Mack Penner and Edward Dunsworth
In his case for “steering a middle course” on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the history classroom, written partially as response to earlier pieces by each of us, Mark Humphries makes a number of points with which we agree. First among those points of agreement are the value of a historical education and the skills that such an education develops in students. We agree, also, that a certain media literacy and technological capacity are important skills not just for our students but for us as historians, too – and that developing those skills can be an important pedagogical goal in our classrooms. We disagree, however, with a number of Humphries’s other arguments in favour of the AI middle course, and finding those disagreements both significant and worthy of reply, we want to further the discussion here.
Among Humphries’s key arguments is one about relevance: to reject AI is to “retreat into a purist position that is likely to make us irrelevant” in the ongoing discussion about AI implementation, he claims. But to reject AI is not to ignore it, and neither is it to vacate the field of discussion. We have no interest whatsoever in pretending that AI doesn’t exist, as Humphries implies that we do. On the contrary, from a place of intense concern for how AI might warp our discipline (not to mention our world more generally), and diminish the intellectual development of us and our students alike, our position is critical rather than ignorant.
There is something unsettling about Humphries’ arguments for relevance. He seems to suggest that only by falling in line behind the ascendant power of AI can historians have any effect whatsoever in the classroom. Resistance is futile. “This is the world in which we and our students must live. So how can we simultaneously reject AI while also claiming to prepare students to live, work, and think critically in such a world?” Humphries asks. We don’t agree that teachers’ ability to reach their students is dependent on the use of the technology du jour. (Neither do we accept that this is the world in which we must live, but more on that later). Both of us attended university after the take-off of personal computers and the Internet and had professors who integrated those technologies minimally – or not at all – in their teaching. In our own experiences as students, the use or non-use of technology had absolutely no correlation with the quality of instruction. We strongly suspect that this observation rings true to many readers. Universities offer students a wide-range of pedagogical approaches that may or may not inform their future paths. Some professors are embracing AI, while others are rejecting it. But surely even AI optimists can recognize the value to students in this pedagogical diversity.
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