ChatGPT: The future, not destruction, of scholarship

and Facebook — three of the most popular social media sites in the United States — are all organized with the purpose of pushing more and more content under the nose of the viewer. This takes the form of algorithmically suggested content and a video feed feature, in which the user scrolls up in order to access a new video. The second a user is bored, they can scroll past what they were watching and immediately move on to whatever’s next — and there’s always something next.

This pattern of consumption, in which the user can dispose of a piece of content the moment it bores them in the slightest, creates an impossible standard for longer-form entertainment. If film and television have to compete in an entertainment market where they’re up against a perpetual stream of content customized to individual users, they’ll lose every time.

Film as an artform is careful, deliberate, delicate and laborious. It took more than three years of preparation to make “Gone With the Wind,” and it takes almost four hours to watch it. Good things take time, but nowadays we hate to wait. There are also, however, bad things that take time. Sometimes, movies simply are way too damn long, scripts are slow, performances are lackluster and a story can’t support itself — it drags, slumps and falls apart. Herein lies the difference between a movie being long and a movie being too long. However, this line is getting blurrier and blurrier the more we get used to fast-paced algorithmic media consumption. When you’re used to a 15-60 second clip, every movie you watch is going to feel “too long.”

I don’t think that every movie has to be “Tár”; in fact, I do not want every movie to be “Tár.” We need movies like “American Pie” and “Zoolander” — our “Spiderman” movies and our rom-coms. What bothers me is not that “Tár” lost in the Oscars (I wanted to watch Michelle Yeoh win as much as the next guy), but why people seem to be averse to it outside of the critical sphere.

I watched “Licorice Pizza” in theaters more than a year ago. It has a two hour and 13 minute runtime, and I almost didn’t make it through. I went with a friend and smuggled in some snacks, so it should have been the perfect setup, but I was so bored. This was also the era of my life where I averaged around eight hours of screen time a day, most of it on TikTok. I deleted TikTok around a year ago, and aside from a few brief relapses, I’ve been clean ever since. I recently rewatched “Licorice Pizza”, no snacks, no friend and no big AMC Cinema screen; it was an entirely different experience. I was engaged the entire time and immediately had to do the walk of shame to change my Letterboxd score. The way I was consuming content had fried my brain so thoroughly that I couldn’t even watch movies the same way anymore.

So, if you find that your brain might be similarly fried, maybe consider a little detox, delete some apps, get some snacks, find a friend and watch a movie — the right way. ElizabethBrady’25isaPublicPolicy majorandanEnglishminor.Shelovesart, music and movies, and she is a member of AlphaChiOmega.Emailherateabrady@ wm.edu.

“This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality,” Socrates said regarding the craft of writing in Plato’s “Phaedrus."

Socrates was not alone in his sentiments. Throughout the ancient world, skepticism of the written word was widespread. To our prehistoric forebears, speech was their only means of communication, and memorization their only means of storing knowledge. To them, the written word seemed an existential threat to their traditions and way of life. Had their memorization of vast sums of knowledge been for naught?

Nevertheless, over the centuries, the written word has triumphed. Now, we can hardly imagine a world without it. Indeed, I would not hesitate to say the entirety of modern scholarship is built on the foundation of writing. We would live in a tremendously different world without it.

In hindsight, we can see that Socrates was quite obviously wrong. Yes, writing dissuaded memorization (I doubt most people go about their lives memorizing academic papers), but memory is not the only, nor the best, means to truth and wisdom, which our modern world makes abundantly clear.

And yet, as ChatGPT rocks our world, threatening the tried-and-true 19th century educational techniques and traditions we hold so dear, many seem fated to repeat that same fallacious logic that drove Socrates to his passionate opposition to writing millennia ago. Indeed, this very paper recently published an article decrying language learning models, and ChatGPT specifically, as the “destruction of scholarship.”

In truth, these models are little more than a tool, just as writing is. In their current state, large language models have a litany of flaws that prove that they fall far short of killing wisdom and truth as some claim they will. One, they often relay factually inaccurate information, especially when asked about niche or advanced topics. Two, they are unable to access the most recent scholarship because their training data is limited to when they are trained. And, finally, they lack the skills to fully explore and analyze issues in-depth. Additionally, recent advancements in plagiarism-checking technology to counter dishonorable usage of LLMs has ensured that they cannot be used to blatantly cheat without major consequences. To the chagrin of many middle schoolers, getting an A on your paper is still more difficult than pasting the assignment into a chat-box and letting a computer program do the rest.

Instead, the roles LLMs fulfill within academic life are, in truth, far more productive than not. By being able to generate ideas and inspiration, they act as incredible starting points and set people on the right path before they must strike out on their own. Rather than wasting our energy on excessive idea-generation and brainstorming, they allow us to more efficiently use our time on the more productive section of academic work: researching and communicating our ideas.

Just like every good technology — from the written word to bronze-working to computers — LLMs allow us to spend our time more efficiently, producing more and becoming a better, more prosperous society as a result. Let us not be luddites, wasting more time and energy rejecting this incredible advancement. ChatGPT and other programs like it are, in fact, the future of scholarship.

Kiran Savkar ’26 is a prospective International Relations and Economics double major hailing from Brooklyn, New York. He is a member of the William and Mary Debate Society andTribe Sailing club. He has a deep affection for Komodo dragons. Email Kiran at kssavkar@wm.edu