{"id":285474,"date":"2026-02-21T09:18:20","date_gmt":"2026-02-21T14:18:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2026\/02\/21\/the-humanities-are-about-to-be-automated\/"},"modified":"2026-02-21T09:40:35","modified_gmt":"2026-02-21T14:40:35","slug":"the-humanities-are-about-to-be-automated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2026\/02\/21\/the-humanities-are-about-to-be-automated\/","title":{"rendered":"The humanities are about to be automated"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Referencing my desire to disprove that AI is \u201cmerely a stochastic parrot,\u201d Claude told me that \u201cpolitical theory may be the one field where \u2018stochastic parrot\u2019 is actually a compliment, since the whole discipline consists of creatively recombining things Tocqueville and Mill already said.\u201d Ouch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Professors at top universities are \u2014 in good part because of what it now takes to get a good job in the field \u2014 more focused on publishing erudite contributions to niche debates in scholarly journals which only a handful of their colleagues will ever read than on teaching and mentoring the ever-dwindling ranks of their students.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Yascha Mounk gets an AI to write an academic paper<\/a> in political theory and says the result is more or less indistinguishable from papers written by experts in the field<\/p>\n

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Referencing my desire to disprove that AI is \u201cmerely a stochastic parrot,\u201d Claude told me that \u201cpolitical theory may be the one field where \u2018stochastic parrot\u2019 is actually a compliment, since the whole discipline consists of creatively recombining things Tocqueville and Mill already said.\u201d Ouch. Professors at top universities are \u2014 in good part because … <\/p>\n

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