Yves here. Forgive us for being a bit heavy today on AI-related posts, but a bit of a breather on Trump whipsaws allows us to catch up on some important topics. This one confirms concerns about the way that AI is being used more and more to replace original creative works and is harming what passes for culture in the West.
Note that this development is taking place along side a more general erosion of cultural values, as a result of younger adults not reading books much if at all as well as the teaching of the classics being degraded due to being largely the output of white men. But studying humanities has also been under assault for at least two decades due to being perceived as unhelpful to productivity. For instance, from Time Magazine after Larry Summers was forced out as Harvard President:
And humanities professors had long simmered about Summers perceived prejudice against the softer sciences — he had reportedly told a former humanities dean that economists were known to be smarter than sociologists, so they should be paid accordingly.
And it’s not as if mercenary career guidance has paid off that well. Even though humanities grads typically earn less that ones in the hard sciences, their employment rates are similar, and in some comparisons, marginally better than those of other majors, including the much touted “business”. By contrast, how well has “learn to code” worked out?
And this rejection of culture is having broader effects. IM Doc wrote:
Do you know how hard it is to teach students to be humanistic physicians when they have never spent a minute in any of the Classics? It is impossible. I muddle through the best I can. What is also very noticeable is there is almost universal unfamiliarity with stories from The Old and New Testament. The whole thing is really scary for my kids when I really think about it.
Even more troubling, IM Doc pointed to an article that confirmed something we flagged in a video last week, that students who were raised overmuch on screens cannot process information well, or even at all. From the opening of Why University Students Can’t Read Anymore:
Functional illiteracy was once a social diagnosis, not an academic one. It referred to those who could technically read but could not follow an argument, sustain attention, or extract meaning from a text. It was never a term one expected to hear applied to universities. And yet it has begun to surface with increasing regularity in conversations among faculty themselves. Literature professors now admit—quietly in offices, more openly in essays—that many students cannot manage the kind of reading their disciplines presuppose. They can recognise words; they cannot inhabit a text.