14/06/2026
Do we have enough water to build the required data centres?
Yes to Entrepreneurship in the Gladstone Region - Glad to be ethical.
Gladstone Ports Corporation
Gladstone Area Water Board
Gastel Peterson & Co.
This week I met with senior leaders in education to talk about AI, plagiarism, academic integrity, and the pressure to keep pace with rapidly evolving technology.
One example that shaped the discussion was the adoption of tools designed to detect AI use. Tools that, by their own creators’ admission, do not consistently perform outside controlled conditions, can produce false positives, and should not be treated as definitive.
That raises an uncomfortable question. Why are we investing heavily in systems that “sometimes work”, at significant cost, and then building decisions around them? To be impolite… s**t in = s**t out.
Because when AI becomes positioned as the answer to complex problems, critical thinking can quietly slip out of the process.
The real issue is not the technology. It is how quickly we move to technical solutions without first understanding the conditions that created the problem.
In education, those conditions matter. Increased workload. Reduced time for teaching and observation. Pressure on assessment systems. And growing reliance on tools to fill the gaps.
The risk is that we introduce systems to detect behaviour that our own systems may have helped create, without first stepping back to ask whether the underlying problem is being addressed.
That is why this needs to be a rewind, not a race.
Back to critical thinking. Back to ethics and sociology. Back to understanding impact on learners, including psychological harm and trust in the system.
Only then does it make sense to introduce technology as support, not as a shortcut.
Not to fix the symptoms of a strained system, but to rebuild the thinking that shapes it.
