AI is Infecting the Humanities

Over the past year, AI seems to have infiltrated almost every aspect of society. Businesses’ posters, advertisements, Facebook friends turning themselves into fifty different versions of themselves–I think this month’s trend is the “Your 1980s Portrait.” This time last year TikTok and Instagram Reels were drowning in everyone using Google’s Gemini to turn a photo of them into a poster from the horror movie franchise Scream? No matter where I am, Generative AI is going further and further, in a positive or negative direction? Well, I suppose how people use it determines that. 

Earlier this month, I sat down with Lakehead Orillia’s very own Dr Sarah Olutola, an Associate Professor of Writing in the English Department, to talk about her experience with AI as both a professor and published author. What she had to say was both enlightening and gave me a bit of hope. 

Being a part of Lakehead’s staff since 2021, there has always been AI lurking about in the classrooms. Usually as Grammarly editing out commas or suggesting certain edits. But her first interactions with the GenAI that has now plagued students’ work came in 2022 while teaching 1015, Intro to Academic Writing. 

“I wasn’t sure why I was getting papers that all mentioned Rodney King when they were supposed to write about Madonna, and, somehow, almost every paper mentioned the beating of Rodney King in the 90s, and I was like, this is strange. But I didn’t know.”

Olutola had not heard of ChatGPT, as it had only been released in November 2022. It wasn’t until she later heard on CBC Radio that she started to learn about ChatGPT and GenAI. It was there that the dots began to connect. 

“I was like, Oh, that’s what it was. Like, they were all putting a prompt in and ChatGPT was spitting out the same answer. So, that’s when I became more vigilant, but I was terrified in some way because I was like, how in the world am I gonna tell? How do I catch people? So then it became about catching people using AI.” 

Rather than starting a witch hunt, trying to find those who fell into AI’s trap, as if they were Eve and the apple in the Garden of Eden, Olutola looked at her teaching methods and recalibrated her thinking.  

“I don’t want to spend my time trying to catch people doing bad things. I want to teach people, give them knowledge. I had to completely rethink how I teach. And in a way, it’s been an eye-opening experience. I’ve had to recalibrate some of my syllabi and assignments, but I think that’s a good thing.” 

At this time, there is no Lakehead standard with AI. During Academic Integrity Awareness Week (October 5th to 9th), the school highlighted the fact that while AI of any kind can “threaten academic integrity,” it is ultimately up to each individual professor if or how it can be used in their classroom. For Oltula, AI is not a welcome guest, as she borrows the phrase “cognitive offloading” from Lakehead Thunder Bay’s English & Writing professor Dr Scott Pound.

“Your degree is supposed to say, I am capable of doing X, Y, Z. I have a set of skills. Because I went through four years of university. It’s up to you, as a student, to decide whether you want that degree to mean what it’s supposed to mean. Because when an employer sees, ‘oh, I got a degree from Lakehead University’, they’re gonna assume things, and if those things aren’t true, well, they’ll see you soon enough, and it’s gonna be on you.” 

When asked how AI has affected her as an author, Olutola describes the publishing world as being worse than universities in handling the infectious infiltration of AI. 

“I think most schools at least are trying to do something about it. That is not happening in the publishing industry. The big publishers, like Harper Collins, Simon and Schuster, Penguin Random House. They have not figured out a unified way of tackling AI or how to feel about AI. There’s no universal language. Like some people just use AI for prompts, like idea generation. But even then, some people will say that’s cognitively offloading. That’s what Scott Pound says. I loved how he put it. Like, I don’t want to think; I don’t like the brain pain. So I’m just going to let the machine do that. But that’s part of the labour, and that’s part of why, when the book comes out, you feel so proud because you went through all of that labour and all of that pain.” 

As Olutola works in both academia and the publishing industry, she is left trying to figure out this AI era while also trying to persuade young writers to not give in or to give up. After all, it is difficult trusting a degree in the Humanities and Social Sciences, as any career in this field is so easily affected by AI. In her classes, whether it be in creative writing or critical race studies, she tells students, “Don’t give up your voice to a machine. Letting AI do things for you, you’re only taking away from yourself. Because there are things that AI can’t do for you, can’t teach you. It can mimic humanity, but it’s not humanity. And how do you want to be as a human being?” 

In a world where you can never fully trust the media you consume, as it’s getting harder and harder to tell what is human made versus AI-generated, will you give up your voice? Or will you push against the plague that is AI before it truly has the chance to harm humanity’s ability to create?