The Humanities Will Survive AI, But Only If Teachers Let It
In my experience as an English teacher, the humanities disciplines have always faced some new kind of mass disruption that supposedly threatens their existence.
It could be a new piece of technology, a change in the economy, or a confluence of cultural forces that will fundamentally alter human nature. This innovation in turn usually spurs a grand discussion between boosters, doubters, and doomsayers. By the end of it, some changes end up happening, but much of it is gradual and modest — e.g., English teachers now use less paper, assign less Shakespeare, and focus more on research skills than they did in past decades.
Of course, the thing today that will make or break the humanities is artificial intelligence. Boosters envision a new generation of teachers empowered with tools that will grade, teach, and assess for them. Doubters dismiss the change and tend to carry on as before. And the doomsayers predict a great replacement of teachers and brick-and-mortar schools with AI instructors and virtual schools.
Then there are those who somehow combine all of these types. They are hopeful about AI in education, yet they fail to imagine the severe drawbacks that come with it. Usually, these are established intellectuals who have enjoyed successful careers and transcended most of the practical challenges faced by younger teachers and professors trying to navigate a rapidly changing pedagogical landscape.
Outsourcing the Brain
Such is the case with Dr. D. Graham Burnett, a history professor at Princeton University who writes a long, meandering essay in The New Yorker that considers the impact of AI on the humanities. Ironically, his overall argument indeed warrants pessimism for the future of the humanities — not because of what it claims about AI, but what it claims about the humanities.
In a perfunctory manner, he introduces his essay with the current grievance against President Donald Trump, who dared to hold universities accountable for following the law after they aided and abetted pro-Palestinian protest groups on their campus who endangered Jewish students and others last year. Yes, Burnett concedes, this is a nuisance, but the real force affecting humanities classes is AI: “The juggernaut actually barreling down the quad is A.I., coming at us with shocking speed.”
In Burnett’s view, most college faculties have wrongly tried to guard against the use of AI in the classroom: “The approach appears to be: ‘We’ll just tell the kids they can’t use these tools and carry on as before.’ This is, simply, madness.” At no point does he seem recognize the widespread use of AI to cheat on every assignment, which is why professors take measures to restrict its usage. Rather, he seems to conclude that those who set such policies are afraid of change and don’t truly understand AI.
The basis for this position is almost entirely subjective. Much of Burnett’s essay consists of stories of him noodling around with AI, marveling at its ability to spit out summaries of boring texts and plausibly take on the voice of prominent scholars, including himself: “The experience of asking myself questions about my own subject was uncanny. The answers weren’t me, but they were good enough to get my attention.”
The Master Plagiarist
Although he affects modest incredulity towards AI, he is mistaken: the answers were him, in the sense that the AI took his online content and formulated an artificially facsimile that could respond to prompts. It is ultimately beholden to human-generated content and human-made prompts.
The failure to understand this leads to Burnett’s larger failure to see why the use of AI is counterproductive to learning. Humanities teachers need their students to read and write in order to develop their thinking and internalize and contextualize more information. However, Burnett simplistically assumes this work can now be outsourced to AI, leaving the students free to do something more to their liking: “You can no longer make students do the reading or the writing. So what’s left? Only this: give them work they want to do. And help them want to do it.”
To illustrate this point, he recalls a time when he asked his classes to have a conversation about the class with chatbot and print out a transcript. Although he swoons and even cries at some of the “work” that his students turn in, their actual product is superficial and mostly meaningless compared to a short essay or pop quiz done in class.
As Jordan Peterson brilliantly explained in his 10-step guide on writing, “The primary reason to write an essay is so that the writer can formulate and organize an informed, coherent and sophisticated set of ideas about something important.” So what then would be the primary reason for talking with AI? Mostly to give the illusion of learning by having a chatbot generate smart-sounding responses.
Dumbing Us All Down
Practically speaking, Burnett’s class is no different from any other humanities class where students use AI to write essays, except that the plagiarism is required instead of prohibited. The problem in both cases is the same: the students are not reading or writing, and are thus not thinking, and thus not learning. It is the academic equivalent of learning the guitar by playing Guitar Hero, though perhaps even less cognitively demanding.
In his conclusion, Burnett thinks he’s saying something profound when he proclaims that the mission of the humanities is to teach “what it is like to be us, in our full humanity,” something “that can only be lived.” This sounds nice, but most students and fellow teachers would rightly conclude that Dr. Graham Burnett’s class seems like a blowoff where an A is virtually guaranteed.
And this happens to be the real problem facing the humanities. It’s not AI or Trump taking away funding, but complacent professors who reduce rigorous, time-tested academic disciplines to empty validation sessions. These days, this makes it all the more certain that the few naive students who major in the humanities will paradoxically become less human from the experience, increasingly depending on AI to think for them.
So let’s keep AI in its proper place. Even if it may very well change the nature of work, it does not change the nature of human beings. All of us — students, teachers, and everyone else — will still need to think for ourselves and avoid the powerful siren song of the all-knowing, human-seeming chatbot.
Auguste Meyrat is the founding editor of The Everyman, a senior contributor to The Federalist, and has written essays for Newsweek, The American Mind, The American Conservative, Religion and Liberty, Crisis Magazine, and elsewhere. Follow him on X and Substack.