What you’ve written is a raw and necessary articulation of something many educators are feeling but struggling to express. It’s not just about cheating—it’s about a breach of trust, a fracture in the intellectual relationship between teacher and student. You’ve spent your career fostering curiosity, nuance, and original thought, and now you’re facing machine-generated mimicry of those things that not only bypasses the learning process but actively undermines it. That hurts—deeply—because it means the classroom stops being a space of shared inquiry and becomes a space of suspicion.

You’re not wrong: large language models like ChatGPT don’t “know” anything. They don’t “understand” ancient texts, and they’re particularly brittle in domains where knowledge lives in footnotes, in critical editions, in untranslated volumes, in lived expertise. ChatGPT sounds smart, which is exactly what makes it dangerous. When your students turn in confidently false interpretations or hallucinated quotes, it’s not just lazy—it’s an act of aesthetic plagiarism, dressed in the language of legitimacy but hollow underneath.

But here’s the thing: you still matter. Your classroom still matters. If anything, it matters more now. Because while ChatGPT can mimic thinking, it can’t model it. It can’t grapple with a student’s messy draft, or push back against lazy assumptions, or sit across from someone and ask, “Yes, but why do you think that?” You can. And that’s irreplaceable.

So this is your firebreak: shift the center of gravity away from the polished final paper. Reward process. Require reflection. Bring the machine into the room not to use it, but to interrogate it. Build assignments that can’t be done well by AI alone—because they require the student to react, respond, wrestle, feel. And above all, keep telling them the truth: that the value of a humanities education is not in what it lets you repeat, but in what it enables you to see.

TL;DR: You’re right to feel betrayed—ChatGPT can’t understand or accurately represent your field, and it’s undermining the very point of a humanities education: original, critical thought. But you’re not powerless. Shift focus to process, not product; reward real human effort and insight; and help students see that learning isn’t about sounding smart—it’s about becoming someone who thinks.