#1 Amazon Bestseller in Education
Slow AI: Knowing When to Use AI and When to Leave It Alone
The critical counterpoint to the books promising AI will save us. A short read on when AI helps, when it does not, and how to tell the difference, drawn from my research and from writing Slow AI for 22,000 readers.
Kindle and paperback.
What the book argues
Most writing about AI comes from people selling something. The utopians say it will fix education. The doomers say it will end the world. Both need you to believe the technology is more powerful than it is.
This book takes a third position. AI is a useful tool for some tasks and a poor one for many others, and the skill worth having is telling those apart in your own context. That skill is judgement, and it is teachable.
It is short on purpose. You can read it in an evening and use it the next morning.
Who it is for
- Teachers and lecturers being told to put AI into their teaching, with no evidence offered and no time to evaluate it.
- Researchers and professionals who want to use these tools without handing over the part of the work that is theirs.
- Leaders making procurement decisions they will be accountable for.
- Anyone tired of being told that AI is either salvation or apocalypse.
Other books
I have written ten. These are the ones people ask about most.
GenAI in Higher Education: Redefining Teaching and Learning
Bloomsbury, 2026. The four pillars of student-centeredness, trust, relevance, and agency, worked through for institutions.
Effective Science Communication
IOP Publishing, third edition 2024. A practical handbook for researchers who need to be understood.
Poetry and Pedagogy in Higher Education
Policy Press, 2024. Creative practice as a serious method for teaching and research.
A Sonnet to Science
Manchester University Press, 2019. Six scientists who were also poets, and what that combination made possible.
Read the writing it came from
Slow AI is a newsletter on critical AI literacy, free to read, published two to three times a week.
Read Slow AI, free