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The Conversation ·For the curious

The Importance of Teaching Students What AI Can’t Do

by Billy J. Stratton, Professor of English and Literary Arts, University of Denver

Published 2026-08-21 12:36:08+00:00

If a machine has never had a body, can it really understand a novel?

0:00 / 7:11 · Narrator Charon

Context

Writing for The Conversation on 21 August 2026, an English professor hands a classroom of students an unusual assignment: ask a chatbot to analyze the emotional atmosphere of a Southern Gothic novel. Instead of banning the technology, the author tests it against the messy realities of human grief and empathy. The exercise exposes a profound blind spot in artificial intelligence. Without a physical body or lived experience, the software fails to grasp human frailty. The results force a question about what society actually loses by outsourcing thought to a machine that cannot feel.

Show notes

An argument for teaching students the limits of artificial intelligence by exposing its inability to understand human emotion. Using a classroom exercise based on Southern Gothic literature, the author shows how chatbots produce lifeless literary analysis and fail to grasp the empathy required for creative writing. Builds a case for valuing human frailty, intuition, and vulnerability over machine output in intellectual work.

Read on The Conversation →