TEACHER-led education must be at the “heart of schools amid concerns over invidious and dangerous” artificial intelligence (AI), a head teacher warned today.

Epsom College head Sir Anthony Seldon said that plagiarism and deepfakes could cause “moral damage” to young people.

His intervention followed last week’s warning from more than 60 education figures in the Times newspaper that schools are “bewildered” by the rate of AI-induced change. 

Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak insists that guardrails will be put in place to maximise the benefits of human-mimicking technology, such as ChatGPT, while minimising the risks to society.

But Sir Anthony told Sky News’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday programme: “The opportunity for young people to be manipulated, bullied, brought into drugs, all the rest of it, is very worrying to parents and schools.

“The tech companies have a lot of profit motive. They’re making enormous amounts of money out of the technology. We can’t make them go away.

“We have to ensure that we provide really good information about AI because government really have caught up in the last few months, but they’re still behind the curve — they never quite understand what happens in schools.”