If the Future Is AI, What Happens to the Humanities?

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupery

At the end of her one-hour keynote “AI and the Future of Work: Preparing Students for an AI-Driven World,” our college’s guest speaker opened the room to questions and comments. It was our professional development day at the Vancouver college where I teach, and like many of my colleagues in the English department, I held my tongue through her admittedly slick presentation. She traced the dramatic rise of ChatGPT since its official inception in 2022, and how this recent spike has been a part of a long-going trend begun in the mid-’50s.

We were invited to engage with questions on our phones using Metimeter, an online tool for audience interaction, so that our guest could get a read of the room regarding our attitudes towards AI. There were presentation slides showing its value for industry. There was information pointing towards the argument that AI would displace traditional education.

In stunningly detailed realism, there was an image of a beaver on a bicycle arriving at our school for the Pro-D day talk (which was indeed extremely cute). Within this display of wonder, we needed to adapt to AI being our pedagogical partner.

“Consider the importance of technology itself and how you use it every day in the classroom. Even just with a laptop and projector,” the speaker said. “If the internet is down, you don’t have class.”

Personally, this was the last straw.

The mention of technology suddenly being inaccessible touched on a memory of a fire alarm going off one afternoon some years back and all the classes flooding onto the sidewalks to collect around our various muster stations.

While waiting for the okay to return to our classrooms, I dusted off an old game I’d once played at the end of each monthly semester when I taught English as a Second Language at a private school (yes, monthly semesters. I remember explaining this to former UBC professor and academic extraordinaire Peter Quartermain: “Sounds like a puppy mill,” he said in wide-eyed alarm).

With an MA in English literature, I was able to escape Vancouver’s ESL puppy mill and land a college job at a school consisting predominantly of international students. My college classes were also multilingual, and I had students who were mostly from the Global South. Waiting for the fire alarms to stop, I explained the game to my 16 students from South America, Africa and Asia.

It would be like a game of telephone, I told them, but instead of whispering, everyone would speak their own languages.

Each person would take a turn asking a question in their language, and, with the understanding that not everyone would understand each other, the next person would respond however they like in their native language.

After everyone had a turn, we went back in reverse, translating our questions and answers to each other.

For my English 100 students, it was the most interactive fun they had all semester. The educational outcome was next to nil, but they were delighted to communicate with each other in this roundabout way.

They all shared a glimpse of half of who they were as bilingual speakers. We returned to the classroom with a revivified sense of the many fluencies contained within the four walls of our classroom.

On the morning of the professional development day with the AI keynote, I didn’t share any of this when I opened my mouth, but I did explain how from the humanities point of view, the power going out was not the end of the world.

“We can still talk about the central ideas of a poem, story or text that’s there on the paper in front of us or since we’re working with sources of vital creativity, we have the means to create something engaging for ourselves,” I said.

“In fact, pulling the plug on technology in a humanities class can be one of the best things to happen.”

I shared that while listening to the talk and taking notes, I’d written a poem in response.

I read it aloud to the group.

AI

                          
axing intelligence?

ask it

                          
                           2022
 
Anno Intelligentia?

Apple’s Idiocracy? 

                     ask it

                          
aches identified

     ailments insured

     astringency’s itch
 
assuaging itself

                          
affrontery’s imposition

                ago’s inferences

                          
apps’ invasiveness

all in

        autocracy’s Id

                          
all in

         all
 
                its
 
arse-backwardness irks

                          
ai?

                          
about industriousness

        all imbibe

absurdity’s innateness
 
                          
AI illiterate

am I

and I

    (an individual)
 
              already inventable

       ad infinitum

I explained my concern over the use of the word “skills” and how the humanities are concerned about preparing students for a world of increased thoughtlessness and unpredictability.

There was another question from another corner of the room and then our guest speaker, in summing everything up, mentioned the marvel of my ChatGPT-made poem.

What?!

A corrective wave of noise emerged from many around me in the face of this misunderstanding.

Later in the afternoon, several people from various departments, some of whom I’d never met, commiserated with me over the speaker’s cognitive glitch: “It was pretty clear that was written by you.”

What of the soul?

Ideology provides a pre-packaged framework for understanding the world. It saves us from the trouble of thinking. What struck me about that moment of our AI-boosting speaker suddenly stating we’d all heard an AI-produced poem was the glaring spike of ideology. At the practical level of the moment, it evinced both a gap in listening and the entire missing of my point.

This was an educated and intelligent person who spoke articulately and was well-informed on her subject matter. No shade on her, but this blip in understanding exposed the thoughtless proposition that AI is inevitable and we must adapt. This wasn’t so much an argument as an assumption.

An argument can be argued against. An assumption is often more slivered within the skin of the moment or rather hidden deep within the cogs of ideology’s machinery.

The history of the 20th century should show us how a belief in technology’s inherent greatness is flat-out wrong.

At the erection of the Berlin radio tower in 1930, Albert Einstein, no slouch of a thinker, praised radio’s potential for bringing culture, understanding and peace to the world. The genesis of every new technology is accompanied by fanfare and enthusiasm. Even so-called geniuses can crush hard on this forward momentum.

This, however, is the opposite of the time-bound values of critical thinking, creativity, love and reflection. Reflection necessarily takes time. Within the schema of the current algorithm, to even spend seconds on the old time-equals-money adage leaves you behind.

Yes, there will be a Q&A, but it’s a formality and there’s no time to make the argument that this cutting-edge technology threatens to sever us from our collective values.

I admit that I used an online thesaurus a couple times to help me write “AI” in a Google Doc on my new MacBook Air. Sometimes I write with pen and paper but mostly I write on my laptop. I’m no luddite.

I also must admit that I wrote eight poems with the assistance of ChatGPT for a chapbook published in 2023 called Hymned Data. At the time, I didn’t know the extent to which AI was scouring the web to steal from writers’ work, still not in the public domain.

I wrote my small collection of poems explicitly about the emptiness of the conversation with ChatGPT. In the excitement of this new technology, I rushed forward to make something, yes, critiquing, but also falling for the hype.

Whatever resistance and alternatives to the inundation of AI are, they have existed for millennia and are found in poetry, conversation, argumentation and Indigenous brilliance — the poetry in my English 102 class begins with the work of Selina Boan, Lee Maracle, Dallas Hunt and many other fabulous poets.

The alternatives also lie in the wisdom already embedded in the many languages within earshot around us, something felt at the experiential level of trying the words out on your lips for yourself.

What I love about poetry is its beautiful conflagration from the kindling of ordinary language, fancy 10-dollar words or maybe even a word in some other language.

Embrace the friction. It’s where humanity lives

On the topic of metaphors, the mitochondrial powerhouse of poems, I often elicit idioms from the different languages in my classes — this invites students to share the prevalence and variety of figurative language.

This past winter semester, a student from Nepal explained how Hatti ko mukh ma jira was the equivalent of the English idiom “A drop in the ocean.”

In scanning this expression, we listened for the syllables, alliteration and rhyme. Poetic devices were packed into this phrase, which literally meant: elephant tongue cumin seed.

I worked on memorizing the idiom for the next class and found myself recalling the first page of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince, where the picture of the elephant swallowed by a snake looks like a hat: Hatti.

It was a two-syllable start, though truly it was just a cumin seed on an elephant’s tongue.

All languages have syllables. To study and consider their possible significance prepares us for the encounter with any new language.

Of course, it takes time for us to find the personal strategies that work for us in our efforts to preserve some of the world within, i.e. remember stuff. It sometimes requires repetition, which also happens to be a key feature of poetic devices.

While poetry has been my life’s passion, it’s not because I have any particular affinity with words. It’s because of a linguistic deficit and inability to remember or name things that I’m motivated to work the world out on the page.

If I sound smart on paper, it’s because I’ve committed decades to reading and writing. Most importantly, I enjoy learning from and with others and considering ways to prepare for the many adaptations required for the immensity of existence.

Unfamiliar languages and poems may not be the only stuff popping out of left field to slow the momentum of daily life.

Given the likelihood of more and more severe weather phenomena interrupting our “productivity,” preparing students for the power to go out might be the most valorous way forward.

I can imagine a future where that would be a verboten statement. We can imagine many other futures as well.