AI in Berkhamsted: three questions, three honest answers

You cannot move along the High Street without bumping into someone with Opinions.

Half the town runs a committee. The Rex was saved by a residents' campaign that became a small legend. The Boxmoor Trust has a constitution that locals reach for in arguments. Berkhamsted does not adopt anything quietly.

Which makes it interesting that AI is the one thing most people here have not yet had a proper conversation about. I have had that conversation a lot in the last few months. Outside the school gates. In the queue at the bookshop. At the Rex on a Thursday. Three questions come up more than any others. Here are the answers I keep giving.

"Is there any point if I do not write for a living?"

Most people who ask think AI is for journalists, marketers, and the kind of London consultants who already commute back from Euston with a half-finished pitch. They are wrong, but understandably so. The headlines are about writing, so the assumption is that writing is the use case.

The most underrated use case for AI in Berkhamsted is reading.

Drop a forty-page parish meeting PDF into Claude and ask for the three things that need a decision. Drop a residents' association submission into ChatGPT and ask whether it actually persuades. Drop the small-print terms of a school trip in and ask what the parent is agreeing to. Reading well is harder than writing well. The chatbot is genuinely good at it.

If you spend more of your week reading than writing, the half of the use case that fits your life has been hiding in plain sight.

"Should I let my fourteen-year-old use it for homework?"

This is the most-asked question, and the one with the most defensive answers in the local press. The press is mostly wrong, but only by a little.

You should not ban it. They will use it anyway, you will lose the conversation, and they will learn worse habits than they would with you in the room. You should also not surrender. The honest answer is the same one we landed on for calculators and spell-check, eventually. Set the floor.

The floor I suggest: the AI can read with them. It can challenge a draft. It cannot start the draft. Anything they hand in must contain at least one sentence they can defend, out loud, in their own words, when challenged across the dinner table.

Sit with them once. Watch them use it once. Most parents who do this come away calmer, not more anxious. The risk is not that they cheat. The risk is that they outsource thinking, and that risk is best managed in the kitchen, not on a school IT policy page.

"What is the most useful thing it has actually done?"

When I push past the abstract, the answer is always smaller and less impressive than people expect. It is a list of obstacles that had been sitting on a to-do for months, and got unstuck in an afternoon.

None of those are spectacular. None of them will make a documentary. Each one is the kind of thing that has been quietly draining a Sunday evening for months. AI does not transform Berkhamsted. It clears the queue.

Where to start

Open Claude or ChatGPT on your phone. Pick one item from your own version of that list. Spend twenty minutes. Do not aim for impressive. Aim for one thing crossed off this week.

If you commute, our guide to Claude on the Euston run has three things to try on tomorrow's train. Five miles up the line, the Tring guide takes a different angle. The Hemel guide too. New to all of it? AI on your phone is the entry point.