2025-04-26
I'm an English major. My routine for the past semester has been quite regular. On the weekend (or, if I've been procrastinating quite badly, on Monday), I open up my LMS to complete that week's assignment. They're mini papers, of around 500 to 600 words. At the beginning of the week, before going through any of the content, I look at the next assignment and make a mental note of the questions. As I read through the content, go through the lecture videos, and speak with my TA during office hours, I keep the assignment's questions in the back of my mind. I'm thinking about them throughout the entire week.
By the time I sit down to write, I have a few ideas bouncing around in my mind. Honestly, I spend a lot of time switching from Obsidian to Reddit to my Fediverse client to YouTube and back while writing. But eventually, a draft gets formed. I read it over a few times. I feed it into a text-to-speech program to catch any obvious mistakes.
Finally, I copy and paste from Obsidian, and then I hit submit.
That's not the end of it. As soon as I hit submit, I'm greeted with the next page. It's time for me to review and leave comments on a random classmate's submission. It's the part I hate the most.
80% of the time I'm greeted with AI slop. Hallucinated quotes/content. "As a LLM, I..." Bullet points, when we're supposed to use full paragraphs. Hyper synonymized sentences because apparently AI hates saying the same word twice. Literary devices mentioned when none are actually used in the material itself. I call these out as gently as I can, signalling without explicitly saying, "I think you used AI."
10% of the submissions are poorly done. To meet the word count, I once saw someone copy and paste the entire poem into the submission. I encounter other, less obvious, techniques to meet the word count. I recognize them well, as this was often me in my Language Arts classes in high school.
The last 10% is interesting, and makes good points. Sometimes they seem way off base, but it is an earnest attempt. Not perfect, but you can tell some thinking has went into it. I hope I'm also part of this 10%.
Now, I'm just a student. Imagine how my TAs and professor feel reading these responses.
It's an interesting time for someone to choose to study English right now. And not just because of AI. The New Yorker article, "The End of the English Major" has been circling around for two years now, just before AI really blew up. In the article, they say that enrollment for humanities degrees, like English, has been falling the past few years. The article points to several different reasons why.
One student interviewed in the article had an answer that resonated the most with me. "I always view humanities as a passion project. You have to be affluent in order to be able to take that on." It actually describes my situation right now.
There are three reasons why I'm currently an English major. The first reason is what I tell people: I want to do a career switch to become a librarian. In my undergrad, I wrote maybe two or three papers. If I want to get into grad school and be successful, I need to learn how to write papers, especially research papers. All of which I never did in my computer science degree. This reason is true, but largely bullshit.
The other two reasons why I'm am English major fall under the "passion project" reasoning. One is that I've been in software development for a few years now, and I have the money to spend on another whole ass undergraduate degree. I have the luxury to do this. I've always wanted to study literature, and to study writing. I have the resources to do it "just for fun." And so I do.
The other reason why I want to study literature and writing is the most "passion project" thing of all: for self-improvement. Despite all my posturing online, I'm pretty dumb. Critical thinking is not my forte. If you were to listen to me talk in real life, you'd probably dismiss me as vapid and ditzy. Well, to an extent, I am vapid and ditzy! I really envy people who are "smart." Those who know how to articulate their thoughts, how to make connections between seemingly disparate phenomena, how to break down arguments, how to come up with interesting hypotheses and back them up with evidence, how to read something and find meaning in it. The list goes on. I have an idea in my head, maybe erroneously, that studying English will help me with building all of those skills.
I am here to learn how to think and write rigorously. In a world where people are increasingly offloading those skills to AI, it is disheartening. If these skills can be done by AI, what is the point of honing them? Are those skills even worth anything anymore, if it can just be done by AI? I remind myself of my self-improvement goals, but does it really matter in the real world? Even before AI, people have been reading and writing less and less, and devaluing it more and more, with every year. It's hard not to feel discouraged and I have more questions than answers.
To bring it full circle, this blog post was inspired by a conversation I had with one of my English TAs during office hours. We were talking about just this: why I was undertaking another degree when I already had a STEM degree. At some point in the discussion, I mentioned the AI submissions I saw in this course, and in others. We (myself, the TA, and the other students in the office hours) lamented over humanities departments closing in the U.S. We expressed fear for the future of thinking. My TA concluded by thanking me and the other students in office hours for the genuine engagement in the course. I said that was just a product of being interested in the content, and, also, enjoying it.
That's basically what it boils down to. I'm an English major because I enjoy it and I value what it teaches.