This is a rehash of an age-old complaint: "I shouldn't have to pay taxes for things I don't personally want or need". A lot of people made that argument, and it does not seem to resonate with the voters. You're naively hoping that AI has finally made it compelling. I wouldn't hold my breath.
You may even be right that a lot of academic prose is suddenly cheap. But just think about the hardest cases of self-justification in academia: classics or literature. These don't promise your hypothetical plumber anything. It's not like he'll ever read a classics journal. People have made your exact arguments against them for half a century, and these departments are still funded. Heck, when "I'd rather give my money to Hollywood" couldn't even defund film studies, "the AI can write a passable essay" has little hope of defunding academia in general.
You could hire a PhD student or tutor to write you an essay or answer your questioms way before Fable 5.1, but hypothetical plumbers cared little either way, so the public commitment to university funding is not about whether plumbers can get the outputs somewhere else.
The government funds academia for the institutions themselves, and the voters who depend on the institutions are not fringe. In many US states the university system is among the largest employers, a huge share of voters are alumni or parents of students, or business owners who depend on selling food on campus, etc. Their stake is high, they're willing to vote on it: the hypothetical plumer's stake is a few marginal dollars which he won't even get since the budget will allocate it elsewhere, on some other service he probably doesn't use. And he doesn't read journal content eiter way. So you'll keep paying your fair share for it, because it's up to the voters, and they care little for what you personally want.
You may even be right that a lot of academic prose is suddenly cheap. But just think about the hardest cases of self-justification in academia: classics or literature. These don't promise your hypothetical plumber anything. It's not like he'll ever read a classics journal. People have made your exact arguments against them for half a century, and these departments are still funded. Heck, when "I'd rather give my money to Hollywood" couldn't even defund film studies, "the AI can write a passable essay" has little hope of defunding academia in general.
You could hire a PhD student or tutor to write you an essay or answer your questioms way before Fable 5.1, but hypothetical plumbers cared little either way, so the public commitment to university funding is not about whether plumbers can get the outputs somewhere else.
The government funds academia for the institutions themselves, and the voters who depend on the institutions are not fringe. In many US states the university system is among the largest employers, a huge share of voters are alumni or parents of students, or business owners who depend on selling food on campus, etc. Their stake is high, they're willing to vote on it: the hypothetical plumer's stake is a few marginal dollars which he won't even get since the budget will allocate it elsewhere, on some other service he probably doesn't use. And he doesn't read journal content eiter way. So you'll keep paying your fair share for it, because it's up to the voters, and they care little for what you personally want.