{"id":110267,"date":"2026-07-18T04:20:35","date_gmt":"2026-07-18T04:20:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/110267\/"},"modified":"2026-07-18T04:20:35","modified_gmt":"2026-07-18T04:20:35","slug":"they-used-ai-is-not-an-argument-american-enterprise-institute","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/110267\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThey Used AI\u201d Is Not an Argument | American Enterprise Institute"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Chronicle of Higher Education asked Carolyn Rouse<\/a>, Princeton professor and president of the American Anthropological Association, to respond to the most serious indictment her discipline has faced in a generation.<\/p>\n

Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis\u2019s report on the state of humanities scholarship<\/a> named anthropology \u201cthe most extreme case\u201d of politicized decline among the six fields it reviewed. The report found that \u201creasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.\u201d<\/p>\n

In response, Rouse declared, \u201cThey used AI.\u201d These are the first three words of her interview; the president of a major scholarly association reacted to a fair concern and powerful indictment with an accusation of robot authorship and disavowed the report\u2014comparing it to chatbot-written student papers.<\/p>\n

Rouse\u2019s retort about AI falls apart when the details of the report are considered, however. Kwame Anthony Appiah, a report author, told the Chronicle that the group used artificial intelligence to survey large bodies of disciplinary text and identify themes within them\u2014a decades old social-science method. However, Rouse converts a description of AI-assisted research into an assertion that the report is machine-written slop. More telling, she concedes the suspicion came first: \u201cEven before we read that, we were all thinking, \u2018This reads like they used AI.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

This rhetorical move is common in academia and professors regularly keep conversation-stoppers on hand\u2014words that end an argument without anyone making one. \u201cPositivist\u201d did this work in the 1990s; \u201charmful\u201d more recently. \u201cThey used AI\u201d is the newest iteration and perhaps the most effective: unfalsifiable, requiring no reading, and shifting the burden to the accused, who must establish their humanity before their evidence can be weighed.<\/p>\n

In her Chronicle interview, Rouse\u2019s dismissive reflex was not isolated. When asked about Joseph Henrich\u2014the lone anthropologist on the commission, among the most cited scholars in the discipline\u2019s modern history, and a well-regarded public intellectual\u2014Rouse\u2019s complete answer was a single word: no.<\/p>\n

Shown a peer-reviewed survey in which forensic anthropologists split roughly down the middle on whether sex is binary, she replied: \u201cI don\u2019t believe in opinion research. Not to disparage them, but a lot of forensic people, they\u2019re coroners, they\u2019re doing it in a practicing level, where they\u2019re actually asked on forms to determine whether this body is male or female, oftentimes they haven\u2019t had advanced schooling.\u201d Rouse is no position to disqualify the legitimacy of survey methodology and reject a finding.<\/p>\n

Rouse went further. When asked whether she regrets the AAA\u2019s 2023 cancellation of an accepted conference panel on biological sex as an analytic category, she answered: \u201cIt should never have been accepted \u2026 they slacked on the peer review.\u201d Then, Rouse dug deeper by stating: \u201cThings like that are cut all the time in peer review, you never see it. Journalists never see it. I never see it. There\u2019s actually a filter happening all the time. This one just happened to make it into the public space.\u201d<\/p>\n

The report\u2019s gravest charge is that anthropology routinely and quietly suppresses reasonable dissent. Rouse did not refute that charge; she described the machinery, called it quality control, and offered its usual invisibility as proof the system works.<\/p>\n

I have been writing recently about a different kind of AI skepticism: the one I see in my own classroom. My students at Sarah Lawrence are often deeply wary of these tools\u2014not because AI discredits someone else\u2019s work, but because they worry about what relying on it will do to their own minds and their education. That skepticism is intellectually healthy because it begins with self-scrutiny. Rouse, on the other hand, directs that skepticism outward, dismissing someone else\u2019s argument before engaging with it, which runs directly against traditional scholarly norms of debate and dialogue.<\/p>\n

To be fair, Rouse later offers a legitimate methodological critique. She argues that a representative study would require sampling institutions across the political spectrum, examining syllabi, interviewing faculty, and observing classrooms. This is exactly the kind of criticism scholars should make. But rather than making this argument at the onset of her discussion, Rouse tried to delegitimize the report before she professionally evaluated and responsibly discussed the evidence.<\/p>\n

This interview captures so much of what is wrong with academia today. Ironically, Rouse concluded her first response by lamenting that \u201cunserious things right now have so much power in the academy.\u201d Yet it was Rouse\u2019s own answers in the Chronicle that came across as unserious and, ultimately, embarrassing for both her discipline and higher education more generally, especially given her role as president of a major scholarly association. Stepping back, colleges and their faculty will not rebuild public confidence by dismissing critics or attacking legitimate research methods. They will rebuild it by engaging criticism honestly, confronting evidence directly, and proving their critics wrong. In this interview, Rouse failed to do so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Chronicle of Higher Education asked Carolyn Rouse, Princeton professor and president of the American Anthropological Association, to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":110268,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,25,28060,4980,1181],"class_list":["post-110267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-higher-ed","tag-humanities","tag-universities"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110267\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}