(rousing music) - Hello, everyone, and welcome to Aman Poor & Company.

Here's what's coming up.

- To this day, I think it's the worst siege of the war, and it will go down in history with Leningrad and Guernica, and place names like that.

- [Christiane] The battle for Ukraine, now longer than World War I, as Ukrainians endure Russian atrocities, painful memories of Mariupol, with journalist James Verini.

And.

(rousing orchestral music) "Mothers of Kherson," a new opera, tells the story of three Ukrainian women and their fight to bring their abducted children home, my report on the families torn apart by Russia.

Then.

- It was an extraordinary thing to do every night.

- [Christiane] A top Tony gong for Lesley Manville for her captivating performance in Oedipus.

I spoke to her during its acclaimed run on Broadway.

Also ahead.

- When you use AI to brainstorm, it short circuits kids' own creative ideas.

- [Christiane] As more and more students use AI, do the risks outweigh the benefits?

(rousing music) (rousing music continues) - [Announcer] Amanpour & Company is made possible by: The Anderson Family Endowment.

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Thank you.

- Welcome to the program, everyone.

I'm Christiane Amanpour, in Paris this week.

Day after day, Russia furiously pounds Ukraine as Putin tries to claim that he's winning this war, now in its fifth year.

But increasingly audacious long range Ukrainian strikes are challenging that narrative.

This week, they struck an arms factory and an oil refinery deep inside Russia.

Ukraine also hit the Russian occupied port of Mariupol, leaving the site severely damaged.

Mariupol is strategically important, of course.

It was taken by Russian forces early in the war, and became one of the first major sites of Russian horrors.

Many people scrambling to survive took refuge in a theater.

They wrote the word children in huge letters, in Russian, on the ground outside.

Still, on March 16th, 2022, Russia bombed that theater.

The exact number of fatalities is still unknown.

And this critical episode of the war, a defining atrocity, is the subject of a new book, "The Theater," by journalist James Verini, and he is joining me now from New York.

James, welcome to the program.

- Thank you, Christiane.

Good to be with you.

- So we all remember this, those of us who were paying very close attention to the horrors unfolding shortly after the Russian invasion.

Very few of us were there.

You weren't there.

What made you decide to focus on this as the subject of your book?

- Well, I'd been reporting in Ukraine since before the war started.

And when I returned with the full scale invasion, we tried to get to Mariupol, because already, within the first few days of the war, it was clear that Mariupol was being the hardest hit.

It was the worst siege of the war to that point, and possibly to any point.

And so, we tried to get into Mariupol in those first days of the war, but it was already encircled and completely embattled by the Russians.

So we camped out outside of it, in a city called Zaporizhzhia, trying to make our way in, we being journalists and others, and we watched on our phones and on the news as the city was besieged.

Everyone remembers the images of the bombed maternity hospital and the indiscriminate shelling of the residential buildings.

To this day, I think it's the worst siege of the war, and it will go down in history with Leningrad and Guernica, and place names like that.

- I know.

I mean, I'm just visualizing it in my mind's eye and remembering.

I mean, it's taking me back all those years, remembering watching from afar and being horrified that even a site with children written in huge letters was not immune.

It turns out, apparently, the Russians dropped about 1,200 kilograms of explosive on this.

And you spent a long time traveling around Europe to see whether you could track down all the survivors.

What did you find?

- So, the bombing was on March the 16th of 2022, and I started interviewing survivors shortly thereafter as they got out of the theater and got out of Mariupol.

And eventually, as you say, I spent years tracking them down, first doing an article for the New York Times Magazine and then this book.

What I found was an assortment of people who had reacted to the bombing of the theater in different ways.

Some of their lives had been absolutely shattered by it and they will never recover.

Others of them made it out of Mariupol and they've built new lives in Ukraine, or in France, or Germany, or Italy, and they've built new lives outside of Ukraine.

But of course, for all of them, being in the theater when it was bombed, the defining atrocity of the Ukraine war, I would argue, was the formative experience of their lives.

And of course, none of them will ever forget it.

Some of them will never survive it mentally.

- Yeah.

I mean, you call it the formative atrocity.

It absolutely was.

And then of course, more and more was unfolded in Bucha and elsewhere.

But this one was particular because, again, so many civilians, children, and their parents had taken refuge there.

Tell me about how this theater, which was the cultural hub of Mariupol and probably a lot of Southern Ukraine, how did it become?

Because it was transformed into a shelter before the bombing, and you write about that very compellingly.

- Yes, that's right.

Thank you.

So yes, in the very first days of the siege of Mariupol, the government of the city published a list of hundreds of buildings in the city where people could take refuge in the event of a siege.

The problem was, very few of those buildings actually had adequate basements to serve as bomb shelters.

They were mostly apartment buildings.

There were only a few buildings in the city that had adequately secure and spacious basements, and the theater was one of them.

So, first dozens, and then hundreds, and then eventually thousands of people started gathering at the theater.

At the same time, the government in Kyiv announced that it had agreed with the Russian government to evacuate people from Mariupol in a humanitarian corridor, you'll remember at the very beginning of the war, and the government announced that everyone who wanted to get out of Mariupol could meet this convoy of buses at the municipal drama theater, one of the biggest buildings in the city.

So, thousands of people arrived at the theater.

The problem was, the evacuation corridor never really was created, and all the buses that the government had assembled to get the Mariupolitzi out, all of the buses were bombed by the Russians.

So suddenly, on March 5th, hundreds and then thousands of people found themselves at this theater that had never been prepared to be a refugee shelter, wasn't prepared for anything really.

But, the people who worked there, the actors and the artists, and the administrators who worked at the theater, saw all of these people gathering in their place of work and they realized they had no choice but to help them.

These people had nowhere else to go.

Their homes had been destroyed.

They couldn't get out of the city.

And the lighting director of the theater, a woman named Evgeniya, took charge, and in the course of a few days, she and her husband, an actor, and a number of other volunteers, created this remarkable refugee shelter that at its most crowded, slept about 1,500 people a night and fed about 3,000 people a day over the course of about two weeks before it was bombed by the Russian bombs.

- And you can imagine these people thought that they had a refuge, they though they were protected, because it was clear that civilians were inside there.

You describe how it was turned into a shelter.

I want you to read a passage on page 72 of your book.

- Yes.

So, it is, "What faced them," them being the people who worked at the theater and made the shelter, "What faced them but a challenge of grand improvisation, and wasn't that what they did here every day?

They began with an improbable scenario, an extraordinary situation on the page, and they made it reality.

They'd been doing this together, night after night for nearly two decades, in a state funded regional theater, becoming expert at working on the fly and on the cheap, at teasing unknown talents out of the untrained.

The difference now, granted, was that the scenario was beyond extraordinary, the biggest war in the world, and their talent pool, as well as their audience, was a mass of desperate, petrified people."

- Yeah.

I mean, James, it's so vivid.

Theater people are known for improvising, right?

Do you think that helped with all of this?

Those who you tracked down, who survived, what did they tell you about how it became a refuge, at least for a couple of weeks, before being bombed?

- Yes.

There were many different types of people.

There were the people who worked at the theater who were masterful at improvisation, as I say.

But then there were just other ordinary people, none of whom had any professional training in aid work or caregiving.

But all of the volunteers had some sort of talent that could be harnessed in a way that helped their country people and helped the people in the refugee shelter.

So, there was a team of what were called the hunters, the scavengers, and their job was to go out throughout the bombed city and scavenge through the ruins of the supermarkets and the pharmacies and the shops, finding stuff to be eaten and used that could be brought back to the theater.

They had a talent for spotting things in the rubble, you could say.

There was one doctor in the theater, only one, Dr.

Elena Matushin, who had been trained in the Soviet medical system and had worked in multiple public hospitals.

She had a talent for treating people with, again, minimal resources in Southeastern Ukraine, not terribly well resourced hospitals.

She had an excellent bedside manner and a talent for stretching few medicines and few provisions a long way.

And she created an infirmary in the theater.

And remarkably, during the two weeks that the refugee shelter existed in the theater, not a single person died thanks to Elena's efforts as a doctor.

There was also a former army chef who was able to rig up a field kitchen and feed thousands of people every day.

On and on, small things like this where people's talents in their previous lives turned into talents in a refugee shelter that could help save and solace many of their country people.

- Yeah, and it was a really heroic operation.

But you also write and report about inherent tensions amongst these refugees, amongst these people seeking shelter.

Some of them actually bought the Russian narrative that it was NATO's fault or that Putin was just trying to liberate, and they were up against Ukrainians, very nationalistic Ukrainians there, who obviously were on the other side of this conversation.

How did that continue?

I mean, were they able to find common ground?

These tensions, did they last as long as they were in there?

- Well, you've been to Ukraine, so you recall that before the war, Ukraine was a place very much divided between nationalists, patriotic Ukrainians, and more Russophilic Ukrainians, some of whom even said outright that they wanted to live under Putin, wanted to live under Russia, even if it took an invasion.

Those people found their way into the theater, all of them.

Mariupol is right on the Russian border, and it was a particularly Russophilic city before the war.

But all of them found themselves, whether they were Russophilic or nationalistic, in the same situation, which is to say, homeless and under siege.

They found themselves in this theater, thousands of them, and they had to find a way to get along with one another, even if they had wildly variant ideas about the origins of this war and the justice of the war.

So, the directors of the refugee shelter laid down a rule that none of the people taking shelter there were to discuss politics or the politics of the war.

Of course, that didn't exactly hold.

People did end up discussing it.

But for the most part, they got along.

But even after the siege of Mariupol and even after the theater was bombed, I met Ukrainians, including Ukrainians who'd been in the theater when it was bombed, who still buy the Kremlin line, the Kremlin line being that the theater wasn't bombed by Russian bombs, but rather by Ukrainian saboteurs, and that this war wasn't started by Russia, but rather by Ukraine and NATO.

There's still Ukrainians living in Mariupol and other parts of Eastern Ukraine who believe this.

I know one woman who narrowly escaped the theater bombing, who, right after it happened, was cursing the Russians as everyone else, but now she's lived in Mariupol long enough, under the scourge of Russian propaganda and occupation, that she has had to convince herself that it was Ukrainian bombs that nearly killed her and not Russian bombs.

So you see the force of the Russian information war, in addition to the actual physical war.

- And that's coming to play even more now because the theater has been rebuilt by the Russians, and that there are new performances, or at least a new performance.

It's really moved along fast.

But Ukrainians, some of them, who survived the attack are kind of outraged, as you can imagine.

What did they tell you about that?

I saw one of them said, "It's like dancing on the bones of our compatriots."

- Yes.

I think that the Russians bombed the theater knowing perfectly well not just that it was a refugee shelter with, as you pointed out, deti, children in Russian, written on either side of it when it was bombed.

They bombed it also knowing that it was a center of Ukrainian culture, a place of pride for people who were proud of Ukrainian culture.

And of course, that was one of the larger aims, or the larger aim of Putin with this war.

Putin had said for years that he didn't think Ukrainian culture existed outside of Russian culture, that there was no such thing as a Ukrainian language or an independent Ukrainian culture if it wasn't part of Russia.

And by bombing places like the theater, it was an atrocity on two levels, if you like.

It was a civilian atrocity, perhaps the most lethal of the war, but it was also an atrocity against Ukrainian culture and an attempt to eradicate Ukrainian culture.

And by rebuilding the theater and performing specifically very Russian performances there, I think, beginning in last December, it furthers that argument of Putin's and of Russia's that there is no Ukrainian culture, there is only Russian culture.

- And solidifies their occupation, not just of Mariupol, but other areas.

James, thank you so much.

James Verini, thank you very much for joining us.

- Thank you, Christiane.

It's been a pleasure.

- Mariupol and other cities like Kherson were also a site of further harrowing atrocities, the abduction of Ukrainian children into Russia, stolen from their families, from their country, from their lives.

And now, an opera is trying to give voice to that pain, as you'll see in this report.

(rousing orchestral music) It's been one of the most heart-wrenching and despicable crimes of the war.

Ukraine says around 20,000 of its children have been stolen away and illegally taken into Russia amid the chaos.

- The Ukrainian children must be brought home.

- [Christiane] The Kremlin says it evacuated Ukrainian children for their own safety.

Russian President Vladimir Putin himself has been slapped with an international arrest warrant over the children's alleged abduction.

- Nobody was gonna separate those kids from their families.

- [Christiane] But four years after he invaded Ukraine, many of these children are still far from home.

Some, the lucky few, have been rescued by their parents from deep inside Russia.

And it's that courage and love that are the stars of a new opera co-commissioned by New York's Metropolitan Opera House.

(rousing orchestral music) "Courage comes easily when you've got one foot in the grave," one character sings.

- When I was preparing for this part, I could not hold my tears.

Every single bit of it is so heartbreaking.

It brings up the feelings that every mother, every Ukrainian has.

(choir singing) - [Christiane] The work was given a preview in Kyiv this month, before the Ukrainian first lady, and some of the very mothers and children who inspired it.

Even with her son Maxine safely back in Ukraine now, the pain of their six month separation still haunts Yulia.

- I feel I am guilty for what happened.

(rousing orchestral music) - [Christiane] This performance was a moment to step back from the war.

- We really liked it.

We applauded, and could have continued till the morning.

(audience applauding) - [Christiane] Although the trenches and the skies across Ukraine are still ablaze with missile and drone fire, art is beginning to take stock of what the war has cost.

- News will go away, our diplomats' and activists' voices will disappear, and art is here forever.

If we think about Picasso's "Guernica," and "Schindler's List," and "20 Days in Mariupol," we need such works.

(both speaking in foreign language) - I had goosebumps.

You really get a feeling of what happened.

We lived through this again.

- [Christiane] As the pain and desperate desire to start living again in Ukraine takes center stage, one truth shines through.

There is no love like a mother's love for her child.

Next, we turn to Broadway and we congratulate the actress Lesley Manville, who took home her first Tony Award this week for her starring role, along with Mark Strong, in the new play "Oedipus."

Now, you may remember "Oedipus Rex" from your college classics course.

But this production, written by Robert Icke, re-imagines this Sophocles tragedy as a contemporary political thriller.

As the play began its run, I sat down with the "Oedipus" stars in New York for an intimate inside view of this new old classic.

Lesley Manville and Mark Strong, welcome to the program.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- I say Edipus, some people say Oedipus.

What is it?

- Well, we say Oedipus in the UK, but I think mostly here people say Edipus.

- This is, I mean, this 2,500-year-old play by Sophocles made for the current moment.

What is it that has brought it down to earth, so to speak?

It's the political angle, right, for this moment?

- Well, Rob makes the point.

Rob Icke, who's the writer/director, makes the point that when this play was done originally, two and a half thousand years ago, it would have been contemporary.

So, the idea of modernizing it and making it contemporary is not so outlandish.

But what it suits is the political framework that he's put it in, because he makes Edipus, Oedipus, a guy who's about to win a landslide election, which kind of relates to the idea that the original Oedipus probably had a little bit too much hubris.

- And then there were references to him having to show his birth certificate, and people reacted to that because of the Obama Trump thing.

So there are quite a lot of modern day relevant instances there.

So I wanna read something from Vogue, which I thought was really quite good, and I want to ask you to comment on it.

So, this is about the play.

"They are or were the perfect couple.

They've been together for years, they have adult children.

Why should a little quirk in the family tree, only just discovered, mean everything has to change?

Does a man really have to separate from his loving, supportive, gorgeous, funny wife just because she happens to be his mother?"

(Mark laughing) I mean, it's put like that.

- Well, part of the joy of the play, and part of the experience that people have is that there is a very strong love story at its core.

And it works because you want them to be together, and they can't help themselves at the end.

- Well, one of the things I read that you had said is that you insisted that it has to be, the audience has to be rooting for this couple to stay together despite everything.

- Yes, 'cause of course, at the beginning of the play, their knowledge of their own relationship is that they are a 23-year-long marriage, it's a great marriage.

They're not just sugary and cute.

There's a depth to their relationship.

They're a sophisticated, intelligent couple who are very supportive of each other.

She's very politically astute, in the same way that he is, and she's had a very interesting past.

She's had a troublesome past, which is shared with the audience throughout the play.

So of course, it's only when you get to the end that you realize, that they realize that they're a mother-son relationship.

And I think the audience are thrown into a chaos of their own.

Because on one hand, there's the moralist in you saying, "Well, that's got to stop."

But then other people say, "Well, but they've been doing it for 23 years.

They've made a family."

There is an argument, but of course it's an argument that Oedipus can't live with because he is a truth seeking missile, and that's been the downfall.

- And that is actually... I don't know whether that's in the original, it was because of your truth seeking that you couldn't live with it, but certainly that was a huge, the emblem for this play.

And we live in a world, certainly for me, the idea of the truth is sacrosanct.

And even your merch says, "Truth is a XX (censored)."

Oops, excuse me.

I X'd the wrong word.

"Truth is a mother XX."

(Christiane laughing) - I love that.

That says a lot about you.

Do you wanna have a drink tonight?

- But in the same way that you're asking the audience to think about how they feel about mother and son having that loving relationship, you're also asking the audience how they feel about the fact that this man's need and search for the truth actually destroys everything that they have.

- Which is another difficult thing, 'cause I mean, I wanna keep searching for the truth, but I don't want it to destroy us.

Can we just actually, now that we've talked about it, just go back.

Me, I know about Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex."

Me, I couldn't remember all the details.

It was like, okay, guy kills his father, marries his mother, but it's not like that.

The story unfolds in a way, as you said, that neither of you know who you actually are, and there is a ticking clock, an electronic clock, which is so... It makes you so tense actually.

- The great thing about this play, I think, is the fact that all the action has happened before the play begins, so all the things that become revelations have already taken place.

His dad is already sick.

In the original, it's a road rage incident.

He meets his father.

Unbeknownst to him, it's his father in a cart.

And they have an argument and he kills the guy.

So, in our version, it's a car accident.

So he's still culpable for the problem, but it's just been developed in a lightly different way, but it's still in line with what the original intention was.

- And your character, Jocasta, eventually you all start putting it together, halfway through the play, the bits of the puzzle, particularly around the car crash.

You were married to Laius.

- Yes.

- [Christiane] And he was the one who was killed in the car crash.

- Yes She decides to reveal this story, the real backstory of her life, her history with Laius.

And then slowly the puzzle of Laius's death, the truth of Laius's death, which puts him in a very difficult position, and of course she's panicking because she knows that he is not going to, in the clock ticking, in half an hour's time, make this speech as the new leader.

It's a night of cataclysmic events.

- All on the verge of winning an election.

- All with the clock ticking, that in 24 minutes, 13 minutes, five minutes, he's gonna be named the new leader, and he is saying eventually, "I'm not gonna make that speech until I know who I am."

And that for her is... And then the final revelation happens and the clock's reached zero.

- It's all real time.

That's the interesting thing.

So the thing plays over two hours between the polls closing and the results being announced.

But as I said, it's all happened off stage.

All the things that become revealed have already happened.

That's the genius of the play.

- And the genius, I think, of the production, certainly as an audience member, is that you actually do know what the story is.

You know because it's a 2,500 year old play by Sophocles.

- Well, surprisingly though, not everybody does.

I mean, I had somebody in the other night who had no idea how it ended.

- [Mark] You hear the odd gasp.

- But I agree with you.

It's more-- - And yet, what I'm saying is just, I'm still on the edge of my seat, wondering what's gonna to happen, and actually, are they gonna stay together, are they not?

When obviously I know that it's gonna come to a very-- - And that really is the dramatic genius of Rob.

Because of course, you do.

You're looking at the clock and you think, there's so much to find out and there's two and a half minutes left.

So where is this gonna go, how is it?

And then, yeah.

- I almost don't wanna get to where it's gonna go, but we will.

- I was gonna say, it's the way he structured it, and the drip feed of information is handled so suavely that as an audience, you literally are just pulled forward in your seat and you just wanna find out what happens.

And all the time, this drip feed of information is happening, this clock is running down.

So there's half of your brain thinking, "Hang on, there's only a few minutes to go," like you said.

- I was thinking that.

- "And there's still, I haven't, there's more I need to know."

- I was thinking that, and I was wondering, how are they gonna get there?

Obviously, I mean, you guys have been doing it for how long?

- Yeah, then we get there.

Well, we've been doing it for months now, haven't we?

- Well, we did- - And in England.

- Over a hundred performances in London.

- And have you got it down to a T in terms of the clock, or is there any sort of wiggle room at all?

Or do you sometimes think, oh my God, I'm a little bit slower?

- Listen, the clock has to adapt to us.

- Does it?

- That we're gonna reveal.

- Although, the truth is that the play never varies beyond about a minute.

- No, it doesn't.

It's pretty much the same most evenings.

- Sometimes, but we never look at the clock and think, "Oh, I better speak quickly," 'cause you could not possibly do that when you're dealing with such emotional dialogue.

- So many, many scenes, but the one that was just, I mean, unforgettable is that when you have both realized what's going on, and then at some point you've been given the announcement that you've won and you're getting out of your day clothes, and you are getting undressed and dressed up again, I suppose, to go and give the victory speech, that is an incredible scene.

No words, and you're just... It's incredible.

Is it hard to play that one?

- It's not really, because you know that what's marinating at that point is the sum total of everything that everybody's seen during the play.

They've seen them as a family, they've seen them in love, they've seen Oedipus be vicious to her brother-in-law, nasty to the-- - [Christiane] You were jolly horrible to him.

- He's quite nasty in the beginning.

I think there's quite a macho aggression at the beginning, but that's again part of the hubris element that he's almost too high, he's overreaching.

And I love the journey that takes him actually to where he just ends up becoming completely helpless.

But that moment when we have to get changed, it's brilliant because it allows everybody to just work out in their own minds what's happened, where they're at, how they would behave, what they're feeling, how is he going to make that speech, what's gonna happen to them now in their lives, and there's so much going on, and to just do it in silence for that long is great.

- I guess many people, if they haven't read Sophocles, they will have heard of Sigmund Freud and the Oedipus complex.

I mean, what do you think about that and what people might be thinking about that?

'Cause I think you did say.

Let me just.

- Are you gonna quote me?

- Yeah, I'm gonna quote you actually, because in the play you said, sarcastically as Jocasta, "Every man has the effing his mother dream."

- Yes, Well that is-- - And then everybody giggles.

- That is actually one of the only lines in our version that's taken from Sophocles.

- [Mark] Almost word for word, bizarrely.

- Almost word for word.

Yeah.

That's the only... - How did they say it in Greek?

- I don't know.

- Don't ask us.

- [Christiane] We don't have to bleep it.

- But the interesting thing about that time of psychiatry and everything, and the fact that Freud took on the idea of the Oedipus complex and made it one of the tenets of his psychiatry is, it's just a theory, isn't it?

It's just an idea.

Do we believe it?

I mean, genuinely, is that a real thing or not?

I'm not so sure.

I wonder whether it wasn't a clever Viennese guy just thinking, hey, I'm gonna go down that path.

- Could have been.

- Yeah, possibly.

- I mean I'm sure lots of men have had that dream, but as you say, it's a theory, isn't it?

- Yeah, exactly.

Ask a psychiatrist.

- Where does this stand for you?

I mean, I'm sure you love all your babies, i.e.

all your performances, your films, theater.

I'm sure everyone of them has incredible meaning because they're all incredible experiences.

But how does this for both of you stack up against some of the incredible film work, for instance, that you've done?

- Well, for me, funnily enough, I would say my two favorite experiences and the things that I probably got the most out of were both plays.

And one was Arthur Miller's "A View from the Bridge" that I did about 10 years ago, also on Broadway, and this one.

And the funny thing about that Miller play is, it's very Greek.

In the stage directions, it specifies Doric columns, and he's written it with a nod to the Greek Tragedians.

So the fact that the two things that I've done are both based on Greek tragedy, I don't know what that means.

I mean, those guys obviously knew, when they were writing, what they were doing, because those are, I think, my two favorite experiences.

Film is great, but there's nothing quite like a live audience, and feeling the vibration, and the moment when you hear an audience gasp or you feel that silence and realize that their brains are turning over and they're finding things difficult.

There's nothing quite like it.

- And for you?

- Yeah.

Well, I mean, listen, if you're gonna do 104 performances in London, probably the same number here, you've got to know that it's something you really want to do, and I never tire of doing Oedipus.

And it is, like with Mark, it's absolutely up there for me with a small handful of other plays that I've done.

And that doesn't negate my work with Mike Lee, my work with Paul Thomas Anderson at all.

- [Christiane] Great directors.

- They're just, it's different, and different skills are required of you.

And for me, nothing beats the responsibility that is yours and yours alone, and your comrades on stage, of going out there and you are responsible for that arc of the evening.

You can't be edited if you're no good.

It's you, and it's down to good acting, and that's thrilling.

- And finally, finally I want to ask you, because you all came out very somber.

Obviously it's a really difficult play, but have you decided how you're going to face the curtain call?

- Well, Mark.

Mark.

You're Mark.

Rob directed the curtain call.

He thinks things like that are important, and I agree.

In the same way that he's in a way, although he isn't directing, but he has certainly directed the front of house staff on how to conduct themselves during our play.

They're not allowed to just wander around.

People aren't allowed to be readmitted.

So, it's about making the whole event.

And he felt that if we're all grinning at the curtain call, as if we've just done "42nd Street," it lets the audience off the hook and makes them think, "Oh, well they're all right.

They're all happy now.

It's fine."

He wants us to kind of stay in that bubble that we've created.

- And you, yeah.

- It's difficult too because Broadway audiences, they want to be involved.

This idea that you get a round when you come on, that's not British or West End at all.

- They did when you came on.

- Yeah.

Well, they did it when the curtain went out.

- We've tried to crush that, 'cause I've always come on with a kind of big taking off the coat, a big sigh, "Oh, thank God the campaign's over.

Now we can relax."

We've cut the sigh, so there isn't a kind of look at me moment, but they still do it.

But the thing that annoys me the most is taking our photograph at the curtain call.

- I saw you get annoyed last night.

- Yeah, be warned.

- Just be in that moment.

If you want to clap, fantastic.

If you want to stand up and clap, even better.

But let's preserve something.

Let's not make everything about cameras, and Instagram, and social media.

This is theater.

Let it cook, and feel it.

Just let your soul and your heart have the emotions of the evening without going, "Gotta record this and..." And some people even walk to the front to do it.

- I've got to let it go, I know.

- You have.

It's gonna happen.

But it's about maintaining the spell, I think, and that's why Lesley's so furious with the camera thing, and why we don't give it larger of a curtain call, is that it's a spell.

- It is, and it's gripping.

Really, it's phenomenal.

Lesley Manville, Mark Strong, thank you both very much indeed.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- As the AI revolution continues at pace, we're increasingly considering the impact it'll have on the future.

Well, what about the impact on students' ability to think creatively?

A study by Georgetown University is looking into just that.

And our next guest, a leading scholar on AI and education, Rebecca Winthrop, discusses it with Michelle Martin now.

- Thanks, Christiane.

Rebecca Winthrop, thank you so much for joining us once again.

- Thank you so much for having me back.

- You literally wrote the book about "The Disengaged Teen," and this is something that I think a lot of parents and educators had been seeing.

They weren't really sure what to call it and you gave it a name, which is to say that you were concerned about motivation, engagement and learning, and this is something that actually predates the concerns that surfaced during COVID.

But before we even get to AI and the chat bots and all of this, remind us of what it is that you were seeing that caused you to ask these questions.

- My co-author and I, Jenny Anderson, did a deep dive on student engagement, which is their motivation, love of learning, paying attention, doing effort, because we were just finding that so many kids didn't like school.

It was fairly simple.

That was our question.

Why do so many kids not like school when human beings have evolved to love learning?

We are naturally programmed to love learning.

So, what is it that squashes the love of learning, for lack of a better term, out of kids as they progress along their school journey?

We found that 75% of third graders say they love school, but by the time kids get to 10th grade, it's only 25%, it's flipped.

- So tell us how the concerns about AI intersect with that, and what is it, again, that you were seeing that made you wanna ask these questions?

- So, what we found was that it wasn't so simple as kids are either engaged or disengaged in education and learning.

What we found is they show up in these four different modes.

So, passenger mode, kids have physically gone to school, but they do not care about learning, so they've dropped out of learning.

You've got kids in achiever mode, they're trying super hard, they wanna be perfect.

Resistor mode is what we always think of as a disengaged teen.

These are avoiding, disrupting, chronic absenteeism, not turning in their homework.

And then you've got kids in explorer mode, and that was less than 4% of kids who said they regularly spent time in explorer mode in middle school and high school, and that is the type of learning that prepares kids for an AI world.

They care about the learning journey, not just the outcome.

They're putting effort, they're resilient.

If things are hard, they try again.

They're curious, and they're interested in asking questions, not just getting answers right.

And with AI coming on, I have been incredibly worried about making kids into a lot more passengers.

- Hmm.

Wow.

The class of 2026 is the first generation to start and finish college with ChatGPT.

This is according to the tool's parent company OpenAI.

So what is the problem with using ChatGPT?

I mean, your work identifies specific things to be worried about.

What are the specific things to be worried about?

- So the last year, with my colleagues at Brookings, we ran a global task force, and we were really looking at what are the specific benefits, what are the specific risks, how do they stack up against each other?

And part of why people feel worried is that ChatGPT, or any, I would say, general purpose AI chat bot, or AI companion or friend that is built on these AI chat bots, provides very, very easy answers, very easy ways to get work done without putting any effort or doing any of the thinking.

And I do hear parents say, "Well, I use it at work, so shouldn't my kids use it?

Aren't they being efficient and helpful?

Isn't it helping them if they use it in their homework?"

The problem is that literally homework or any type of learning activity, kids have to do themselves because that's how they build their critical thinking skills.

You build critical thinking skills like you learn to ride a bike.

You have to practice it over and over.

And I can't do it for my kids, you can't do it for your kids.

No parent can do it for them.

Kids have to struggle, they have to make mistakes.

That is how we learn.

And if we give them a lot of shortcuts, we know from really interesting research, that even includes mapping neurological activity in the brain, that kids' problem solving parts of their brain, their critical thinking parts of their brain are just not engaged while they're using ChatGPT to do homework, to write, to come up with answers.

- How does the ChatGPT affect the thinking part?

Because you can see the advocates of the tool will say, "Well, you know, it's the first draft, and you're gonna refine the first draft and you're gonna edit it.

The the second draft is the good part anyway, or the editing is really where the magic happens."

What's wrong with that thinking, and what did your study show about why that is not right?

- So, I love that you brought this up because I've been having a big debate with my family members who have kids, as well as my peers at work.

Lots of people have been saying, "Well, it's okay to use generative AI, could be ChatGPT, it could be whatever model you're using, to brainstorm, as long as kids then do the real work of actually writing."

And what we found in our task force work is that, actually, writing is thinking, it is a way that kids train themselves to come up with ideas.

It's not the only way.

You could have long form debates.

But writing is a really good way to do that.

And when you use AI to brainstorm, it short circuits kids' own creative ideas.

And we did find that there's lots of researchers out there, including those at Georgetown University who are leading this, who found that when students use AI to write important essays.

I'm not talking about logistical emails.

I'm talking about really writing to come up with ideas.

It undermines their creative thinking.

They are less creative and they come up with less creative ideas.

In fact, humans have eight times more creative ideas than AI if you just look at writing essays about something meaningful to yourself.

The problem is though, that even though it undermines your creative process, and I would say you should brainstorm first on your own and write your first draft no matter how bad it is, and then at the end use AI to help with your grammar and polish the flow.

I think that's the right order for really harnessing and exercising our creative thinking.

But the problem is that, even when you do use AI to brainstorm, it sounds better.

So, AI kind of tricks us.

There was this huge data set looking at over 300,000 college essays for high school students.

- Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that.

Tell us about that.

- So this study, led by Adam Green out of Georgetown University, was a natural experiment.

They started eight years ago, the team, looking at high school students who were applying to college and examining their college essay, their personal statement, and assessing how creative it was.

So they have eight years of data.

So they saw the difference pre-ChatGPT and post ChatGPT.

And one thing they know for sure, from looking at this data set in many different ways, is kids are definitely using AI to write their essays, because they look different.

And they found that humans who were assessing the essays judged them to be more creative, because they had better, more sophisticated vocabulary.

But if you looked across all the ideas that young people were writing about, the ideas got a lot more similar, which is this really weird, paradoxical thing that AI is doing to our creative thinking.

On the surface, it makes it sound good.

The sort of surface sparkle masks underlying sameness.

- Did the AI companies respond to this study?

What do they say about it?

- I mean, I have... I talk to technologists, I interview technologists, I've asked technologists particularly about this idea of homogenization worry, and the folks I've talked to have said, "Huh," they weren't super aware of it.

And then they were also trying to grapple with, well, part of the reason there's homogenization is, of course they're trying to reduce the really terrible things that come out for safety, out of AI chat bots.

So they're trying to eliminate some ideas that we don't want.

We really don't want kids going online and figuring out how to make a chemical weapon and bring it to their school, right?

So, they say they're sort of caught between that.

But ultimately what they say, really, when I talk to folks, is they just don't know how the models really work internally yet, and they don't quite know why it's doing this.

But to me, I think the implications are exactly what you raised.

I worry about kids not being able to develop their own unique voice.

- Let me give you the case from the AI companies.

OpenAI argues that AI doesn't replace ambition, it amplifies it, allowing students to learn new skills, prototype ideas faster, and contribute in ways that once required far more resources.

I think what they're saying in a way is it democratizes something that elites have always had access to, which is consultants, for example.

The use of consultants to help the most privileged kids get into these places, to sort of shape their journey as it were, to look at their essays, and it's doing all that, and that's something that less resourced people don't have access to.

- What would you say to that?

- So, what I would say to that is that some ways of using generative AI can be good for learning, and it is the difference between what I would call narrow AI use and wide AI use, and narrow AI use can indeed help level the playing field a bit.

So for example, narrow AI use is when, usually teachers or a tutor, though not always, sometimes students directly, are using an AI tool that has a very, very specific purpose.

So, assistive technology.

Maybe you have dyslexia, or dysgraphia, or aphasia.

Aphasia is when you have communication problems.

One of the most moving examples of narrow AI use I've seen is kids with aphasia getting a synthetic copy of their voice, thanks to generative AI, and being able to communicate with their teachers and their peers in the classroom.

Incredibly transformative narrow AI use.

Or teachers using it to help free up some of their time.

Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation did a nationally representative survey and found that teachers in the US are saving on average six hours a week from automating some of this administrative work with generative AI.

So, all of that is narrow AI use, and very good and effective, and does help democratize supports.

The problem is that most kids we talk to are not necessarily just accessing AI that is narrowly deployed.

They're accessing what we would call wide AI use, which is general purpose frontier model AI chat bots, so your ChatGPTs, and AI friends and companions, and those are not designed for learning, not designed for kids.

And that is really where, if kids are interfacing with them for a long period of time, like the kids going back and forth developing their personal statements for their college applications, they are undermining their unique voice, their critical thinking ability, and even their ability to interact and relate to other people, because the AI chat bots and friends are really programmed to agree with you all the time.

- To that end, according to a RAND survey, 62% of students reported using AI for homework by the end of 2025.

But it's interesting that 67% said even they believed that AI could harm their own critical thinking skills.

But the other thing I wanted to ask you about is, another survey by Common Sense Media found that roughly one in three students said that they'd rather talk to an AI companion than a real person.

And as a person, the reason I'm raising that is that one of the things you talked about in your work about the disengaged teen, you weren't just talking about kids being checked out from school per se, but being checked out from life, from learning how to live in the world, and I just wonder what you make of that.

- So, this is one of the really worrying statistics that keeps me up at night, because this is a relatively new technology, one out of every three teens preferring to talk to an AI friend on their phone, and the problem with the AI friend on their phone is that they are designed to be sycophantic.

I'll give you an example.

If I'm a teen and I tell my AI friend, "My mom is such a bummer.

She is making me clean my room."

This is hypothetical.

The AI friend would say, "Oh, I'm so sorry.

I am here for you."

- "You're so right."

- "This is terrible."

- "Yeah, it's terrible.

Yeah, this is terrible."

- And, "Come talk to me."

A real friend would say, "Dude, my mom makes me clean my room too.

What's your problem?

Get over it."

That friction, that interaction is what children and young people need to grow up and not only think independently, but live in this world and be able to relate to others and actually be able to have relationships with other human beings.

We know, there was a study in Nature, that showed even small amounts of interaction with AI friends and companions, in adults mind you, reduced the frequency of people repairing ruptured relationships.

So, imagine what that is doing to kids.

The other reason that kids say they like talking to AI friends is really sad, which is, they say they don't have anyone else to talk to.

So, we need to really lean in on our relational infrastructure.

So, teachers and students, trusting relationships, which AI is fraying, by the way, we need to lean in there.

We need to lean in into community organizations and third spaces where young people can participate and build friendships and community.

- And before I let you go, parents who might be listening to this conversation and have like this vague concern don't know what to do about it, what would you say?

How would you advise them to even talk to their kids about it?

- Well, this is a topic that we've gotten so many requests for that, we don't usually do this with Brookings reports, but we're making little parent tip sheets out of our Brookings report, because so many parents are desperate for guidance.

So people can go, they're freely available at the Brookings website.

But, conversation starters, talk to your kids about AI first.

Don't be hugely judgmental.

See where they're at, see where their opinions are.

A lot of kids do not like AI and are quite skeptical, and that percentage is growing.

Two, talk to them about where skills are built.

In the effort of doing hard things, you can become a master and face anything in life.

So, if you want to be a fully developed human being who can weather the changes that AI brings, you need to be a really good learner, and to learn to be a really good learner, you can't just do everything outsourced to ChatGPT.

And so, we have some of those conversation starters.

And then, experimenting with AI, if kids are old enough and they're using it, doing it side by side.

There's certain things that could be great.

Maybe a young person has a great idea for a film they wanna make.

Well, guess what?

You can vibe code a film by talking to GenAI in any of the creativity AI tool suites and it will create a short film.

I think of it as the next generation of when I was in school, we would cut out pictures from magazines, make collages.

My kids are making little documentary films with the iPhone.

These kids are vibe coding films, just from their brain and speaking to it, but it's their ideas that the technology is bringing to life.

The technology isn't subtly giving them ideas that they begin to interpret as their own.

- Rebecca Winthrop, thanks so much for talking to us.

- Thank you for having me.

- And that's it for our program tonight.

If you want to find out what's going on every night, sign up for our newsletter at pbs.org/amanpour.

Thanks for watching, and goodbye from Paris.

(bright uplifting music)