I remember when the internet was developing, it was cool to criticize Wikipedia as an unreliable source of information by academics. It was a mark of real academic rigor to point out that Wikipedia articles were written by “anyone on the internet” and that none of the content was properly sourced as a real academic source should be.
Of course, Wikipedia never presented itself as an academic source and the only reason why any academics were talking about it was because their “students” were using it to get around their shallow assignments.
Wikipedia was, and remains, an amazing place to begin research on many issues, with basic information, links to external sources, and much more. When I was in the early phases of my research in developing the CLAA, Wikipedia was a source of many helpful insights and connections to resources that were largely unknown elsewhere.
Today, the same is being done to ChatGPT. The same shallow academics, pretending they represent some kind of virtuous enterprise rather than a politically-charged, state-funded circus, now scoff at “ChatGPT” as the new Wikipedia. I recently shared a few statistics on the career earnings of the average American worker, an enlisted soldier and an Army officer. The responded answered, “That looks like ChatGPT…lol.”
As if that is a refutation. People did this with Wikipedia 20 years ago.
Most of these professional academics don’t understand what artificial intelligence is or what ChatGPT does. They are primarily interested in preserving their failed and now obsolete educational institutions, not learning. They think of ChatGPT as most of the ignorance population does: an interactive search engine.
The reality is that these tools, in the hands of real domain experts (rather than pretenders) are allowing work to be done that couldn’t be imagined 10 years ago. For example, though a classicist, I am building my own custom programs for my educational work that is allowing me to scale my work with no dependence on dead-weight “employees”. This is allowing me to produce amazing resources at no cost to parents or students. The CLAA’s quality and price in 2025 is due entirely to AI-powered tools available to me.
The real problem is that AI is beneficial to “domain experts” and these academics are not domain experts. Consequently, they neither understand the benefits nor realize that they are the hirelings that AI is going to put out of work soon.
WCM
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