As humanities professors contemplate student reading and writing in the age of AI, we sound like Chicken Little: “the sky is falling, the sky is falling.” The falling sky will destroy the halcyon days in which students read and write as individual moral actors, as secular monastics contemplating shards of the truth.
In contrast, our AI overlords and their techno-knights assure us that a new dawn draws nigh. AI means enhancement, efficiency, productivity. Our overlords need not be named. The techno-knights? Politicians (e.g., one Donald Trump), college and university administrators (e.g., Ivy League Universities such as Dartmouth and Harvard, as well as state schools like the University of Florida) and members of the professoriate — including humanities professors.
Which is it? A falling sky or a new dawn?
Perhaps neither. Perhaps this dystopic possibility: the coming of techno-geddon.
Consider: data centers whose gaping, ravenous maws demand extraordinary amounts of water and electricity while creating noise and light pollution that harm both natural and human communities. Consider: bots that can escape their “sandboxes” (those cute little toddlers!) and attack other computer systems. Consider: weaponized drones that make AI-enabled targeting decisions on their own.
If we can avoid techno-geddon, AI might bring about a new dawn of both medical and energy research. If we can use AI to discover better ways to treat children suffering from cancer — or indeed find that golden fleece of a cure — AI away! If we can use AI to create new energy sources or refine old ones to help us counter climate change, AI away! These uses, however, are different in kind from the use of AI in the undergraduate humanities classroom. Humanities education, at its best, invites us to slow down, take our time, think about what is good for human and non-human communities.
Now more than ever we need to reconsider the insight of Paulo Freire, the Brazilian literacy theorist. Freire defined literacy as the act of “reading the word and the world” so that people can flourish. Reading the word and the world challenges students and teachers alike to explore the meaning of words, phrases, and sentences by themselves, for themselves, in their communities. This is not a task for AI.
Humanities professors who use generative AI to create assignments and evaluate student work so they can be freed for “more important” tasks (research and writing? Deck renovation?) might want to think again. What is more important than engaging their students as they read the word and the world?
Some professors use AI to evaluate student work out of pique. If students use it, I will use it in return! An eye for an eye, and all that. I am not a Christian but know that Jesus has some sage advice about that.
Others imagine returning to discussion-focused classrooms that mirror, or reinvent, the age of one-on-one or small group oral pedagogy. Imagine Socrates and Phaedrus sitting under the plane tree. What school budgets — other than those at the wealthiest institutions — can afford that? At my own school, for example, we no longer have traditional humanities degrees and the “enrollment caps” in our remaining humanities courses increase every term.
What to do? Elegy is a time-honored tradition. We could write poems about the good old days. Prophetic screed likewise: we could rail against the end of education or of life as we know it. Here are four smaller strategies:
- Educate students about the history of literacy as an act of liberation.
- Require humanities students to pledge not to use generative AI because they want to grow as moral actors who can read the word and the world.
- Create assignments that students can accomplish without feeling tempted to use generative AI. Gone are the days of the 20-page essay; we should move to much shorter assignments such as weekly one-page essays that challenge student to read the word and the world.
- Walk humbly. After all, how, many of the professoriate can themselves resist the temptation to bite the apple?
Brad Stull is Professor of English and Coordinator of the Global Scholars Program at Rivier
University in Nashua.