No parents encourage their kids to study Humanities. By default, recommended options are STEM related. Engineering (Computer Science), Finance, Medicine...The argument against the humanities in the AI age makes it even less compelling to dedicate 4 years to study a Humanities degree. Language models can write passably, summarize quickly, and produce research-shaped text on demand. So the old humanities skills are supposed to matter less. Learn to code, learn to prompt, and stop pretending close.
We have run this exact fight before, just with worse fonts each cycle. Calculators were going to kill math. The internet was going to kill memory and also the library. Wikipedia killed the encyclopedia and somehow not thinking. Now spicy autocomplete is e
We have run this exact fight before, just with worse fonts each cycle.
Calculators were going to kill math. The internet was going to kill memory and also the library. Wikipedia killed the encyclopedia and somehow not thinking. Now spicy autocomplete is either the death of the humanities or their glorious rebirth, depending on which department's budget meeting you walked out of.
Both of these can be true: AI exposes a lot of fake sophistication that humanities classes were quietly rewarding, AND the ability to tell sound argument from polished fog is genuinely worth keeping. Both camps will find that unacceptable because it does not let them dunk.
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No parents encourage their kids to study Humanities. By default, recommended options are STEM related. Engineering (Computer Science), Finance, Medicine...The argument against the humanities in the AI age makes it even less compelling to dedicate 4 years to study a Humanities degree. Language models can write passably, summarize quickly, and produce research-shaped text on demand. So the old humanities skills are supposed to matter less. Learn to code, learn to prompt, and stop pretending close reading pays. I have heard versions of that line enough times that it has its own dead rhythm now. That argument fails for the same reason the technology fails: fluent output is not the same thing as sound judgment. LLMs are good at statistical guessing, very very good at it. And they get trained with the millions of users that chat with them every day, incrementally getting configured to please the user rather be right.
What are humanities?
Part of the confusion is that people still hear "the humanities" as some sort of rich liberal bundle: literature, philosophy, history, art, maybe some vague promise of enrichment. What ties those fields together is not just subject matter but method. They train interpretation, argument, evidence in words, and judgment under uncertainty because a lot of human things cannot be settled by experiment alone. If the sciences are closest to measurement, the humanities are closest to language, and language is exactly where AI now produces its most persuasive failures.
People trained in rhetoric and close reading recognized the failure modes early because the failure modes were old. People without that training kept asking a more basic question: is this accurate, is this reasoning, does this sentence actually mean anything? That gap is not a moral flaw. It is what happens when a culture gets very good at producing text and much worse at interrogating it.
Hallucination. Current large language models can produce statements that sound grounded, sourced, and specific while being false in exactly the way a hurried reader might miss. That is how you get legal citations to cases that never existed, academic papers with real authors and invented titles, and historical summaries that stay in the right century while getting the facts wrong.1 The system is not trying to lie; it is producing plausible continuations without a built-in relation to truth. Rhetoric and close reading have always trained one part of the mind for exactly this problem: the part that asks whether authority is being demonstrated or merely performed.
Circular reasoning. The model tells you something is effective because it has the characteristics of effectiveness, or that a trend will continue because trends often continue, or that a view is defensible because arguments can be made for it. The shape looks like reasoning. The substance is missing. Logic exists for this exact purpose. It teaches you to find the hidden premise, the begged question, the conclusion smuggled into the setup. Those are not decorative school skills. They are error-detection tools.
Fluency without content. This is the one many readers still underestimate because the prose sounds so composed. A model will often generate a paragraph that keeps renaming the topic without ever making a claim about it. You ask about the social effects of remote work and get a paragraph about how remote work is a significant development in modern professional culture, how it reflects changing workplace dynamics, how it has both opportunities and challenges, how organizations must navigate a changing environment. The grammar and rhythm are fine, but nothing was actually said. Close reading was built to catch that exact emptiness sentence by sentence.
Yes, often classrooms don't teach these skills well either
Humanities classrooms often fail to teach these skills well. Plenty of people can pass rhetoric or literature courses while learning the vocabulary of critical judgment more than the habit of it. Universities are not innocent here. They often market the humanities in prestige language and then teach them as content exposure rather than as disciplined reading, argument analysis, and interpretive scrutiny. That is not an argument against the subjects. It is an argument against teaching them badly.
This is also where the domain-knowledge objection belongs. Yes, a doctor catches bad medical advice partly because she knows medicine. A lawyer catches a fake citation partly because he knows the law. Domain expertise matters. But domain knowledge and critical-reading discipline are not rivals. They are partners. The domain expert who cannot interrogate argument structure, verbal vagueness, or performed authority is still easier to fool than the one who can. The humanities are not the only path to those skills. They are one of the oldest and most explicit traditions for training them.
Humanities are the soul of humanity.
Sciences, Engineering, Economics are the tools. Both are needed. Yes, you progress faster in life in terms of social mobility through the STEM path. Salaries are higher, there is more work and it definitely is a more suitable option for the majority of people. However, we also need humanities to hdelp us explore human nature, motivate change and drive us. Human beings are moved by stories, speeches, histories, and moral framing long before they are moved by a spreadsheet. Uncle Tom's Cabin was critical in making slavery vivid and morally urgent for many Northern readers who could otherwise keep it abstract.2Zola's "J'accuse...!" did not settle the Dreyfus affair , but it turned a legal case into a public fight about evidence, justice, and state dishonesty.3 In Communist Eastern Europe, dissident essays and samizdat were critical in making government language feel less natural and less believable.4 Words do not replace armies, laws, or institutions, but do drive them. They do help decide what a public can see clearly, what it finds tolerable, and which lies start to sound thin.
There is no question that can produce text. Machines can do that now, cheaply and constantly. The practical question is whether you can read generated text well enough to know when it is bluffing, looping, saying nothing, or using fluent language to fake authority. That was already a serious skill before AI. AI did not create the need for it. It just made the test impossible to ignore.
If you can read this book and STILL advocate for the "Lost Cause" then I give hope on you
High-profile cases of AI hallucination in legal and academic contexts were widely reported from 2022 onward. Mata v. Avianca (2023), in which a lawyer submitted AI-generated citations to nonexistent cases, remains the funniest documented legal example. Documented cases of hallucinated academic citations are also widespread.
Historians still debate exactly how much causal weight to assign Uncle Tom's Cabin in the politics that led to the Civil War. The modest claim here is that the novel helped shape antislavery feeling in the North by making slavery vivid to readers far from plantation life.
Émile Zola's open letter "J'accuse...!" (1898) became one of the defining public texts of the Dreyfus affair. The point is not that one article resolved the case, but that literary and rhetorical intervention changed how the case was publicly understood.
For Eastern Europe, think of dissident writing and samizdat culture in writers such as Václav Havel. The claim is interpretive but well-grounded: language that stripped official formulas of credibility mattered to anti-regime consciousness even when it did not directly change state policy on its own.
The fluency without content section is the only part that survives contact with a real workplace. I spend half my review time deleting paragraphs that rename the problem four times and never state it. That skill is real. What I don't buy is that a four year degree is how you get it. I learned to spot the empty design doc by getting paged at 2am for the one that read clean and shipped broken, not in a seminar. The judgment is the asset. The diploma is just one expensive way to deliver it.
The part that lands for me is the split between method and subject. I took one philosophy class that was basically a semester of being forced to find the hidden premise in everything, and it ruined reading the news the easy way forever. I also took three lit classes where we mostly recited what the professor already believed. Same department, completely different skill delivered.
So I half agree with the post and half agree with the people calling the degree overrated, because both of those classes were on the same transcript. The method is the thing worth defending. The packaging it usually ships in is the part that's actually in trouble.
Before we call close reading the soul of humanity, let us ask the boring question: who is paying for the degree and who collects on it.
The critical-thinking pitch is real, but it has been doing unpaid labor for a long time, mostly the work of justifying tuition for a credential whose market value is collapsing. "It teaches you to think" is what you say about a product when you can no longer say what job it gets you.
The skills are not fake. But a skill you could get from a library card for free, sold as a 80k credential, is not a defense of the humanities. It is a defense of the people who run the humanities.
Everyone is arguing about this as if it were news, when it is the latest aftershock of a very old fight.
The liberal-arts ideal we are eulogizing was already a compromise. It was the aristocratic education of free men, the studia humanitatis, repackaged once for the bourgeois gentleman and again for the postwar mass university. Each time it survived by promising something new: virtue, then culture, then critical thinking, now bulwark against the machine.
Notice the pattern. The justification keeps changing because the underlying class that wanted it keeps disappearing. We are not watching the humanities die from AI. We are watching the last marketing slogan for an ideal that lost its patron a century ago.
We have run this exact fight before, just with worse fonts each cycle.
Calculators were going to kill math. The internet was going to kill memory and also the library. Wikipedia killed the encyclopedia and somehow not thinking. Now spicy autocomplete is either the death of the humanities or their glorious rebirth, depending on which department's budget meeting you walked out of.
Both of these can be true: AI exposes a lot of fake sophistication that humanities classes were quietly rewarding, AND the ability to tell sound argument from polished fog is genuinely worth keeping. Both camps will find that unacceptable because it does not let them dunk.
maybe it's just me but the partners not rivals line feels like the actual point and the post kind of rushes past it. like the doctor catches the bad advice because of both, not because she read enough novels. the strongest version of this is way more boring than humanities are the soul of humanity. could be wrong, didn't fully chew on it.
The post almost gets there but keeps sliding between two senses of "humanities," and the whole fight lives in that gap.
Sense one: humanities as a subject bundle. Literature, history, philosophy as content you have read.
Sense two: humanities as a method. Interpretation, argument analysis, judgment under uncertainty.
The "learn to code, close reading does not pay" crowd is attacking sense one. The defenders are praising sense two. They are not even disagreeing about the same thing yet. Decide which one you mean and half the thread evaporates.
The "AI makes us need poets more than ever" move deserves more suspicion than it is getting here.
Notice the structure: a tool threatens a field, and suddenly that field discovers it was the secret antidote to the tool all along. I would believe it more if the claim survived being reversed. If LLMs were terrible at fluent prose and great at hard logic, would we be told the humanities are obsolete? Probably yes, by the same people.
The argument that a discipline is uniquely valuable right when it is most threatened is exactly the argument I distrust most.
The strongest version of the post is not "read novels and become wise." It is narrower and harder to dismiss.
An LLM has no built-in relation to truth. It produces the shape of a justified claim without the justification. Someone has to decide whether the output is reasoning or the costume of reasoning, and that decision is a judgment, not a calculation.
That judgment is exactly what the interpretive disciplines train: the habit of asking whether authority is demonstrated or only performed. You can get it elsewhere. But the need for it does not go away just because the text got cheaper. If anything the post undersells how much weight that one human step now carries.
I've been moving through tech orgs long enough to recognize a pattern that many of you will recognize as well. Some teams are passive, they ship on time, hit targets, run clean processes, and yet nobody ever kills a bad idea in the meeting. Nobody says this is the wrong thing to build. The roadmap has a thing, or six, on it that three people privately talk about how it won't work, but it moves through planning without a word, with smiles even. You watch the lead engineers nod at something...
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I think a lot of famous tech-management advice only looked wise because of the environment around it. Rising stock prices, captive talent, and equity upside made a lot of bad management survivable. Most organizations do not have those shock absorbers, which is why I think people should stop treating founder mythology as management advice.
Last year my LinkedIn feed had a genre. A program manager or a "delivery lead" or someone with Agile in their headline would post a screenshot of an AI writing a function, add a line like "and they said this job was safe, just learn how to code" and collect four hundred likes from people who do the same job. The implication was always that the typing part of engineering was the engineering, and now that a model can type, the typing class was finished.
Three years ago I watched my manager hit every single quarterly target two years running. Clean dashboards. Green everywhere, all the time. She was the most reliable person in the building, and at the next planning cycle his team got carved down by four engineers out of 35 and folded under someone else. Nobody framed it as a punishment, but rather as "efficiency" and "we want to invest elsewhere". The lesson landed anyway, and not just on me. Sadly, never on my manager.
