision his group made fifty years ago was that normalization. The culture was shaped by the space. The expectations of the following generation were shaped by the culture. A few of those kids now reside in comparable situations. Some people are open to it, but they don’t. The design process is still ongoing.

The same issue is addressed from the perspective of organizations rather than housing in the GSD’s executive education program on creating innovative and cooperative workplaces, which is taught by Jacob Reidel and Carly Tortorelli. The physical environment has always played a major cultural role in the creative industries, which is why they have struggled more than most with the shift to hybrid work. The table covered in real models, the shared wall of drawings, and the studio are more than just tools. They are the circumstances that make it possible to think in certain ways and initiate conversations that would not otherwise take place.

Observing Harvard’s architects, housing researchers, and workplace designers come to the same conclusion from various angles gives the impression that the field is coming together around something it has always understood but has seldom intentionally created. Despite their surroundings, good people do not create spontaneous creative collaboration by cultural accident. One shared kitchen, one hallway, one pentagonal void at a time—spaces can either make it easy or difficult.

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For Black Panther in 2018 and Wakanda Forever in 2022, Carter became the first Black person to win two Academy Awards for Best Costume Design. She began her career with Spike Lee’s School Daze in 1988 while attending Hampton University, an HBCU in Virginia. Since then, she has costumed over 70 movies and TV shows, creating what Robertson refers to as a “Afrohistoricist” body of work, which is based on the notion that authentic design starts with historical excavation rather than trend research. Malcolm X’s oversized, patterned Zoot suits were specifically chosen for their symbolic meaning in the 1940s: racialized politics of fabric during wartime rationing, cultural assertion, and defiance. Carter was aware of all of that prior to selecting a single swatch.

This methodology—research first, design later, always in service of the story—is beginning to permeate design education in ways that are actually changing what the field views as fundamental. According to Robertson, Carter functions as a “fashion griot,” referencing the West African custom of the storyteller who uses art to preserve and transmit history. The art form in her case is clothing. She has stated that the non-negotiable first step in working on Black Panther was comprehending the various African tribes, not the superhero suit, the box office forecasts, or the pre-existing sketches from the Marvel visual development team. The tribes. Their jewelry, colors, and attitudes toward silver versus gold, as well as how they used clothing to express their social standing and sense of belonging. The design didn’t start until that research was finished.

The pedagogical shift is noteworthy for young creatives who are absorbing this philosophy through her exhibitions, her virtual keynote at the Costume Society of America Conference, and her structured digital course created in collaboration with PLC Detroit. Technical skills such as draping, pattern-making, textile knowledge, and construction have long been the focus of design education. None of that is being disregarded by Carter. She is introducing the notion that a garment’s authority stems from its knowledge, which most curricula have tended to overlook. Queen Ramonda’s 3D-printed Isicholo crowns in Wakanda Forever were not ornamental. They were constructed using in-depth research on traditional headwear worn by Zulu married women in South Africa, filtered through the logic of Afrofuturism, which honors ancestral aesthetics while envisioning what they might become in a civilization that has never been colonized. A stylist doesn’t make that choice. It is a historian’s choice conveyed through the artistry of a fabricator.

As Carter’s influence grows through design schools, exhibitions, and online learning environments, it seems as though she is actually imparting a self-authorization philosophy. She has stated unequivocally that she always wanted to be the first, not out of a sense of competition but rather out of a quiet conviction that the stories she was sharing were important and worthy of praise. She advised graduating students at Suffolk University’s 2019 commencement to take risks, be unpredictable, and find validation within themselves rather than waiting for it from traditional industry structures. Black students entering design fields that have historically marginalized their perspectives and histories are especially affected by this message, which effectively tells them that having a thorough understanding of their own culture is not a niche interest but rather their greatest competitive advantage.

It’s still unclear if educational institutions will take Carter’s framework seriously enough to alter the way their curricula are actually organized, or if her influence will continue to be inspirational rather than structural. However, the case for teaching design the way Carter practices it is already complete in the Indianapolis Children’s Museum, those five dresses, the young child who noticed something lovely, and the researcher who saw everything beneath it.

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The course, which has been offered at Montclair State since 2012, started out as a direct reaction to an unsettling finding in American educational statistics. A seminal study conducted in 2010 found that children’s creative thinking test scores had been steadily declining for the previous twenty years. The results were quiet in the same way that some uncomfortable facts are often quiet; they were acknowledged, briefly mentioned, and then mainly ignored while academic institutions continued to teach in the same manner. Montclair State took a different approach. It created a course centered on the issue and asked a few genuinely unlikely partners to teach it together.

Professor of physics Ashuwin Vaidya, who led sessions in 2012 and 2014 and contributed to the curriculum’s development, talks about wanting students to think and ask questions independently rather than just absorb information. That seems simple until you consider how infrequently it occurs in a traditional lecture hall, where the room’s layout—rows of seats facing a single speaker—has been subtly arguing the same point about authority and knowledge transfer for 200 years. That architecture is upended by the Creative Thinking course. Professors and visiting artists are added to the curriculum. The next day, students sit in the same room as the artists and ask questions after attending rehearsals for performances by visiting choreographers. Liz Queler, a Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter, stopped by and talked about her process. In 2013, musician and performer Laurie Anderson shared her thoughts on creativity. These are not guest lectures added to an already-existing curriculum. They are the framework.

Mika Munakata, a math professor, asked students to draw parallels between math and a dance performance by the Brazilian group Companhia Urbana de Dança. Her goal was to help students see mathematics as a means of observing pattern, proportion, and movement in the world rather than as an end in and of itself. Kirk McDermid, a philosophy professor, describes creativity in terms of exploration, making it clear that this process is dangerous, prone to failure, and difficult to measure. Just this recognition distinguishes the course from the majority of university programs, where the grading system tends to subtly discourage the kind of unrestricted intellectual risk-taking that results in truly novel ideas.

Reading about this course and the faculty’s descriptions of their own teaching experiences gives me the impression that modeling is more crucial than actual instruction. By working with individuals who have different perspectives, venturing outside of their fields, and letting their students witness their uncertainty, the professors themselves are taking chances. In higher education, where expertise is frequently performed as confidence and admitting ignorance can feel costly from a professional standpoint, that is less common than it should be.

It is worthwhile to trace the intellectual lineage that runs beneath the course. Paul Baker, a 1950s educator and artist whose curriculum thinking was decades ahead of most current discussions about interdisciplinary learning, planted the seed. Furthermore, the link to Matthew Lipman’s Philosophy for Children program at Montclair State College—where Australian philosopher Philip Cam received his training and went on to create inquiry-based teaching strategies that are currently employed in classrooms throughout several nations—indicates that Montclair has been quietly considering how to teach thinking for a longer period of time than the current discourse tends to recognize.

It’s still unclear if the Creative Thinking course can be replicated on a large scale or if it requires a certain mix of institutional support, willing faculty, and the unique creative energy that seems to congregate around programs that have found their purpose. The idea that a student who learns to view a tree through the simultaneous lenses of language, mathematics, dance, philosophy, and science has gained knowledge that no single discipline, taught in isolation, could have imparted seems more difficult to dispute.

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A growing number of child development researchers are spending a lot of time worrying about that transaction, which is quick, seamless, and becoming more frequent. It’s not because the image is poor; rather, it’s because of all the things that didn’t go as planned.

Twenty empirical studies on the impact of AI-based painting tools on children’s creative thinking were reviewed in a 2025 systematic review published in Frontiers in Psychology, which was headed by Anna Wang at Jiangxi Science and Technology Normal University in China. Both enthusiasts and skeptics should find the results unsettling because they are genuinely conflicting. On the one hand, AI tools seem to improve engagement and creative expression, especially in kids who find traditional art-making intimidating. However, the same standardized interfaces that make these tools accessible also carry a real risk of what the paper refers to as cognitive homogenization: a gradual flattening of the diversity of creative output as children start producing work that looks, feels, and thinks alike. This is the section that researchers keep coming back to.

That might seem abstract until you think about its practical implications. When a child draws with pencil and paper, thousands of tiny decisions are made, such as where to begin the line, how hard to press, what to leave out, and how to correct the mistake that turns into the best part. The series of decisions—including the mistakes—is not incidental to the process of creative growth. For the most part, it’s creative development. Most of it is ignored by AI. The outcome is already finished, resolved, and devoid of the awkwardness that imparts invaluable knowledge about creating things to a young mind.

Assistant professor Qiao Jin of North Carolina State University oversaw a different study that looked at how parents and kids aged four to eight reacted to AI-generated pictures in children’s books. The results showed that children were more sensitive than their parents to the emotional content of the pictures, which seems both obvious in hindsight and genuinely surprising in its details. Children noticed when an illustration’s emotions didn’t match the text’s emotions, and it turns out that AI still has a lot of trouble deciphering emotional cues. In ways that their parents frequently overlooked completely, they noticed and were disturbed. The youngest readers were the most sensitive to the emotional void left by AI, which is something to think about.

Researchers’ discussions have started to lean toward what some are referring to as the “AI Second” approach, which is a framework that requires kids to work with tangible materials first, using paint, clay, pencils, and mess to develop fundamental skills and personal meaning before introducing AI as a tool for iteration rather than origination. It’s a sensible notion. Additionally, it calls for a degree of deliberate, structured guidance that most homes don’t naturally provide and most classrooms aren’t currently equipped to provide.

By creating child-safe AI art environments with age-appropriate filters and a stated goal of assisting children in creating with AI rather than being replaced by it, platforms like LittleLit are attempting to find a middle ground. The distinction is genuine and deserving of preservation. However, it still depends on someone—a parent, a teacher, or someone who is paying attention—making sure the tool continues to support the child’s imagination rather than subtly replacing it. That is a more difficult problem than any algorithm has been able to solve so far.

Watching all of this take place in classrooms, living rooms, and tablet screens, researchers seem to agree most of the time that technology shouldn’t be used to solve the inefficiency of learning to imagine, which is the slow, frustrating, and fundamentally human task of conjuring something from nothing. It is the actual object.

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Located in the heart of Shrewsbury’s town centre, The Hive is housed in a building that seems to have been discovered rather than planned. Its programming is so varied that it may hold a film screening, a jazz concert, a life drawing class, or a toddler music session every week. It has a charity registration. Its TripAdvisor rating places it comfortably in the top forty things to do in the town, and it has about 7,400 Facebook followers. That doesn’t adequately describe what it does.

The Hive introduced its Alternative Provision program in November of last year. The program’s name is purposefully low-key, but it actually represents a real rethinking of what education can be for young people who have fallen out of the traditional system. The program is intended for kids and teenagers who have trouble going to school, who bring anxiety into every classroom they attend, who are in foster care or have special education plans, or who have just reached the point where the conventional model is no longer effective for them. The duration of sessions is two to four hours. Groups can consist of just one young person and a mentor. Music, DJing, songwriting, graphic design, photography, and printmaking are among the activities. Exams don’t exist. No bells are present.

The CEO, Katie Jennings, put it this way: to make every young person feel like they have a place in the world. That may sound like what charities say in press releases, but there is proof that this goes beyond words. During the organization’s Save The Hive campaign last summer, Mary Keith, who oversees Buzzy Beats, the Hive’s interactive music program for children under five and their caregivers, stated that the venue matters in ways that are genuinely hard to replace. Although she was discussing the building’s survival, the sentiment encompasses all of its contents.

Observing what The Hive does and hearing the language people use around it gives me the impression that alternative education is no longer the exception in Britain; rather, it is subtly evolving into a parallel system. The majority of parents only partially comprehend the pressure that schools are under. National attendance statistics have not returned to their pre-pandemic levels. The number of kids receiving home education has significantly increased. Local authorities like Shropshire have SEND waiting lists that can last for months or even years. Organizations like The Hive are filling that gap with something that government programs frequently lack completely: flexibility and genuine warmth, rather than the resources of such programs.

The only multi-artform alternative facility in Shropshire is The Hive. Sitting with that for a while is worthwhile. The work that the formal education system hasn’t been able to accomplish is being carried out by one charity in a town center building in a county with about 330,000 residents. It’s difficult not to find that both admirable and subtly troubling—admirable because of what The Hive has created, troubling because of what its necessity makes clear. Most of the young people who end up at 5 Belmont are ones that the system has already attempted but failed to retain. It’s noteworthy that The Hive can keep them engaged, whether it’s during a DJing session, a printmaking afternoon, or a discussion with a mentor who isn’t keeping track of their attendance on a spreadsheet.

It is still genuinely unclear if this model can expand or if it will continue to rely on the unstable funding environment that almost put an end to it last summer. Standing outside this specific building on a weekday morning while the rest of the town goes about its business, it seems more difficult to dispute that something genuine is taking place here. Silently. Without much fanfare. Just as educational revolutions usually do.

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According to a study that was published in the Journal of Educational Psychology in late 2025, about 80% of middle school students came up with more original ideas when they were free to move around in their seats as opposed to when they were instructed to remain motionless. Two distinct experiments were carried out with sixth and seventh graders at a private school in the Bay Area by the lead researcher, Marily Oppezzo, a medical instructor at the Stanford Prevention Research Center who graduated with a doctorate in educational psychology from Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. The results were consistent for both groups, and what was especially noteworthy was that the freedom to move had no effect on memory or focused attention. The advantage was unique to creative thinking rather than an all-encompassing improvement all at once.

There was a pleasing simplicity to the experiment itself. For four minutes, students had to think of as many different uses as they could for commonplace items like tires and bricks. This type of task necessitates loose, associative thinking rather than a single right answer. The researchers used a novelty ratio—the number of original ideas divided by the total number of ideas a student produced—to prevent rewarding students who were just more talkative. Whether they were moving or not, a student who came up with ten ideas, two of which were novel, received the same score; the measure only took effect if the percentage of truly original thought changed. It did under conditions of freedom of movement. Regularly. In most cases, students who were instructed to move as naturally as possible while seated on “wiggle stools” outperformed their own sitting-still results.

It’s important to remember that Oppezzo had previously encountered this situation. In 2014, she and Dan Schwartz, who is currently dean of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education and a co-author on the more recent study, discovered that walking increased adult and college students’ creative output by an average of 60%. In an earlier study, some participants were placed on indoor treadmills facing blank walls in order to test whether the environment was causing the effect. It made no difference that the wall was blank. Even in a featureless room, walking on a treadmill still elicited far more imaginative answers than sitting. It seems that the body has a relationship with imagination of its own, independent of scenery.

For anyone in charge of a classroom, the more recent research adds something more useful. It is challenging to incorporate walking into a lesson. The ability to squirm freely and the use of wiggle stools are not. In the second experiment, a third condition was added: “sit as usual,” which refers to a regular chair with no explicit instructions to remain rigid. The results showed a linear trend: students in this middle condition fell between the sit-still and freedom-to-move groups on creative output. This implies that the effect is not binary. It appears that stifling movement actively hinders creative thinking rather than merely failing to encourage it.

The mechanism might have something to do with how the body’s arousal state is altered by mild exercise in a way that loosens the type of inhibited, self-monitoring cognition that typically yields safe, obvious answers. It’s still not clear. Oppezzo has taken care to point out that students’ level of creativity was not predicted by how much they actually wiggled; rather, the benefit came from the permission rather than the amount of movement. This is a truly peculiar and intriguing discovery, indicating that both physiological and psychological factors are at play.

As this field of study progresses, there’s a sense that it keeps running into a rather obstinate institutional presumption that stillness is a prerequisite for serious thought. Steve Jobs conducted his most significant meetings while strolling. The same has been done by Mark Zuckerberg. It is said that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was unable to think without movement. There have always been anecdotes. The accompanying data is what Stanford continues to produce. As usual, the question of whether offices and classrooms will truly change in response is a different and slower one.

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This is not a gentle trend. Researchers at Harvard Business School and University College London have examined nearly 5,000 job descriptions that Russell Reynolds Associates compiled. The number of C-suite ads that specifically highlighted social skills increased by about 27% between 2000 and 2017. Ads highlighting the management of operational and financial resources decreased by about 38% during that time. These are significant changes occurring over a period of seventeen years in the world’s most competitive executive hiring market. These decisions are not being made by idealistic companies. These are sizable, publicly traded companies with boards, shareholders, and quarterly earnings reports. It’s important to pay attention when they alter their requests.

Under the direction of Raffaella Sadun and Joseph Fuller of Harvard Business School, the researchers identified two main reasons for the change. The first is the sheer complexity of large, contemporary organizations, where the CEO’s role is more about coordinating scattered, specialized knowledge across functions and geographies that frequently have little natural overlap than it is about managing particular operations. Technology comes in second. When routine tasks are automated, what remains—what truly determines competitive advantage—is everything that algorithms are unable to do, such as judgment, creativity, conflict resolution skills, and the ability to foster trust among a group of people who don’t share the same presumptions. The quality of the individuals in charge of those tools becomes the differentiator in businesses where all of their rivals use the same enterprise software platforms and cloud infrastructure. Furthermore, it turns out that managing people calls for social skills that were never given much attention in traditional management pedigrees.

The irony is that the executives who were most valued by the previous system—the finance-trained operators who rose through GE or McKinsey, capable of accurately managing a P&L and reading a balance sheet in their sleep—were designed for a world that has all but vanished. Not totally. Operational skills are still important. The idea that a CFO should be innumerate is not being debated. However, the HBR analysis makes it evident that businesses are now searching harder for something else and treating those capabilities as baseline rather than differentiating.

What the researchers refer to as “theory of mind”—the ability to deduce the thoughts and emotions of others and take appropriate action—is what the C-suite increasingly seeks. Although it sounds almost philosophical, it has important real-world applications. A strong theory of mind enables a leader to convey a strategic direction to a board of directors, an engineering team, and a marketing team while maintaining focus and register. They can comprehend what isn’t being said as clearly as what is when they are seated across from an irate regulator or a nervous major customer. Because people have faith that failure won’t be arbitrarily punished, they can create an atmosphere that encourages creative risk-taking. For many individuals who advanced through organizations by maximizing quantifiable results, these are not natural abilities. They can be developed, but only if companies choose to give them top priority.

Observing this change from the outside, it seems that the businesses that are succeeding are those that have shifted from viewing creativity as a desirable cultural trait to viewing it as a fundamental strategic competency. These positions, such as Chief Innovation Officer, Chief AI Officer, and Chief Product Officer, have proliferated because the competitive landscape has actually changed rather than because companies chose to rebrand. The compliance layer is being automated by AI, which also manages routine risk calculations, documentation, and monitoring. It is unable to determine what should be built next or convince a skeptical workforce to support it. A person is still needed for that. Someone who can enter a room and give the impression that the idea was partially theirs is still needed. It’s a skill. It’s simply not the same as the one we used to measure.

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That’s essentially what happened when a paralegal flooded a court system with hundreds of concurrently filed motions using an AI tool, seemingly unaffected by the consequences. The judge responded harshly, calling this “an assault on the judicial system.”

It’s difficult to avoid thinking about that phrase for a while. An attack. Not a mistake. Not a mistake. An assault is the term used to describe actions that seem purposefully hostile to the targeted institution. In some ways, it doesn’t matter if the paralegal had bad intentions or just didn’t consider the repercussions. Regardless of intent, there was actual harm done to court resources, the integrity of individual filings, and the trust that keeps legal proceedings cohesive.

This is not an isolated incident. For the past two years, courts in the US, Canada, and the UK have been debating what happens when lawyers use generative AI without the necessary verification procedures. Justice Joseph F. Kenkel of Ontario ordered criminal defense attorney Arvin Ross to completely refile his submissions after discovering that one of the cited cases seemed to be wholly fictitious and that several others led to unrelated civil matters that had no bearing on the argument being made. Kenkel wrote, “The errors are numerous and substantial,” and there’s a certain tiredness that seems to be telling.

The Divisional Court in London heard two cases under what is known as the Hamid jurisdiction, a legal framework that permits judges to oversee their own processes. In one instance, a Haringey Law Centre solicitor and barrister cited five fictitious cases. In another, a lawyer provided a witness statement based on forty-five authorities, eighteen of which were found to be false.

Both groups of attorneys were directed to their respective regulatory agencies. The President of the King’s Bench Division, Dame Victoria Sharp, was straightforward in her assessment: ChatGPT and other open-source AI tools are just not able to perform trustworthy legal research. It wasn’t a recommendation. It was a menacing warning.

The possibility of downstream harm is what makes this truly concerning rather than just embarrassing. According to Amy Salyzyn, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa’s faculty of law, courts shouldn’t base decisions about a person’s money, freedom, or rights on something wholly fictional. When said that way, it seems obvious.

Nevertheless, it continues to occur. In the 2023 case of Mata v. Avianca, a federal court in New York was presented with citations generated by ChatGPT that were simply nonexistent. The attorneys received sanctions. The profession took the story as a warning and, in many cases, continued doing what it had been doing.

The legal community seems to be genuinely divided about how to respond to this situation. Some senior practitioners contend that seasoned attorneys can serve as a useful check because they are more likely to identify irregularities in AI-generated content because they are familiar with the appearance and feel of real case law.

Others think that rather than general consumer goods that were never intended for the demands of litigation, the answer lies in ringfenced, purpose-built AI research tools with built-in verification. There is merit to both arguments. On their own, both are most likely insufficient.

A simpler point that is frequently overlooked in the discussion is that the paralegal who filed 400 motions at once wasn’t showcasing the potential of AI. They were illustrating the consequences of using efficiency as the sole metric. The purpose of courts is to settle disputes thoughtfully, methodically, and with consideration for each individual case.

It is not a workflow optimization to file 400 documents at once. No institution should be required to take this stress test. The judge was correct to call it what it was, and before the next threshold is crossed, the legal profession as a whole would be wise to take the criticism seriously.

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A woman in the second row made a sound that wasn’t quite a gasp when the judge concluded reading his ruling and dismissed all fourteen lawsuits against the daycare run by the church. Something heavier was involved. The sound a person makes when they realize their trusted system has silently shut down.

The decision was based on a peculiarity in Illinois law that had been hidden from the public for many years until a case like this brought it to light. In the state, religious daycares are subject to fewer regulations than secular ones, and these same protections frequently reappear in court documents when lawsuits are filed. Most parents might not be aware of this. On the steps of the courthouse afterward, many expressed the same sentiment, their voices tight with the kind of rage that takes years to fully develop.

The families feel that the decision had nothing to do with the law. It had to do with something more ancient and difficult to identify. Speaking to a small group of reporters, one mother explained that she had picked the daycare because it felt secure. The building featured a handmade wooden cross above the front desk, a small garden close to the entrance, and a playground out back. Almost unconsciously, she brought up the cross twice. She claimed that trust had been ingrained in the walls.

The complaints themselves were not all the same. Some claimed that the supervision was insufficient. Others detailed injuries that, according to the families, went unreported for days. The daycare’s lawyers did not directly refute the claims made by some that the employees had been hired without conducting thorough background checks during the hearings. Instead, they contended that the facility was exempt from the specific claims being made due to its religious status. The judge concurred. A written order doesn’t indicate whether he consented voluntarily or reluctantly.

Similar discussions have previously taken place in Illinois, albeit infrequently on this scale. Advocates who contend that a child’s safety shouldn’t be dependent on whether the building next door has a steeple have long criticized the state’s religious-exemption childcare policy.

Others argue against it, pointing to the long history of faith-based community care and the actual risk that stricter regulations could lead to the closure of small, reliable programs. There is merit to both arguments. For a parent who has already lost something, neither provides much solace.

It was difficult to ignore how quietly the families moved as they left the courthouse that afternoon. Nobody yelled. There were no speeches. They just strolled toward their cars at the leisurely, slow pace of those who are already considering their next move.

We are preparing an appeal. Although things tend to move slowly in Springfield and reform-minded bills have a tendency to stall once the cameras leave, a state senator has indicated interest in drafting new legislation.

For its part, the daycare is still open. During a recent afternoon visit, there was a small line of parents waiting to be picked up; some were chatting, while others were looking at their phones. In that little part of Illinois, life goes on. Even though it’s hard to quantify, something has changed. There is a sense that the case has been put on hold rather than truly concluded. Additionally, the parents who were defeated in court this spring appear committed to spreading the word throughout the entire state.

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