AI makes the humanities more important, but also a lot weirder

But in the longer run, the damage is being done to students. By making effort an optional factor in higher education rather than the whole point of it, LLMs risk producing a generation of students who have simply never experienced the feeling of focused intellectual work. Students who have never faced writer’s block are also students who have never experienced the blissful flow state that comes when you break through writer’s block. Students who have never searched fruitlessly in a library for hours are also students who, in a fundamental and distressing way, simply don’t know what a library is even for.