AI in the humanities: do we need professors anymore? From the commentary:

There has been much hand-wringing about the crisis of the humanities, and recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence have added to the angst. It is not only truck drivers whose jobs are threatened by automation. Deep-learning algorithms are also entering the domain of creative work. And now, they are demonstrating proficiency in the tasks that occupy humanities professors when they are not giving lectures: namely, writing papers and submitting them for publication in academic journals….

[B]y focusing on egocentric writing tasks—asking the AI to write about AI—Thunström and the Guardian’s experiments understate the broader challenge to academic writing. In addition to deep-learning algorithms, one also must consider the central role that Google Scholar plays in today’s academy. With this index of all the world’s academic literature, AI scholarship should be able to expand far into new frontiers….

In the absence of mainstream media coverage, the standard philosophy journal article might be read by the five other philosophers who are mentioned therein and almost no one else. Yet in a future of AI-generated academic writing, the standard readership will be largely confined to machines. Some academic debates might become as worthy of human attention as are two computers playing each other in chess.

For those of us who view the humanities as one of the last essentially human disciplines, the first step to salvation is to think about how we engage with students….

Rather than structuring our courses like apprenticeships in specialized academic journal writing, we should reconnect with the “human” in the humanities. Today’s digital media landscape has created a deep longing for credibility and authenticity. In a world of AI writing, rhetoric itself would become flattened and formulaic, creating a new demand for genuinely human forms of persuasion. That is the art that we should be teaching our students.

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