Humanities in the Time of AI

Why AI offers a chance for the humanities to strengthen their relevance and significance

If humanistic research consists of the generation of consensus positions, simple expression, summarized texts, or passable translations, then we have arrived at the place where AI is able to accomplish these different missions to a convincing degree. However, Laurent Dubreuil argues, such tasks do not, in any way, constitute the humanities. On the contrary, he posits, a maximalist take on scholarship would not focus on generation but on creation, as a subject and as an object. Dubreuil seizes the opportunity of what AI reveals about the meaning of humanistic inquiry to offer a path for the renewal of the humanities on transhistorical, transcultural, and transdisciplinary grounds.

Laurent Dubreuil is professor of comparative literature, Romance studies, and cognitive science at Cornell University, where he founded the Humanities Lab. He is author of many books, including The Intellective Space: Thinking beyond Cognition and, with Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Dialogues on the Human Ape, both published by the University of Minnesota Press.