A Princeton historian argues that campus bans and hesitation around AI ignore a transformation already reshaping scholarship and instruction. In classroom experiments, students used chatbots to interrogate music, philosophy and spirituality, revealing both the tools’ limits—no consciousness—and their startling strengths: fluency, patience and personalization. He contends that AI will automate the “knowledge-production” model of the humanities, rendering traditional monographs and fact accumulation less central. The path forward, he says, is to reclaim the humanities’ core mission—cultivating judgment, meaning and ways of living—rather than policing tools that can already write papers. The result could be a hard reset for universities: less busywork, more intentional pedagogy, and a renewed focus on human experience that machines can’t replicate.
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