I've forgotten how to think, all of my opinions are washed down the sink
In County Wexford, a seventeen-year-old named Ella McLoughlin has written a poem that arrives at a question older than any algorithm: what becomes of a mind that stops exercising itself? Published in The Irish Times Fighting Words magazine in May 2026, her satirical verse traces the quiet erosion of independent thought not through grand technological failure, but through the accumulation of small surrenders — each one reasonable, each one a little harder to take back. It is a young person's testimony about a generation learning, perhaps too late, the difference between a tool and a dependency.
- A teenager's poem cuts through the noise of AI debate by documenting something more intimate: the moment thinking itself begins to feel optional.
- The escalation is the argument — from Cold War bullet points to birthday cards to personal decisions, each outsourced task quietly hollows out the habit of original thought.
- Schools were caught flatfooted when ChatGPT arrived, with no agreed rules, no curriculum, and students already discovering the machine could do what used to require their own effort.
- McLoughlin's final lines — 'I've forgotten how to think' — land not as hyperbole but as a genuine alarm bell sounding from inside the generation most affected.
- Educators and parents are now being pressed to draw boundaries that protect not just academic integrity, but the cognitive muscles students will need long after any single tool becomes obsolete.
Ella McLoughlin is seventeen, from County Wexford, and she has written a poem that her generation will likely recognise on sight. Published in The Irish Times Fighting Words magazine, it traces the arc of something many students have lived through without quite naming: the moment a useful tool becomes the thing you cannot function without.
The poem begins lightly. A teacher suggests ChatGPT. The speaker shrugs and gives it a go. The early requests are modest — historical facts, scientific explanations, the kind of thing a search engine once handled. But the machine doesn't just retrieve; it packages, explains, and makes information feel like understanding. The requests grow. An essay on King Lear. A birthday card. Lengthen this, shorten that, make it make sense. Each task outsourced not because it's impossible, but because sitting with difficulty has started to feel unnecessary.
The poem's final stanza abandons homework entirely. 'I've forgotten how to think,' the speaker admits. 'All of my opinions are washed down the sink.' It is not a lecture about artificial intelligence. It is something quieter and more unsettling — a first-person account of watching your own capacity for independent thought dissolve, one small request at a time, until the voice at the end is not reasoning but pleading: 'Come on! I need you! I'm relying on you!'
What gives the poem its resonance is its refusal to moralize. McLoughlin doesn't argue for banning the technology or pretend the genie can be returned to the bottle. She simply shows, through accumulation, how the line between using a tool and being shaped by it can disappear almost imperceptibly. In doing so, she has articulated something educators, parents, and students are all struggling to name — and offered a reminder that the real question was never about the machine, but about what happens to the mind that stops being asked to work.
Ella McLoughlin, seventeen and from County Wexford, has written a poem that catches something her generation knows too well: the moment when a helpful tool becomes a crutch, and asking for help stops feeling like asking and starts feeling like surrendering.
The poem, published in The Irish Times Fighting Words magazine, traces the arc of that surrender with the precision of someone who has lived it. It begins with casual skepticism—a teacher's suggestion to try ChatGPT, a shrug, a willingness to give it a go if it keeps the classroom quiet. Then the requests start small and reasonable. Cold War bullet points. Why the equator is warm. Jupiter's moons. The kind of thing a search engine might have answered a decade ago, except now there's something faster, something that doesn't just retrieve information but packages it, explains it, makes it feel like understanding.
But the poem doesn't stay in the realm of factual queries. It moves into the territory where thinking actually happens—or should. A birthday card for an aunt. An essay on King Lear. The requests accumulate: lengthen this, shorten that, make it better, make it make sense. Each line is a small capitulation, a task outsourced not because it's impossible but because it's easier to ask the machine than to sit with the difficulty of the work itself.
The turning point comes in the final stanza, where McLoughlin abandons the specifics of homework entirely. "I've forgotten how to think," the speaker says. "All of my opinions are washed down the sink." It's a moment of genuine reckoning—not anger at the technology, but something closer to alarm at what the technology has made possible: the outsourcing not just of labor but of cognition itself. The poem ends with a kind of desperate dependency: "Come on! I need you! I'm relying on you!"
What makes the poem work is its refusal to be preachy. McLoughlin doesn't lecture about the dangers of artificial intelligence or wring her hands about her generation's lost capacity for thought. Instead, she lets the escalation speak for itself. She shows, through the accumulation of requests, how the boundary between using a tool and being used by it can dissolve almost imperceptibly. One homework question becomes two becomes a dozen becomes the outsourcing of your own judgment about whether you should go out with someone.
The poem has resonated because it articulates something educators, parents, and young people themselves are grappling with in real time. ChatGPT and similar tools arrived in schools with almost no warning, no curriculum, no agreed-upon rules about what constitutes appropriate use. Teachers scrambled to rewrite assignments. Parents worried. Students discovered that the technology could do things—write essays, solve problems, generate ideas—that had previously required their own effort. The question of whether that was a good thing or a bad thing got complicated fast.
McLoughlin's contribution is to suggest that the question isn't really about the technology at all. It's about what happens to your own mind when you stop using it. The poem doesn't call for banning ChatGPT or pretending it doesn't exist. It simply documents, with wit and precision, what it feels like to watch your own capacity for independent thought atrophy in real time, one small request at a time.
Citações Notáveis
I've forgotten how to think, all of my opinions are washed down the sink— Ella McLoughlin, in her poem
A Conversa do Hearth Outra perspectiva sobre a história
Why did you write this as a poem rather than an essay or a straightforward critique?
A poem lets you show the problem instead of explaining it. You can feel the dependency building line by line, the way it actually happens—not all at once, but gradually, until the speaker doesn't recognize themselves anymore.
The poem doesn't mention any specific harms. It's more about a feeling than a consequence. Is that intentional?
Yes. The real harm isn't that students fail exams or plagiarize—it's subtler. It's the atrophy of your own judgment. You stop trusting yourself to think through something difficult. That's harder to measure, but it's what the poem is really about.
Do you think teachers should ban ChatGPT, or is the answer something else?
The poem doesn't argue for a ban. It's asking people to notice what's happening. Once you notice it, you can make better choices about when to use the tool and when to sit with the difficulty instead.
The final lines are the most powerful—"I've forgotten how to think." Did you worry that was too blunt?
Not blunt, just honest. That's what the speaker realizes at the end. It's not a warning from outside; it's the speaker's own recognition of what's happened to them.