I'm begging for an English class.

With the rise of AI, we need the humanities more than ever.

*blows dust off newsletter*

Heyyyyy…

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything here. As with everyone the past couple of years, life got busy. Moving apartments, ramping up at work, finally building an adult social life, trying to shut out the gnawing feeling that our democracy is crumbling before our eyes. You know, normal 25-year-old stuff. Another reason for putting this Substack on the back burner is because I have been hard at work on my novel, which is getting closer and closer to being ready to pitch.

I hope to share more on that process later, but for now I have opinions that need to be shared on the devaluation of the humanities happening right now, the invasion of AI in our lives, and why we all need a great English class to reclaim our humanity.

There was a point in my life when I constantly worried about coming off as too pretentious, too “into” whatever I was talking about, or too academic. “It’s not that deep” is a catchphrase thrown around online when someone is taking something too seriously or reading into something too much.

But, what if some things are that deep?

I remember this meme that was going around in the late 2010s about how English teachers read into small details in literature too much. Maybe blue curtains were just blue; they didn’t mean that the main character was sad or, perhaps, melancholic.

Many of us have had overzealous English teachers, so the joke is funny, but I also find it depressing in the age of ChatGPT, AI search results, and the rise of media that spoon feeds its themes to us.

In many ways, I really was shocked by the almost immediate adoption of AI. Here: a tool, at last, that can do the thinking for you! The final nail in our convenience culture coffin. Every time I turned around, it seemed like every brand or company was announcing its newest AI tool, chatbot, mechanism, do-thingy, even when these tools failed to work accurately a majority of the time. Are we all still not shouting, “SPEAK TO A REPRESENTATIVE!” into the phone when our keypads fail to bring us to the correct destination?

It seemed that everyone I knew was using ChatGPT without a second thought. Generate travel plans, sift through data, create a list of ideas, or, most dishearteningly, see yourself a Studio Ghibli character (stealing decades of human creativity and design? who cares!). Amid all of this, I still couldn’t bring myself to use it. Something about AI felt incredibly icky to me, and it almost felt pretentious to say it. Why wouldn’t I want my life to be easier? Why should I shame people for using it? Who has the time to brainstorm ideas or learn a new skill when there’s rent to be paid, dishes to wash, relationships to maintain, and crashouts about fascism to be had?

There has always been hand-wringing over new technology, from the telephone to automobiles to the internet. But AI really is different. Instead of helping us communicate, get to our destinations faster, or connecting us with people across the planet, AI is thinking for us. It’s brainstorming for us. It’s doing the human part of creative work.

Me begging everyone in my life NOT to use AI.

It’s doubly horrifying that we are seeing the surge of AI alongside the humanities losing their tiny shred of federal funding. Last week, Trump effectively defunded the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and shuttered the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). IMLS supports funding and grants to our nation’s museums and libraries — stalwart defenders of our history, democracy, and critical thinking skills — and NEH provides essential funding to humanities councils across the country. Some of these councils, such as those in Michigan and Nevada, receive upwards of 75% of their funding from NEH. Without this money, they may have to close their doors.

Even before this, the humanities had already been increasingly undervalued in our society. Research in the humanities is often vastly underfunded compared to STEM. In 2019, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences reported that “expenditures for health sciences research…were over 50 times greater than funding for research in the humanities.” (And not saying that health sciences doesn’t deserve the money here — don’t do that <3).

Anecdotally, I remember having to defend my decision to study History and English Creative Writing in college to extended family members more times than I can count. “What are you going to do with that?” was always the question ringing in my ear — as if the skills provided by these degrees (critical thinking, writing, research, identifying reliable sources, understanding how we got here, and more) had no place in our modern world. Why bother with history or English classes when a money-making career in these disciplines was not immediately apparent?

But the state of our democracy shows us exactly why we need the humanities now more than ever.

Studying literature makes you see the world differently. You learn empathy by stepping into the shoes of someone whose life is completely different from your own. You can learn about other periods in history, or imagine a world that doesn’t exist and its ramifications. You learn to read critically, to notice small details, to develop your own opinion on what you just read. You learn how to go deep. As more Americans struggle to identify misinformation, to coherently defend the ideas they purport to believe in, and to understand the consequences of the decisions being made in the Executive Branch, I fear our window to build a better future filled with thoughtful people is closing without these skills.

In my high school and college English classes, I was forced to spend a dedicated period of time on one novel or poem or short story. Sometimes, I analyzed particular paragraphs or quotes for an entire class period. I read with a pen in hand. The curtains were blue for a reason. And, at some point, all of those abstract thoughts floating around in my head had to be distilled into an essay, a coherent argument. With evidence. With style. It was rewarding. It was mine. Pages of original thoughts. From my brain. When was the last time any of us did something like that?

I recognize most people don’t feel this way about writing an essay about T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. And certainly a degree of my satisfaction came from academic validation (girlies who derived their entire self-worth from A’s RISE). But regardless of how you may feel about writing an essay for English class, you must agree that creating — however you choose to do it! — feels good. And with the rise of AI and decline of humanities, I worry that we are going to forget that satisfaction.

Many people focus on what AI will allow us to gain. I am worried about what we will lose. How is the next generation of writers and thinkers ever going to discover the satisfaction they may get from crafting an argument or drawing themselves in an animation style they adore or brainstorming a new list of solutions if they have the option to have the work done for them in one second? How quickly will they grow impatient with anything that takes longer than that? They will not have the opportunity to recall all that they learned from pushing through that one assignment or really sitting with and then incorporating revisions. And how can we fault them, if this path of ease is all that they’ve known?

Something human is slipping through our fingertips. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to watch movies or read books or observe artworks that weren’t created by another human being. I don’t want to outsource my thinking to a robot. I don’t want to see English classes removed from curriculums. I don’t want deep thinking to be a relic of the past.

Surely there are benefits to AI, but replacing the humanities is not one of them.

Thanks for reading.

Cameron

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Recommended reading and watching:

• For more on IMLS, NEH, and the humanities…“DOGE comes for the humanities”

• For more on AI…“I’m TIRED of AI”

• For a truly profound critique of AI in a medium that is bursting with human care and creativity…Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (I am incredibly serious and it’s on Netflix)

• For more on being a pretentious little humanities whore…“in defense of pretension”

• For more on the environmental impact of AI…“Explained: Generative AI’s environmental impact”

In my own efforts to resist the AI invasion and do more independent thinking, I hope to write more in this Substack. If you have topics you’re interested in exploring, feel free to drop them in the comments! Some ideas I have for future newsletters:

• A list of books to read to understand our times

• Thoughts on commentary about Trump…in the age of Trump

• More on how media is spoon-feeding us (developing)

Thank you to Por Jaijongkit for editing this newsletter. You can subscribe to her Substack here!