eNotes started more than twenty years ago as a Shakespeare website. The idea then was the same as it is now: work with real scholars to write about literature in a way that speaks to students without talking down to them. We’ve spent millions of dollars on that content over the years, working with thousands of professors, teachers, and scholars worldwide. Millions of students have used it to write essays, get through assignments, and actually understand the books in front of them.
Then came ChatGPT.
We use AI technology ourselves, but only on the backend. It’s good at coding and business analysis, and we won’t pretend otherwise. But it has wrecked the economics of educational writing. There is no longer much reason for us, or anyone in our field, to commission a new study guide or pay for literature analysis, because the work gets pulled into a large language model and students end up reading a bastardized version instead of the original.
We assumed at first that students would start with ChatGPT and eventually find their way back to the source. That hasn’t happened. Instead, the web is filling up with AI-written pages citing other AI-written pages, and the accuracy degrades at every step. Quotes nobody ever wrote, plot points that never happened. Confident analysis of chapters that don’t exist! And perhaps most importantly, no new thinking or ideas.
So here is where we stand.
Every study guide, every answer, every piece of analysis on eNotes was written by a person, most of them holding graduate degrees in the subject. We have never used AI to write our content, and we never will. We’ve blocked AI crawlers from the site. The AI tools we do offer on eNotes work only from our own material, so they can’t invent a quote that isn’t there.
If you’re a student, that means you can cite us. The passages are real, the page numbers are real. The person who wrote the analysis has a name and a degree, and is often a teacher or professor of literature, and it’s printed at the top of the page. You can click on all of our writers and learn more about them and their expertise.
If you’re a teacher, it means you can send your students here without wondering what they’re actually reading.
But we need your help. None of this survives without people paying for it. An eNotes membership funds the writers and injects purpose back into this ecosystem. It’s also the only way we can start commissioning new work again.
If you know someone who wants an AI-free oasis from the mess the web has become, send them our pledge.