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AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

resobscura.substack.com

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Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#11

Post by paulpauper »

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.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#12

Post by ReptileMan »

quanto wrote: post #4

> 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…

>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.

And they will spend 12 hours trying to figure out which is the fake python library and the citation that the LLM has hallucinated from the real one. Vibe coding is just WYSIWYG on steroids in good and bad. WYSIWYG didn't go anywhere.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#14

Post by coldcache »

simonw wrote: post #3

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 assignme…

I find it difficult to think of examples that aren't just based on niche information (what did we talk about on this day? what analogy does the teacher make repeatedly?). Maybe multimodal stuff?

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#15

Post by dotancohen »

carbonguy wrote: post #9

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 disrup…

The definition of learning has not changed. One of our first written records is a man complaining that this newfangled writing thing will make the students lazy, they will no longer have to remember their studies.

Education will adapt.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#17

Post by lwo32k »

quanto wrote: post #4

> 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…

The kids are not even trying to do either. They are already gravitating towards multidisciplinary teams, cause unlike past generations they are dealing with a rate of change at a totally different level. In such an environment, people get to see their own limitations much faster no matter the quality of their training and they end up having to rely on others.

The big challenge is getting very different people with ever growing different skillsets and interests to coordinate, stay in sync and row in one direction.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#18

Post by Animats »

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

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#19

Post by mastazi »

ReptileMan wrote: post #12
quanto wrote: post #4

> 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…

>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. And they will spend 12 hours trying to figure out which is the fake python library and the citation that the LLM has hallucinated from the real one. Vibe coding is just WYSIWYG on steroids in good and bad. WYSIWYG didn't go anywhere.

> which is the fake python library and the citation that the LLM has hallucinated from the real one. Vibe coding is just WYSIWYG on steroids

Maybe you haven't used AI coding tools in a while, the latest ones can run build tools, write and run unit tests, run linters, and will try and fix any errors that may arise during those steps. Of course it's possible that a library may have been been hallucinated, but this will just trigger an error during the build job and the AI agent will go back and fix it. Same thing for failing unit tests.

Just last week I saw Copilot fixing a failing unit test, then running the test, then making some more changes and repeating the process until the test was running successfully. At some point during this process, it asked me if it could install a VS Code extension so that it could run the test by itself, I agreed then it went from there until the issue was resolved. This was with the bottom-tier free version of Copilot.

Of course there are limits to what AI tools can do, but they are evolving all the time and at some point in a not too distant future they will be good enough in most cases.

Regarding hallucinated citations, I imagine that the problem can be solved by allowing the LLM to access and verify citations, then the agent can fix its own hallucinations just like most coding agents already do.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#20

Post by palmotea »

dotancohen wrote: post #15
carbonguy wrote: post #9

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 disrup…

The definition of learning has not changed. One of our first written records is a man complaining that this newfangled writing thing will make the students lazy, they will no longer have to remember their studies. Education will adapt.

> One of our first written records is a man complaining that this newfangled writing thing will make the students lazy, they will no longer have to remember their studies.

And if your summary is correct, he was right. If you don't remember what you've learned (i.e. integrate it into your mind), you haven't learned anything. You're just, say, a book operator.

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