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AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

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

#31

Post by sdoering »

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 field of history had their - oh, this is a thing - moment quite a few decades ago with Hayden White. It is a good example of the underlying issue.

Hayden White's assertion that "history is fiction" was (and still is) a complex one, not intended to dismiss the factual accuracy of historical narratives (as it is more often than not portraied).

Instead, it highlights the interpretive nature of historical writing and the way historians shape their accounts of the past through literary and rhetorical techniques. White argues that historians, like novelists, use narrative structures and stylistic devices to construct meaning from historical events.

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

#32

Post by FranzFerdiNaN »

Animats wrote: post #18

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…

> It's not about how to use history as an aid to prediction.

Because this isnt the goal of history. You cant use history to predict the future.

> 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.

No they dont. This is yet another example of an outsider looking at another field, thinking he knows better and making a fool of himself. Also, why would you ignore 80 years of scholarship about Cicero and read a book from 1942???

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

#33

Post by vineyardmike »

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.

> WYSIWYG didn't go anywhere

Like MS Word?

These are pretty easy to solve problems tbh. LLM tools already exist that can work around “hallucinating libraries” effectively, not that this a real concern. It’s not magic, but these tired skeptic takes are just not based on reality.

It’s much more likely that LLMs will be used to supercharge visualizations with custom UIs and widgets, or in conjunction with things like MS excel for data analysis. Non-engineers won’t be vibe-coding a database anytime soon, but they could be making a PWA that marketing can use to add a filter on photos or help guide a biologist towards a python script to sort pictures of specimens based on an OpenCV model.

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

#34

Post by lynx97 »

mantas wrote: post #23
lynx97 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where all you got was the outline of the island As a blind person I can't help but notice that this "innovative" question design is inherently inaccessible to people like me. Yes, I know I'm not the norm. However, I can't help but notice that this avoidance of text based assignments is making accessible teaching even more impossible. Say welcome to a new generation of Digital Divide.

It’d be bad if there was no alternative. But different people can get different assignments and that’s ok. Complaining about this is like me complaining about people drinking milk since I’m lactose intolerant.

[flagged]

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

#36

Post by quanto »

sdoering wrote: post #28
UncleMeat wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not about how to use history as an aid to prediction. This is not what academic historians generally do. The study of history tells us about the story of humanity and exists for wider reasons than direct application to decision making today. This is even true for military history, which is among the slowest subfields at adopting new methods and practices.

Thanks. Came here to say that. Having studied history - esp. in a time where Hayden White's assertion that "history is fiction" was strongly (and sometimes emotionally) discussed in between students and professors alike, taught me, that - while we might learn from history - that that is not the reason to "do" history. I also learned to appreciate history on a fundamentally different level than I did, when I loved his…

> while we might learn from history - that that is not the reason to "do" history.

If we don't learn from history, why do we do history? Is it a form of pure entertainment, i.e. of arts? If so, does that give more credence to White's argument?

I have had a PhD colleague who genuinely believed that history ought to be (in the philosophical normative sense) contributing to national propaganda, thus of national interest. By extension, this is why history departments should be funded by tax dollars.

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

#37

Post by _elephant »

Animats wrote: post #18

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…

It makes a good point by separating history as strategic analysis from history as cultural appreciation. Most teaching today leans toward the latter, which is also easier for AI to replicate. But the most valuable historical thinking often comes from uncomfortable questions failure, unintended consequences, and perspectives that usually get ignored.

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

#38

Post by Caelus9 »

I think that when a new era comes, we should choose to embrace it actively. Today, the humanities face unprecedented challenges, but they also contain new opportunities. The rise of artificial intelligence has undoubtedly subverted traditional teaching methods, but it also forces us to rethink a fundamental question: What is the real value of the humanities? As a historian at Princeton University once pointed out, artificial intelligence can process data and generate text, but it can never replace human subjective experience, moral judgment, and our exploration of meaning, such as questions like “Who am I?” In the final analysis, the value of the humanities may not be “useful” in the traditional sense, but in helping us better understand ourselves and the world we live in.

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

#39

Post by aaron695 »

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…

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

#40

Post by Zorass »

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…

[dead]
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