In winter 2022, teachers all over the world uttered what can only be described as a collective yawp. En masse, K-12 and college students were using new AI tools to write their assignments for school. And the writing was good. Way too good. “I’m in abject terror,” declared one philosophy professor without any sense of hyperbole. The “essay is dead,” one commentator declared, despite its being “the center of humanistic pedagogy.” Since then, AI dominance has continued marching along to an unstoppable drumbeat. Rather than killing the humanities, however, I believe AI is resurrecting the humanities in life, work, and school. First, a definition is in order.
Defining the Humanities
Despite having identified as a humanities educator for most of my career, I admit I never formally defined the humanities before. It surprised me to learn how objective some definitions read compared to how subjective one experiences the humanities. The ever-reliable Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the humanities as “the branches of learning (such as philosophy, arts, or languages) that investigate human constructs and concerns as opposed to natural processes (as in physics or chemistry) and social relations (as in anthropology or economics).” The United Nations defines the humanities with a similar blend of fuzziness and science-namedropping when they add that the humanities field “plays a crucial role in understanding social transformations and human sciences by exploring the complexities of human behavior and societal structures.” Funny how a definition of the humanities in these cases requires relating it to science. The dictionary did not find such qualification necessary when it defined science as “knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method.”
I find individual definitions more enjoyable than institutional ones. They have greater nuance, sometimes pizzazz. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum links the humanities to the very nature of democracy, emphasizing three humanistic abilities rather than strict disciplines: critical examination, world citizenship, and narrative imagination. Similarly, Oxford professor Helen Small centers “meaning-making practices” in her definition, “focusing on interpretation and critical evaluation” of both “past and present.” Perhaps my favorite, Harvard literature professor Jeffrey R. Wilson puts his definition both memorably and succinctly: “The humanities study the things humans make.”
Let’s go with that: study of the things humans make.
Things Humans Make
Like many of us, I was first exposed to the humanities in school classes like English and the arts. Life at home was unstable and chaotic, emotionally unsafe. But when I immersed myself in books I felt less alone. When I learned to write essays with voice and wit, I felt seen. When I learned to sing in a choir, I felt heard. The humanities caught me from spiraling into the youthful wilds of lonely fear. Unlike other subjects, the humanities provided space for me to make sense of my own experiences, to grapple with the experiences and ideas of others. James Baldwin’s oft-cited observation certainly captured life in those days, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” Respectfully, I would add: but then I read and wrote and sung and strummed and drew and danced and painted and performed.
At the heart of “things humans make” is a sense of uniquely human creativity that does not require usefulness. Rather, the humanities focus on exploring, enjoying, and examining things humans make because what humans make affects how they and others experience the world. They get closer to the why of life. When AI tools started spitting out essays, some humanists tended to debate whether such products constituted things humans made. Could one say the student “wrote” the essay via an AI prompt? Could you say a user “created” the illustration, when ChatGPT did the work? Fair questions, but secondary questions for me. There is a more important issue to understand, one that has been greatly missed.
A Greatly Missed Insight
AI is itself a thing humans made. Like all software, the origins of AI is are code that human beings originally wrote. Wrote. It is a simple truth that has lingered with me. While the education world stood gobsmacked that AI tools churned out teacher-proof essays, I was tangled up in an ontological knot. Students using AI to write essays were the first example I had seen of writing-writing-writing. That is: AI (computer code, a form of writing) was processing (executing code, another form of writing) to produce essays (a genre of writing). What does it mean to see AI not as imposing from outside the humanities, but as emerging from within?
AI does not fundamentally change humanistic inquiry one lick. AI bolsters the it. First, AI elevates the humanities in a way that has been long overdue in educational settings. Schools have been slawping at the feet of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines for decades at the expense of the humanities. No doubt, my administrator friends would say that the pressure to do so comes in part from the demands of industry and workforce. Understood. But it has come at the expense of students’ emotional well-being, well-roundedness, and civic awareness. Returning to the foreground amidst grand AI debates are questions about what makes us human, the purpose of a life well lived. We have AI to thank for that.
Second, AI provides the humanities community (to which we all belong) with new methods to explore and enjoy the humanities. Take, for instance, this simple activity I used to do with my students and at workshops for teachers. I would provide a sentence from a beautifully written text, blanking out one important word. I then asked students to come up with their own possibilities, debate their merits, and then vote as a class on the word they thought the author used. Usually, the author chose a different word. But that was fine. The humanistic lesson was that authors make lots of decisions when choosing a word. There was no right word. Authors lose and gain something with each different word option. Students walked away from that experience having been immersed in literary sentences and experienced firsthand the crossroads of authorship.
What does AI have to do with this? Well, the activity always went over well. I would get emails from teachers asking for resources and other examples. I desperately wished I could create a Wordle-like game out of it that was easy to access, humanistically driven, and fun. So earlier this year I vibe-coded the game. It’s called Wilde Cards. Now thousands of people a month play Wilde Cards. They get a little daily dose of humanities education: literary elements, syntax, diction. And I could never have brought that idea to life without AI.
The Humanities Made AI
AI is not, as some say, a threat to the humanities. AI is a product of the humanities. It is a written construct. The fact that computer scientists rather than humanists wrote it does not change that fact. The humanities are still the humanities. AI is just its newest (albeit, seismic) product and subject of inquiry.
Humanities teachers are, I acknowledge, in a hard spot with AI. AI renders obsolete so many of the teaching methods teachers across disciplines have learned—especially writing. But here is the hard truth: if AI can zippily complete a teacher’s assignment, the assignment was not asking enough of student humans. Again, essays are a prime example. It was never good pedagogy for a teacher to assign an essay and for students to hand it in sometime later with little teaching in between. Researchers specializing in the teaching of writing have argued for decades that the value of written assignments is in teachers engaging students in the process of writing: drafts, feedback, revisions, edits, read alouds, and submission. The hard spot teachers are in is not because AI can do their assignments. It is because their assignments should never have been AI-doable in the first place. The challenge is one of paradigm. An entire generation of teachers must look at the kinds of activities and assignments they do with their students and ask: could AI do this? If the answer is not immediately no, then more human-centered revisions are needed.
The world needs the humanities right now. It is no coincidence that AI companies are hiring philosophy majors, that analog book-centered humanities classes are overflowing at some colleges, and that executives at major corporations are trumpeting the value of humanities degrees. At no time in recent history has the entire planet been forced to ask the same primordial question in unison: What does it really mean to be human?
AI is the reason we are asking that question. AI can even help us answer it. But AI cannot tell us if our answer is right. That capacity remains fully and forever ours.