Times Higher Education reported on arguments that heavy reliance on AI marking may become a false economy. The core concern is not only what students lose, but what teachers lose. If assessment and feedback are increasingly outsourced to systems, educators may gradually lose the professional craft involved in reading student work carefully, diagnosing problems, and shaping progress through nuanced response. That matters directly to ELT, where formative feedback on writing and speaking is central to learning. The piece is a useful counterweight to the current wave of automation claims, especially for schools looking at AI-based marking as a workload solution. It does not argue that AI has no place. It argues that if teachers give away too much of the feedback function, the profession itself may weaken
