Get Your Filthy ChatGPT Away From My Liberal Arts

You People Disgust Me

Ryan Gosling Expressing Loathing, Barbie, 2023

There is very little in life that fills me with seething quite like reading stories of people who use ChatGPT to write or summarize books for them.

Driven by either typical student laziness, LinkedIn grindset losers, or the most emotionally stunted grifters you’ve ever met—LLMs are infiltrating the humanities. It was this post in particular that has so deeply annoyed me as to make me write this.

The idea that ChatGPT can replace what studying the liberal arts does for a person is utter insanity that misunderstands the purpose of studying the humanities in the first place.

Using a language model to summarize a piece of writing for you is—besides an indication of profound laziness—a complete dereliction of having to engage seriously with texts.

Books are not merely a set of facts to be regurgitated like a Wikipedia summary. You are not reading Plato, Cervantes, or Melville for the sake of being able to produce a rote memorization of terms and characters.

Look at it this way. Who cares if you can reference the point of the White Whale. You’ve obtained nothing by being able to name Thrasymachus as a Platonic interlocutor.

The point is to grapple with the text and think through the complexities of what the author was attempting to say.

You study the humanities so that you can develop a habit of taking in complex information and then think it through.

Reading widely exposes you to the often opaque and grey facets of life that don’t have easy and accessible answers. It allows you to think through often contradictory or unclear pieces of information and make your own judgements by carefully considering the material.

Reducing all of this to nothing more than a slightly more glorified version of a Wikipedia summary is pathetic. The people promoting this ought to be ashamed at even attempting to equate surface-level prompts with actually putting in the necessary work to create understanding.

These are grown men completely abdicating the most basic of human faculties from sheer apathy.

Your average LinkedIn grifter is the functional equivalent of a baby who needs their parent to make airplane noises at them so they can feed themselves at this point.

You people are like 40.

If you can’t read a book yourself without needing a robot to spoon-feed you—you definitely shouldn’t be on the board of a multi-million dollar tech company.

The notion that someone would turn to a generated list of bullet points to understand someone like Virginia Woolf is so pointless to me I can barely comprehend it.

What do you even get from this?

You’ll never struggle to see the interior life of her characters through their own lives. You’ll never feel the sorrow of the remaining Ramsays finally traveling to the lighthouse. What can you say about Mrs. Ramsay without living inside the stream of thoughts within her mind? Where is the fun of arguing about all of this with your friends?

What is even the point.

Similarly, the degradation of writing is an absolute disaster for anyone that cares about our shared ability to express ourselves.

Writing—even terrible writing like mine—is an essential aspect of developing the ability to express one’s true self to others.

It is a deeply difficult activity that most people spend their lives working at without ever truly becoming great at.

Learning how to coherently structure your thoughts, choose words to capture a specific tone, or find a specific voice that’s your own are all incredibly meaningful struggles of a genuine education.

Letting an algorithm do all of your writing for you is like having your mom pack your lunch for you at your corporate job. Grow up.

It’s almost depressing to think of how a large cohort of my current generation will be duped into never experiencing this by blue check conmen and Silicon Valley shills.

If you can’t be bothered to do your own writing you shouldn’t have elected to go to college or work in a career that requires writing.

There are other people who could be in your place who would care enough to actually do the work. You are taking up a spot from someone who would have valued what they were doing.

There’s nothing wrong with having an LLM proofread for you. I’m not a Luddite that wants to start a Butlerian Jihad here.

Technologies have their merits. I’m just saying that if you can’t be assed to write your own words who should ever trust you with more difficult decisions?

Are you going to have your phone propose to your girlfriend for you? Are you going to write a prompt telling you how to vote? Are you going to have ChatGPT tell you how to write a birthday card for your daughter?

What parts of your life are you going to actually bother doing yourself if you can’t even manage to write a paragraph of your own?

Engaging seriously with the humanities isn’t some game of inputs and outputs. You don’t get anything from the ability to spit out a summary of the plot of a book.

Liberal arts—at its core—consists of the difficult and often exhausting process of cohering and thinking through complex ideas about ourselves and the world and attempting to express that in a way that others understand.

Taking that away from people?

Why even be conscious at that point? What’s the point at all? You might as well just let an AI live your entire life for you.