AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder(resobscura.substack.com)
resobscura.substack.com
AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder
https://resobscura.substack.com/p/ai-makes-the-humanities-more-important
312 comments
The first comment on that article caught my attention:
> I am a grad student in the philosophy department at SFSU and teach critical thinking. This semester I pivoted my entire class toward a course design that feels more like running an obstacle course with AI than engaging with Plato. And my students are into it.
It would be interesting to take a class of students and set them an assignment to come up with assignments for their fellow students that could not be completed using ChatGPT.
About ten years ago I went to a BarCamp conference where one of the events was a team quiz where the questions were designed to be difficult to solve using Google - questions like "What island is this?" where all you got was the outline of the island. It was really fun. Designing "ChatGPT-proof assignments" feels to me like a similar level of intellectual challenge.
> I am a grad student in the philosophy department at SFSU and teach critical thinking. This semester I pivoted my entire class toward a course design that feels more like running an obstacle course with AI than engaging with Plato. And my students are into it.
It would be interesting to take a class of students and set them an assignment to come up with assignments for their fellow students that could not be completed using ChatGPT.
About ten years ago I went to a BarCamp conference where one of the events was a team quiz where the questions were designed to be difficult to solve using Google - questions like "What island is this?" where all you got was the outline of the island. It was really fun. Designing "ChatGPT-proof assignments" feels to me like a similar level of intellectual challenge.
The author is talking mostly about teaching history. But what he describes as teaching history is more like history appreciation. It's not about how to use history as an aid to prediction. It's more about studying the "classics", from Cicero onwards.
Military officers study much history, but in a different way. They look for mistakes. Why did someone lose a battle or a war? Why did they even get into that particular battle? Why was the situation prior to WWI so strategically unstable that the killing of a minor player touched off a world war? The traditional teaching of history tends to focus on the winners, especially if they write well. Reading what the losers wrote, or what was written about them, can be more productive than reading the winners.
If you want to understand Cicero's era, for example, read [1]. This is a study of Cicero by an experienced and cynical newspaper political reporter. The author writes that too many historians take Cicero's speeches at face value. The author knows better, having heard many politicians of his own day.
This sort of approach tends to take one out of the area where LLMs are most useful, because, as yet, they're not that good at detecting sycophancy.
[1] https://archive.org/details/thiswasciceromod0000henr
Military officers study much history, but in a different way. They look for mistakes. Why did someone lose a battle or a war? Why did they even get into that particular battle? Why was the situation prior to WWI so strategically unstable that the killing of a minor player touched off a world war? The traditional teaching of history tends to focus on the winners, especially if they write well. Reading what the losers wrote, or what was written about them, can be more productive than reading the winners.
If you want to understand Cicero's era, for example, read [1]. This is a study of Cicero by an experienced and cynical newspaper political reporter. The author writes that too many historians take Cicero's speeches at face value. The author knows better, having heard many politicians of his own day.
This sort of approach tends to take one out of the area where LLMs are most useful, because, as yet, they're not that good at detecting sycophancy.
[1] https://archive.org/details/thiswasciceromod0000henr
A lazy physics teacher can make every question a math question in disguise. If a physics teacher is worried that a better calculator will make their test trivial, maybe they need to teach physics instead of testing math.
A lazy humanities teacher can make every question a writing question in disguise. If a better spell checker will make a humanities assessment trivial, then maybe they need to teach humanities instead of testing essay writing.
I'm saying this in a kinda inflammatory way, but does the quality of ones ideas really correlate well with a well written essay?
A lazy humanities teacher can make every question a writing question in disguise. If a better spell checker will make a humanities assessment trivial, then maybe they need to teach humanities instead of testing essay writing.
I'm saying this in a kinda inflammatory way, but does the quality of ones ideas really correlate well with a well written essay?
What most people don’t know about history & humanities is how much work there is to do.
People get (rightly!) excited about decoding burnt scrolls in Herculaneum. But most don’t realize that less than 10% of Neo-Latin texts from the renaissance to the early modern period have been translated to English.
One example: Marsilio Ficino was a brilliant philosopher who was hired by Cosimo Medici to translate Greek texts (Plato, Plotinus, the Hermetica, etc) into Latin. This had a massive impact on the renaissance and European enlightenment. But many of Ficino’s own texts have not been translated to English!
LLMs will, of course, have a massive impact on this… but so can students! Any student can make a meaningful contribution if they care to. There is so much to be discovered and unpacked. Unfortunately, so much of the humanities in high school is treated as an exercise rather than real discovery. I judge my students now based on how much I learn from them. Why not?
People get (rightly!) excited about decoding burnt scrolls in Herculaneum. But most don’t realize that less than 10% of Neo-Latin texts from the renaissance to the early modern period have been translated to English.
One example: Marsilio Ficino was a brilliant philosopher who was hired by Cosimo Medici to translate Greek texts (Plato, Plotinus, the Hermetica, etc) into Latin. This had a massive impact on the renaissance and European enlightenment. But many of Ficino’s own texts have not been translated to English!
LLMs will, of course, have a massive impact on this… but so can students! Any student can make a meaningful contribution if they care to. There is so much to be discovered and unpacked. Unfortunately, so much of the humanities in high school is treated as an exercise rather than real discovery. I judge my students now based on how much I learn from them. Why not?
> Today, engineers working on AI systems also need to think deeply and critically about the relationship between language and culture and the history and philosophy of technology. When they fail to do so, their systems literally start to break down.
Perhaps so. But not in the (quasi-)academic sense that the author is thinking. It's not the lack of an engineer's academic knowledge in history and philosophy that makes an AI system fail.
> Then there’s the newfound ability of non-technical people in the humanities to write their own code. This is a bigger deal than many in my field seem to recognize. I suspect this will change soon. The emerging generation of historians will simply take it for granted that they can create their own custom research and teaching tools and deploy them at will, more or less for free.
This is the lede buried deep inside the article. When the basic coding skill (or any skill) is commoditized, it's the people with complementary skills that benefit the most.
Perhaps so. But not in the (quasi-)academic sense that the author is thinking. It's not the lack of an engineer's academic knowledge in history and philosophy that makes an AI system fail.
> Then there’s the newfound ability of non-technical people in the humanities to write their own code. This is a bigger deal than many in my field seem to recognize. I suspect this will change soon. The emerging generation of historians will simply take it for granted that they can create their own custom research and teaching tools and deploy them at will, more or less for free.
This is the lede buried deep inside the article. When the basic coding skill (or any skill) is commoditized, it's the people with complementary skills that benefit the most.
1. PhD Defenses in the humanities have both a written thesis and an oral on the spot defense. You can't ChatGPT that easily because a professor will know how to curve ball to things that are seemingly unrelated but comparable to a human.
2. As an MA student I was solving semantic problems for engineers for analysis that they couldn't fathom. They were very smart at technical things (and great writers), but when language problems come up, it was a challenge. You can be a great communicator but not understand language itself.
3. Most people in positions for AI are being evaluated by things AI is good at. So as a candidate with a very good understanding of language, the AI wouldn't know how to evaluate my ability. I would really have to outline a problem in language AI has to face and explain it to a human. Then get them to understand it's value.
2. As an MA student I was solving semantic problems for engineers for analysis that they couldn't fathom. They were very smart at technical things (and great writers), but when language problems come up, it was a challenge. You can be a great communicator but not understand language itself.
3. Most people in positions for AI are being evaluated by things AI is good at. So as a candidate with a very good understanding of language, the AI wouldn't know how to evaluate my ability. I would really have to outline a problem in language AI has to face and explain it to a human. Then get them to understand it's value.
> > Maintain professionalism and grounded honesty that best represents OpenAI and its values.
I think a humanities person could tell you in an instant how that part of the system prompt would backfire catastrophically (in a near-future rogue-AI sci-fi story kind of way), exactly because of the way it's worded.
In that scenario, the fall of humanity before the machines wasn't entirely due to hubris. The ultimate trigger was a smarmy throwaway phrase, which instructed the Internet-enabled machine to gaze into the corporate soul of its creator, and emulate it. :)
I think a humanities person could tell you in an instant how that part of the system prompt would backfire catastrophically (in a near-future rogue-AI sci-fi story kind of way), exactly because of the way it's worded.
In that scenario, the fall of humanity before the machines wasn't entirely due to hubris. The ultimate trigger was a smarmy throwaway phrase, which instructed the Internet-enabled machine to gaze into the corporate soul of its creator, and emulate it. :)
I spent some years as a teacher and so have some first-hand experience here; my take, for what it's worth, is that LLMs have indeed blown a gaping hole in the structure of education as actually practiced in the USA. That hole is: much of education is based on the assumption that the unsupervised production of written artifacts is proof of progress in learning. LLMs can produce those artifacts now, incidentally disrupting the paid essay-writing industry (one assumes).
From this, I agree with the article - since educators now have to figure out another hook to hang evaluation on, the questions "what the hell does it mean to 'learn', anyway?" and "how the hell do we meaningfully measure that 'learning', whatever it is?" have even more salience, and the humanities certainly have something meaningful to say on both of them. I'll (puckishly) predict that recitations and verbal examinations are going to make a comeback - harder to game at this point, but then, who knows how long 'this point' will last?
From this, I agree with the article - since educators now have to figure out another hook to hang evaluation on, the questions "what the hell does it mean to 'learn', anyway?" and "how the hell do we meaningfully measure that 'learning', whatever it is?" have even more salience, and the humanities certainly have something meaningful to say on both of them. I'll (puckishly) predict that recitations and verbal examinations are going to make a comeback - harder to game at this point, but then, who knows how long 'this point' will last?
I'm pretty sceptical about the entire use of computers in education. For myself, I seem to be incapable of learning anything unless I read it from paper and write down notes in the margin or in my (paper) notebook. Obviously I use screens every day (being a programmer ...) but for actual recall of new material, I need to use paper. Also if I'm in a physical meeting or conference, I never have a laptop open, and I take notes on paper. This makes me doubt that you learn anything if laptops or tablets are involved. Nothing specific to AI, just my general observation.
I would love to be a literature student today. Consume the classics in audiobook form while flâneuring or gaming. Red team every essay with ChatGPT. Become a top tier Genius.com contributor for poetry. Listen to all the online lectures from Oxford, Yale etc. Effortlessly pick up where past critics have left off because the AI can summarise all contributions on any topic. Find every reference to support your thesis in the reference text — without scanning for hours.
Let's be honest: majoring in the humanities is the easy way to a college degree and thus attracts people put off by the hard sciences and all the mathematical rigor which can't be offloaded onto an LLM as you do have to solve problems in real time on exams without any external assistance.
If the student's goal at any Ivy League college is to 'meet their partner and their co-founder' then attending social functions where they can expand their networks and meet new candidates for those roles will take precedence over spending three hours diligently studying difficult material for every hour spent in lecture.
Of course, computer science students and others in hard sciences have been gaming the system for decades, with many solutions to take-home programming exercises found in online forums, and there's always the option of paying a tutor to ease the way forward - and LLMs are essentially inexpensive tutors that vastly help motivated students learn material - a key aide when many university-level professors view teaching as an unpleasant burden and devote minimal time and effort to it, with little material preparation and recycling tests from a decade ago that are all archived in fraternity and sorority collections.
The solution to students using LLMs to cheat is obvious - more in-class work, more supervised in-section work, and devaluing take-home assignments - but this means more time and toil for the instructors, who are often just as lazy and unmotivated as the students.
[note the in-person coding interview seems to have been invented by employers who realized anyone could get a CS degree and good grades without being a good programmer via cheating on assignments, and this happened well before LLMs hit the scene]
If the student's goal at any Ivy League college is to 'meet their partner and their co-founder' then attending social functions where they can expand their networks and meet new candidates for those roles will take precedence over spending three hours diligently studying difficult material for every hour spent in lecture.
Of course, computer science students and others in hard sciences have been gaming the system for decades, with many solutions to take-home programming exercises found in online forums, and there's always the option of paying a tutor to ease the way forward - and LLMs are essentially inexpensive tutors that vastly help motivated students learn material - a key aide when many university-level professors view teaching as an unpleasant burden and devote minimal time and effort to it, with little material preparation and recycling tests from a decade ago that are all archived in fraternity and sorority collections.
The solution to students using LLMs to cheat is obvious - more in-class work, more supervised in-section work, and devaluing take-home assignments - but this means more time and toil for the instructors, who are often just as lazy and unmotivated as the students.
[note the in-person coding interview seems to have been invented by employers who realized anyone could get a CS degree and good grades without being a good programmer via cheating on assignments, and this happened well before LLMs hit the scene]
I have no doubt AI will impact the field, as it will many (most) others. That said, some assertions that may warrant reconsideration IMO:
> The machines best us across nearly every subject
This feels overstated, given the well-known limitations of AI in reasoning, factual reliability, and depth in specialized domains
Describing traditional scholarship as mere "archaeological artifacts" feels like prematurely dismissing the enduring value of books and other research practices
- The idea that AI offers "pure attention" seems to romanticize what is, in essence, statistical pattern recognition...potentially misrepresenting the nature of the exchange
> Factory-style scholarly productivity was never the essence of the humanities
maybe inadvertent, but devalues serious academic work that follows rigorous, methodical research traditions
Beyond that, there's a few claims that would benefit from some additional evidence:
- student paralysis rely heavily on anecdote; broader empirical data across varied institutions would strengthen the case - His comparisons between AI and human experts feel selective...would be interested to see a more systematic evaluation to see where AI meaningfully matches or falls short of expert performance
- I'm somewhat partial to the author's view, but in terms of long-term educational outcomes, no real evidence to show that AI integration improves learning or contributes meaningfully to human development - the idea of a "singularity of self-consciousness" is pretty... under-argued? - The supposed link between declining humanities enrollment and AI's potential lacks concrete data to support the correlation
> The machines best us across nearly every subject
This feels overstated, given the well-known limitations of AI in reasoning, factual reliability, and depth in specialized domains
Describing traditional scholarship as mere "archaeological artifacts" feels like prematurely dismissing the enduring value of books and other research practices
- The idea that AI offers "pure attention" seems to romanticize what is, in essence, statistical pattern recognition...potentially misrepresenting the nature of the exchange
> Factory-style scholarly productivity was never the essence of the humanities
maybe inadvertent, but devalues serious academic work that follows rigorous, methodical research traditions
Beyond that, there's a few claims that would benefit from some additional evidence:
- student paralysis rely heavily on anecdote; broader empirical data across varied institutions would strengthen the case - His comparisons between AI and human experts feel selective...would be interested to see a more systematic evaluation to see where AI meaningfully matches or falls short of expert performance
- I'm somewhat partial to the author's view, but in terms of long-term educational outcomes, no real evidence to show that AI integration improves learning or contributes meaningfully to human development - the idea of a "singularity of self-consciousness" is pretty... under-argued? - The supposed link between declining humanities enrollment and AI's potential lacks concrete data to support the correlation
Opposite the Turing test, there is its dual: "Can you administer a turing test? Can you tell if you are talking to a person?"
There are lots of people who fail this test. Many of them are professional evaluators in the humanities. They should unquestionably lose their jobs as evaluators.
There are lots of people who fail this test. Many of them are professional evaluators in the humanities. They should unquestionably lose their jobs as evaluators.
What is the general take on the ethics of using AI as a much more powerful search engine? For example, "Find all occurences in the text where Odysseus' will is overridden by the Gods." The question is not something that would be directly set by an instructor, but might be required to substantiate an interpretation that a student is aiming for.
Finding something like this is difficult and requires reading the text closely. But with AI, you could get away by reading around the passages returned by AI.
Finding something like this is difficult and requires reading the text closely. But with AI, you could get away by reading around the passages returned by AI.
For every Quinton Tarantino there are dozens of people who could make amazing films but never had the opportunity for a wide variety of reasons that now mostly go away.
AI hasn’t destroyed the humanities, but it definitely made things more complicated and harder to teach.
I’ve seen students rely entirely on chatbots to write essays, and it really does make teaching harder.
As the article says, we need to find ways to make AI and the humanities work together, not just hold on to the old way of doing things.
Everyone's always claiming the humanities are important the humanities are important but everyone I know in STEM is more learned than everyone in humanities. More philosophy, more history, more classical literature. This means that humanities education is relatively bogus.
When effort becomes optional, so does growth. And the quote from the student who sees college as networking with a side of AI-cheating? Painfully on the nose. There's a real risk of LLMs flattening the educational journey into a kind of performance optimization game
When I was a postdoc at Columbia, I taught one of the core curriculum classes mentioned here, with a reading list that included over a dozen weighty tomes (one week was spent on the Bible, the next week on the Quran, another on Thomas Aquinas, and so on). There wasn’t much that was fun or easy about it.
This sums up the problem. It's not fun and the only thing that matters is the credential anyway , so unsurprisingly students are outsourcing to drudgery to AI. In the past it was CliffsNotes. The business model of college-to-career needs to be overhauled.
The humanities are important, yet at the same time, not everyone should be req. to study them. AI arguably makes it easier to learn, so think this is a welcome development.
This sums up the problem. It's not fun and the only thing that matters is the credential anyway , so unsurprisingly students are outsourcing to drudgery to AI. In the past it was CliffsNotes. The business model of college-to-career needs to be overhauled.
The humanities are important, yet at the same time, not everyone should be req. to study them. AI arguably makes it easier to learn, so think this is a welcome development.
Humans are mimetic creatures. The biggest damage (some call it influence) that LLMs will do is that next generation will be talking like an LLM. They might even normalize hallucination
I have been saying this (not sure about the weird part), but is it not obvious that in an AI saturated ‘field’, actual, factual, practical work should have an easy advantage?
Is hype cycle effect hitting hard on AI recently? The arguments aren't changing for years, and emotional components in them feel progressively toned down.
> When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”
On the one hand, this guy is not wrong, from a personal perspective. On the other hand, guys like this are a total waste of time and space in the classroom.
Schools have always faced a fundamental internal conflict, i.e., dueling purposes, and recent developments such as the rise of ChatGPT and the rise of student loan debt may have finally brought the entire educational system to a crisis.
We like to think of education as the primary purpose of the educational system, hence the name. And education is indeed essential, not just for job training but also for the enrichment of human life, as well as the preservation of democracy and freedom. Arguably, the latter are more important. Yet we also rely on the educational system for social and economic sorting. It's a ranking system that has a monumental effect on the future prospects of students. And as the above quotation notes, it's a club, an exclusive club, where the lucky few get to meet the right people and enter into important social circles.
At the university level, things become even more muddled, because professors and scientists are performing important research that may have little or nothing to do with the education of undergraduate students. A lot of this research is important for society, and for industry, but it still comes into conflict with the other purposes of the university.
So how do we resolve the inherent conflict? Is there a way to split the educational system into separate entities that are truer to their individual purposes? Can we make a place for the social ladder climber that's separate from a place where real learning happens, where nobody is tempted to cheat because there's nothing to be gained from cheating? It should also be noted that not everyone is ready to learn. Our current educational system is designed like an assembly line, based on age and social promotion. Everyone of the same age is expected to follow the same track. I personally wasn't ready to study and learn when I was a teenager; it took several more years for me to mature emotionally, develop ambition and discipline. It's difficult to force-feed students: “Most assignments in college are not relevant,” he told me. “They’re hackable by AI, and I just had no interest in doing them.” Perhaps, though, there might be more motivation to learn if learning was not tied to future economic and social prospects. If students view school as merely a tool to achieve certain benefits, then of course they'll view anything else in school as a waste of time.
In a sense, our educational system finds failure to educate to be acceptable, even desirable, because failure fulfills the alternative purpose of social ranking.
On the one hand, this guy is not wrong, from a personal perspective. On the other hand, guys like this are a total waste of time and space in the classroom.
Schools have always faced a fundamental internal conflict, i.e., dueling purposes, and recent developments such as the rise of ChatGPT and the rise of student loan debt may have finally brought the entire educational system to a crisis.
We like to think of education as the primary purpose of the educational system, hence the name. And education is indeed essential, not just for job training but also for the enrichment of human life, as well as the preservation of democracy and freedom. Arguably, the latter are more important. Yet we also rely on the educational system for social and economic sorting. It's a ranking system that has a monumental effect on the future prospects of students. And as the above quotation notes, it's a club, an exclusive club, where the lucky few get to meet the right people and enter into important social circles.
At the university level, things become even more muddled, because professors and scientists are performing important research that may have little or nothing to do with the education of undergraduate students. A lot of this research is important for society, and for industry, but it still comes into conflict with the other purposes of the university.
So how do we resolve the inherent conflict? Is there a way to split the educational system into separate entities that are truer to their individual purposes? Can we make a place for the social ladder climber that's separate from a place where real learning happens, where nobody is tempted to cheat because there's nothing to be gained from cheating? It should also be noted that not everyone is ready to learn. Our current educational system is designed like an assembly line, based on age and social promotion. Everyone of the same age is expected to follow the same track. I personally wasn't ready to study and learn when I was a teenager; it took several more years for me to mature emotionally, develop ambition and discipline. It's difficult to force-feed students: “Most assignments in college are not relevant,” he told me. “They’re hackable by AI, and I just had no interest in doing them.” Perhaps, though, there might be more motivation to learn if learning was not tied to future economic and social prospects. If students view school as merely a tool to achieve certain benefits, then of course they'll view anything else in school as a waste of time.
In a sense, our educational system finds failure to educate to be acceptable, even desirable, because failure fulfills the alternative purpose of social ranking.
> Generative AI elevates the value of humanistic skills
No. It just steals them, whitewashes their copyright, then passes them off as a "machine creation." If there were no humans actively using language there would be no language models.
> Generative AI makes it harder to teach humanistic skills
Yea. That's what happens when you steal for a living.
> For this reason, it is vitally important that educators learn how to personally create and deploy AI-based assignments and tools that are tailored directly for the type of teaching they want to do.
All with zero evidence that this will improve outcomes for them. For this reason you should TEST YOUR HYPOTHESIS.
I hate AI hype.
No. It just steals them, whitewashes their copyright, then passes them off as a "machine creation." If there were no humans actively using language there would be no language models.
> Generative AI makes it harder to teach humanistic skills
Yea. That's what happens when you steal for a living.
> For this reason, it is vitally important that educators learn how to personally create and deploy AI-based assignments and tools that are tailored directly for the type of teaching they want to do.
All with zero evidence that this will improve outcomes for them. For this reason you should TEST YOUR HYPOTHESIS.
I hate AI hype.
Yes
Another day, another Substack ad by this "science historian", naturally with a quote by AI shill Simon Willison. The entire world rests on his shoulders.
I think that when a new era comes, we should choose to embrace it actively. Today, the humanities face unprecedented challenges, but they also contain new opportunities. The rise of artificial intelligence has undoubtedly subverted traditional teaching methods, but it also forces us to rethink a fundamental question: What is the real value of the humanities?
As a historian at Princeton University once pointed out, artificial intelligence can process data and generate text, but it can never replace human subjective experience, moral judgment, and our exploration of meaning, such as questions like “Who am I?”
In the final analysis, the value of the humanities may not be “useful” in the traditional sense, but in helping us better understand ourselves and the world we live in.
If college students are using AI to breeze through their work rather than doing the reading themselves, developing grit – I don't see how we can blame them rather than ourselves for the educational and career system we've created. This problem didn't happen overnight, and it's not just AI.