The Inhumanity of History / the Humanities in the Age of AI

The Inhumanity of History / the Humanities in the Age of AI

December 2025

I am fed up with faculty’s noncritical dismissal of AI. I think one of the issues - the most serious issue I have with academia is the pervasive gatekeeping, hierarchies, and the bumbling hypocrisy from process to delivery. As a scholar whose work sits comfortably in the humanities and the social sciences, I find myself frustrated by the humanities’ inhumanity. I look at history as a clear example to help evidence my point.

I enjoy studying the evolution of artificial intelligence and humanities faculty continued obsession with banning it. It is a monumental ‘freak out’ and at the end of the day, those harmed most by the poor and noncritical decision making will be learners and their families. I found myself in a debate recently with a US-based history professor who lamented AI and was staunchly in favor of AI bans. I have raised these points before but I will raise them again - largely for the purpose of bringing clarity to my own thinking.

Before we go further, let us first center accessibility and inclusion in higher education. DEIAB (diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and belonging) are not add-ons; they are governing principles that should guide a leaders’ work from start-to-finish. The best outcomes are achieved when DEIAB is built into planning for everyone, not treated as a one-off.

Now, let’s look at the hypocrisy of the humanities (well, at least, history).

“The humanities are about engaging with humans. We teach students how to think critically, write, speak, and engage with the world around us.”

My immediate push back to this line – which so many historians like to use – is: whose humanity are you teaching? If history, for example, has fewer than 3-4% faculty of color; with less than 1-2% of those handful identifying as Black, notably, whose humanity is being taught? By this logic, academic history is sufficiently reduced to the old adage that history is written and taught by the victors. White historians' ways of being, knowing, learning, thinking, and creating from the advent of disciplinary history to today, is preserved as the model of academic history. I raised this point with a historian who dismissed it because there are Black historians; then, I asked, "right, but whose disciplinary model were they forced to follow in order to be deemed legitimate?" HBCUs have grieved in the past about the demand they faced in order to be deemed legitimate (and receive funding). It takes a particular form of gaslighting to suggest that historians of color have been given autonomy to craft a discipline built on the back of their othering. In my own research, I challenge the neoliberal approach today which seems to suggest that 'recovering absent voices of color' are a remedy; particularly, because this approach does nothing to extend justice or call out the system that excluded those 'absent voices of color' and it voids those who excluded them of any responsibility. "Absent," "missing," "few" voices in this context suggests a degree of passivity and places partial blame on those voices who had been ignored, sidelined and cast aside.

Linguistically, humanities faculty impose onto their students a linguistic process that robs them of their potentially preferred means of speaking and engaging with the world. In the realm of African American History, I find myself frequently concerned with the academy’s conversion of Black voices into white, Euro-American academic speak, lest the content is treated as illegitimate. Where AI could act as a tool to bridge that gap (on both sides of this linguistic exercise!), AI opponents' outright opposition results in academic prose that students/learners may very well deem flattened.

There is a human side - a pedagogical angle - that humanities faculty frequently dismiss in their AI critique and it is about accessibility. There is an ill-informed universal assumption about students’ development; a disproven assumption that the age-old rules have always worked to get students from primary through tertiary education. That is as offensive and dangerous as it is false. I would like to direct your attention to some of the work from an impressive researcher; they are a GLP (gestalt language processor) and also identify as neurodivergent. GLP’s exist and prefer to thrive in the classroom - the GLP learner has as much right to study and develop in a way that suits them just as much as non-GLP learners. AI as an assistive technology tool can help deliver on a classroom that has never been fully inclusive nor fully accessible – and, it can do so at scale. Preventing students from an opportunity to use AI neither advances their sense of humanity nor their right to a fully accessible and inclusive education.

‘We need not bring race into it.’

Remarkably, it is simple to discuss gender/sex and the disparities in pay, promotion, and harassment and gender-based discrimination in the academy. We can demand a need for greater gender representation, pay, promotion, and equitable treatment in the classroom, in our publishing houses, and in leadership. But, for some reason we are unable to bring race into it. White feminist academics (male and female) frequently refer to intersectionality, a concept coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, an African American law professor and scholar, who is also a leading pioneer of critical race theory, and who acknowledges that intersectionality isn’t just about gender and class, but race, too.

Performative historians need not do more than look around the table at their next meeting and in their classroom - and in their doctoral students’ offices. If the discipline they are so concerned with preserving, teaching, and training is as inclusive as they claim it is, then the intersectionality they teach, the politics of inclusion they espouse, and their personal commitments to equality will be reflected around the table. Performative actors fail to recognize power and instead frame race as contextual, not structural; ultimately, it demonstrates a solid lack of understanding of what intersectionality is truly about: power and structural injustice. That sort of institutional non-inclusive feminism examines intersectionality whilst entirely neutralizing its critique - that is the problem.

“’History requires critical thinking skills. AI harms that.”

This is false - and individuals who raise this point are telling on themselves. There is, of course, an effective means of using AI. This is why students should become literate in how to use it. I remember growing up at the advent of the computer. Public schools quickly evolved to provide computer literacy classes. Funnily enough, I remember when teachers requested that handwritten assignments be submitted in order to monitor students’ handwriting, cursive, and general command on paper. But, in 2025, one would be hard-pressed to find a teacher mandating handwritten assignments in class - certainly not in higher education.

This argument also reduces the purpose of learning into old, outdated forms of assessment which never truly worked nor were they designed for everyone to begin with.

In a conference earlier this year, PhD students presenting a paper on AI raised a critical question: 'what is the purpose of higher education?' When more history academics come out in favor of outcome-based responses (tied to students' development) over defense of existing models, we should begin to take note; but not another second sooner. "Who are your pedagogical influences?" "Why do you teach your history students this lesson this way?" "How do you structure your history assignments? When do you tie them to students' progress throughout the year?" "How are you implementing accessible and meaningful formative assessment into your teaching?" "What are some practical, outcome-based uses for what students are learning here?" "Are you including multimodal materials?" "How are you supporting cognitive diversity in your students' learning journeys?"

The moral and developmental (academic development) concern around AI use in scholarship and research often falls into the abstract trap of authorship and ownership. While it often produces an environment in which the process of scholarship and research pre-AI is highly overexaggerated, we should direct our attention to critical thinking. More specifically, exploring how AI impacts the metacognition of history students who use it. If students are trained to become AI literate in academic history, understand the basics of the subject at-hand, and have a solid understanding of the topic they explore, AI improves cognition and there is no loss to metacognition. In history, AI may also help scholars and academics alike reflect on their biases within their historiography and the archival material with which they engage.

What is being defended in these debates is not rigor, ethics, or critical thinking: it is control.

When humanities faculty insist that AI is non-negotiable, they are not protecting students nor are they protecting scholarship. They are protecting a narrow vision of knowledge production that has always privileged a select few while excluding many others. This kind of gatekeeping deepens inequality, narrows participation, and actively undermines the humanistic values that the humanities are supposed to uphold. If the humanities are serious about humanity, then accessibility, racial justice, neurodiversity, and pedagogical responsibility must shape how we engage new tools, not fear them. Refusing to do so is not principled. It is regressive and it is harmful.