Once upon a time, about 5,000 years ago in southern Iraq, lived a king by the name of Gilgamesh. He was sexist, classist and exploitative, and he mercilessly tyrannized his subjects to satisfy a restless bloodlust in search of his own immortal glory. Yet every year, my first-year humanities students fall in love with him and the epic masterpiece written in his name. They adore his bravado and his bromance with the wild man Enkidu; they are moved to tears over the loss of his love and the dawning of his own existential angst. These 18-year-olds are completely drawn into the ancient king’s strange and 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 students about ancient texts for 30 years. Most students come into my classroom fairly certain that this survey of the ancient world will be a boring waste of time—most leave with the profound wisdom that comes from having explored the rich tapestry of human experience.

But this summer, before I can get into my usual preparation of new notes, slides, writing assignments and seminar questions for my incoming class, I’m wrestling with the fact that, come fall, it will be second nature for many of my students to upload a PDF of The Epic of Gilgamesh into generative AI for a plot summary so they can pass the quiz, then feed it my prompts so the AI can spit out a perfect essay, and then go enjoy their weekends.

Why wrestle with Plato’s allegory of the cave when ChatGPT can summarize the main point in seconds? Why spend weeks working on a debate about gender in the Garden of Eden when Perplexity can produce a polished and sophisticated argument faster than a Nespresso can produce a latte? Grammarly has eliminated the annoyance of figuring out proper syntax, any gen AI can clean up a messy turn of phrase, and Claude can render writer’s block obsolete by offering ideas to get students started. I’m starting to wonder if I should just program Gemini to grade the papers that Claude has written, and we can all knock off early.

I won’t, of course, at least partly due to stubbornness. If there has ever been a time to........

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