Oh the humanities!
Dark Ages
UCLA has announced that, starting next year, it will offer a comparative literature course on medieval and Renaissance-era writing that will make heavy use of AI-generated materials.
Officially described as “survey of literature from the Middle Ages to the 17th Century,” this won’t constitute supplemental stuff here and there, but the foundation of the entire class, including an AI-generated textbook, AI-generated assignments, and AI-generated resources for teaching assistants.
The reaction from writers and academics has been one of outrage — but also mockery. That’s because the cover for the course’s AI-generated textbook is total fucking gobbledygook. Nevermind the pseudo-illuminated-manucript-styled visuals that are all over the place — the text itself is absolute nonsense.
“Of Nerniacular Latin To An Evoolitun On Nance Langusages,” reads prominently placed text on the textbook cover.
Closed Loop
This is an almost too on the nose metaphor for the blatant shortcomings of generative AI. AI models can frequently get the facts wrong — if they’re not just making them up — a phenomenon that the industry likes to call “hallucinations” but is better described as “bullshitting.” They can also distort the original sources they’re pulling from by inaccurately reproducing their content.
In this case, the AI tool used to create the course materials was Kudu, a platform for creating digital textbooks. Kudu was created by another UCLA professor, which is probably why we’re witnessing this forced-sounding plug.
According to course professor Zrinka Stahuljak, she created the textbook and assignments by supplying her own course notes from previous versions of the class to the AI tool, which wouldn’t pull from any outside sources, ostensibly making its output much more reliable. This is also supposed to discourage students from using other AIs to cheat, somehow.
“It will only respond based on course content,” Stahuljak said. “So it’s there to help our students, but it also reduces the risk of them using ChatGPT to generate their homework assignments.”
Desertion of Duty
The other big upside, Stahuljak argues, is that using AI saves professors like her a lot of time.
“Normally, I would spend lectures contextualizing the material and using visuals to demonstrate the content,” Stahuljak said in the statement. “But now all of that is in the textbook we generated, and I can actually work with students to read the primary sources and walk them through what it means to analyze and think critically.”
So, instead of getting hours of actual instruction from their professor on key background about the primary sources they’ll be reading, the students will get a lousy AI summary? And this is supposed to be an upgrade?
Not according to Stahuljak’s peers.
“If you do this you should have your doctorate revoked and be thrown into the stocks at the center of the main university quad,” tweeted Dan Walden, a philologist and an assistant professor at The University of Tulsa. “This is abandonment of professional responsibility to a degree that would be comical if it weren’t so self-serious.”
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