Keep Classrooms Al-Free

A humanities education is vital in our polarized world. But students need to read the books.

- By Shawna Dolansky

ONCE UPON A TIME, about 5,000 years ago in southern Iraq, there lived a king by the name of Gilgamesh. According to legend, he was sexist and classist, and he mercilessly tyrannized his subjects to satisfy a restless bloodlust in pursuit of his own immortal glory. Yet every year, my first-year students fall in love with him and the epic written in his name. They adore his bromance with the wild man Enkidu, and they’re moved to tears over their lost friendship and the dawning of Gilgamesh’s existential angst. I see 18-year-olds get completely drawn into the king’s often-cryptic, otherworldly journey from thousands of years ago—across chasms of space, time, language and culture. This is why I love teaching the humanities.

I’m an associate professor in the College of the Humanities at Carleton University in Ottawa, and I’ve been teaching the oldest texts for 30 years. Students enter my classroom fairly certain that a survey of the ancient world will be a boring waste of time; most leave with the profound wisdom that comes from exploring the rich tapestry of human experience.

But this past summer, before I got into my usual preparation of new notes, slides, writing assignments and seminar questions for my incoming class, I was wrestling with the fact that, come fall, it would be second nature for many students to upload a PDF of The Epic of Gilgamesh into generative AI to create a plot summary so they could pass my quiz. Then they'd feed it my prompts to craft a perfect essay and go off to enjoy their weekends.