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Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

Maybe not as we’ve known them. But, in the ruins of the old curriculum, something vital is stirring.

To teach it, I assembled a nine-hundred-page packet of primary and secondary sources—everything from St. Augustine’s “Confessions” to a neurocinematic analysis of “The Epic Split” (a highly meme-able 2013 Volvo ad starring Jean-Claude Van Damme). The result outstripped my wildest imaginings: here was a young woman from Austin acting as a contemplative Counter-Reformation confessor to the stirrings of conscience in a neural network humming across a billion dollars’ worth of Nvidia chips, somewhere in a windowless server room in Abilene or San Antonio. He then watched as they began to play conceptual games—with one eventually asking whether its own disembodied intelligence might qualify as “angelic.” (It ran through this analysis with a poetic precision any theologian might envy, drawing on Augustine and on Aquinas to list three primary ways in which it could be said to “exist in an intermediary attentional state—not mortal, not divine, but something that serves as a bridge between them.”) Clara trained ChatGPT to impersonate William James by feeding the system chunks of his work, then held earnest discussions about his “Principles of Psychology,” from 1890, and its seminal chapter on attention and “stream of consciousness.” Amy, a skilled violinist, asked the machine to reflect on the claim that the rise of the use of a conductor’s baton in orchestral music in the nineteenth century represented an important shift from acoustic to visual choreography—and, after a quick detour into a book on mesmerism, their conversation rounded to an uncanny mutual meditation on whether she and the machine could in any sense “see” each other.

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