An AI Reckoning for the Humanities

Commentary

The humanities have faced severe challenges in recent years—declining majors, identity politics, lowered standards—but none of them comes close to the dangers posed by artificial intelligence. My colleagues in the classroom don’t know what to do. Stop assigning research papers? Ban screens in class? Bring back blue books? Oral exams at the end of the term?

Something has to be done, teaching has to change, but each decision pulls students away from what the humanities are supposed to instill. We want students to read superior works, slowly and astutely, then write about them on their own, in silence and solitude, assisted by what they’ve heard in class and what they’ve found in critical studies of the authors (properly attributed, of course). A good humanities curriculum produces graduates with good judgment and taste, historical knowledge and critical acumen, which come from long hours of reading and writing.

Now, with AI on the loose, teachers can assign all the books they want and expect few attendees will read them in their entirety. Why should they when AI can hand them a summary in a few seconds and cut the workload by 90 percent? A 15-page research paper is due the last day of class? No problem—AI does most of it for them. Danger is minimal when a professor managing three courses with 25 students each hasn’t the time or energy to monitor every paper and seek signs of AI at work. To ensure that students actually read the books instead of AI capsules of them, a final exam asking essay or short-answer questions isn’t enough. A curt AI rendition plus a few examples from the novel enables them to compose answers that earn a B or better. A thorough check requires extra work, perhaps one-on-one oral exams in the office for 15 or 20 minutes, with questions about particular scenes in a novel or lines in a poem. But how many hours a week does that add to the professor’s burden?

STEM teachers have it easier. If AI helps students memorize chemical formulae and physical laws that students must rehearse on exams, the assistance isn’t a form of cheating. Chemistry and biology teachers test whether students know the facts and principles. How students get to that knowledge isn’t critical so long as it’s effective. AI helps them learn the material but doesn’t help them regurgitate it on the final exam if the room blocks any sneaky consultations on the sly. There are no writing assignments in premed courses in math, physics, and chemistry.

In the humanities, facts are secondary. Students are graded on how they handle facts in the course of their interpretations. How well do they write? What is the quality of their thoughts? How deep is their understanding of the literature? When AI can write sentences and comprehend poems and stories for them, the humanitas that is supposed to develop through and with this labor is suspended.

T.S. Eliot once spoke of a “historical sense,” a capacity to maintain the past as if it were a living presence. He meant it in relation to masterpieces of art and literature, whereby, say, scenes from novels by Charles Dickens, lines from Wordsworth’s poetry, and characters in Shakespeare are fresh and abiding, pieces of mental equipment that put the day’s encounters into their proper places. We could apply it, too, to the die-hard college football fan who recalls a great win or shocking loss from 30 years before as if it happened last week. Eliot regarded this sense as crucial to a mature, discerning intelligence. A humanities formation in the traditional mode creates it. AI blocks it. The labor that AI does for students is precisely what they need to do for themselves.

The future of the humanities lies in the hands of teachers who can persuade, cajole, induce, or force students to do the reading and writing work themselves in spite of the blandishments and temptations of AI shortcuts. “Do it yourself!” they might urge, or “Show some pride,” or “If you cheat now, it will catch up to you later when the stakes are much higher.” And they can make every bit of writing an in-class thing with no screens at hand and every test of reading an oral one. I have heard of some humanities professors trying to incorporate AI uses into their assignments. It won’t work. AI is not to be integrated into instruction—it is to be resisted.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.