Good News for the Humanities

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Clarissa

August 29, 2026

AI is useless in many Humanities courses. At least 30% of the final grade is class participation, in my case with the added wrinkle of having to be able to participate in it in Spanish. What is AI going to do for you in this situation?

Soon enough, Humanities degrees are going to be the most valuable ones because there will be a certainty that AI didn’t do the entirety of the work for the student.

So far, very few students in my courses even tried to engage in AI cheating. Not because they are unusually honest, but because they discover soon enough that it doesn’t work. Humanities are not about finding one correct answer. They are about the beauty, the enjoyment, and the importance of the process of looking for answers. You can’t short-circuit the process because the process is the whole point. Being in the presence of beauty does not have a purpose. It is the purpose.

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One response to “Good News for the Humanities”

Anonymous

August 29, 2026

Anything with a real-world component ought to survive.

“Ought to” is doing yeoman’s work in the preceding sentence: Medicine, engineering, computer programming degrees et al. ought to have been retained value.

Yet just a few years ago actual nurses and doctors insisted on point of retaliation that scraps of fabric and paper, worn by people untrained in PPE use stopped community transmission of a corona virus. Some still do. DIE-engineer bridges collapse. And anyone using MS software knows how well it used to work in the Before Times.

Americans who value knowledge and learning have watched in sadness and disgust as the academic-government-industrial complex, pace Eisenhower, inexorably termite-ed our universities and colleges.

AI may speed the burnt fool’s wobbling finger back to the fire of reification. I.e.: “If Credentialed Academic B says the person participated in class, in comprehensible Spanish, and Credentialed Administrator D stamps the paperwork conforming it, Student D has Languages Degree.”

Or it may not. The problem, O Academics, lies not in our LLM stars but in yourselves.”

Interesting times.

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