Academic publishing was already like having a tick on your face (academic publishers) and one on your ass (universities). No one reads the vast majority of the monographs or articles, the quality of the scholarship has plummeted, and now AI Unless you need to publish for your job, there's no reason
The only thing keeping us all going besides tenure was the fantasy of knowledge production, itself romantic beyond evidence. I just can't think of a reason to ever write another academic sentence again.
And for those thinking about it, and I know there are lots, many of you simply have no idea just how creative you are. It takes an enormous amount of creative energy to write scholarship. For me personally, that energy is now spent on other things, and my contentment has grown exponentially.
I miss the thrill of it sometimes. Sharpening an argument to a fine point, making a connection no one had made, sharing that with others, feeling conceptual certainty build within me as a project developed.
At least in the humanities, that era is definitively over. That's not to say you can't scrape something out of it, but you can't go back. If you think I'm being dramatic: I earnestly hope the LLMs at least get your arguments right when they're spitting them back out, for your sake.