Can artificial intelligence and the humanities learn to live together? Do emerging technologies threaten to replace qualitative forms of inquiry from law to pedagogy to traditional liberal arts? And does AI serve educators—or is it the other way around?
According to Matthew L. Jones, Smith Family Professor of History at Princeton University, those questions may sound alarmist, but they are also vital to shaping the humanities-AI relationship. In a George Washington University seminar titled “AI and the Humanities” on March 25, Jones, an expert on the history of science and technology, urged the humanities fields to closely examine how they interact with these sometimes problematic technologies. In today’s tech terrain, Jones emphasized striking a balance between an uncritical adoption of AI—and a total rejection of it.
“The new AI is a valorization of all that is most interestingly human,” he said, noting the current opportunity for “those of us in the humanities…to leverage that valorization and to do so in concert with our colleagues in the technical domains, in the classroom, in our research enterprises and in the various business enterprises in which we might find ourselves.”
The seminar was co-hosted by two Columbian College of Arts and Sciences (CCAS) departments—American Studies and History—along with GW’s Office of the Vice Provost for Research. The event was one of several recent CCAS-hosted discussions on how AI is altering the humanities landscape.
Provost Christopher Alan Bracey shared remarks at the top of the event that expressed the continued importance of GW being a leading voice shaping conversations on such critical topics.
The university’s faculty demonstrate research power across “historic strengths” in law, policy and international affairs; expertise in computer science and engineering; and a firm grounding in the humanities. Combined with GW’s “unparalleled” global convening power thanks to its D.C. location, “we have a unique ability to offer intimate learning opportunities with thought leaders like” Professor Jones, Bracey said.
Jones’ research centers on the rise of recent information technologies and intelligence as well as the history of science and technology in early modern Europe. In his latest book—“How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms”—Jones and co-author Chris Wiggins delve into the science, politics and power of data, statistics and machine learning from the 1800s to the present.
At the GW symposium, Jones’ lessons reached back into the history of thought-evolution—touching on milestones from the auxiliary sciences of the 17th century, which opened doors to new disciplines, to the pioneering World War II era computer scientist Alan Turing, who is widely considered among the fathers of AI. In his classrooms, Jones said he emphasizes not only the current state of AI, but its progression over decades—even centuries—as a means “to give students functional literacy and tools and critical literacy [to] think about [its] limits.”
Jones acknowledged the “profoundly potentially disruptive” impact AI can pose in fields across humanities and sciences—“everything from essay grading to signals intelligence at the NSA,” he said. But he also framed the modern AI renaissance as presenting “a strengthening of needs for humanistic knowledge and skills” and described it as a possible forum to spotlight the humanities’ role in shaping the future of technology.
Still, Jones cautioned against limiting the humanities’ role in AI to merely technology-serving functions, like prompt writing. “There’s a danger that the humanities is attractive only if attached to the technical,” he said. Instead, he encouraged educators to flip that perspective and consider “how technical practices could serve the liberal arts, without subordinating the arts to technical practices.”
At the beginning of the program, Associate Professor of History Katrin Schultheiss, the convenor of the seminar series, echoed Jones’ caution. She said the purpose of the two-year series had in fact been to consider the many ways AI and humanistic inquiry can and should speak to each other, particularly as technology develops with a rapidity that requires urgency around this conversation.
Reflecting on a Cold War 1959 lecture called “The Two Cultures” by British scientist and writer C.P. Snow, Schultheiss shared that Snow lamented the distance and ignorance between scientists and humanists, their potential to destroy society and the need to close this gap from both an intellectual and practical perspective.
“The warning he sounded 66 years ago in a very different historical context is well worth heeding today,” Schultheiss said.
Jamie Cohen Cole, associate professor of American studies, introduced Jones. He provided an overview of Jones’ scholarship, which has included books that study “what is new and what is old about the artificial and technical representations of intelligence.”
“At this moment, we confront the possibilities both positive and negative of artificial intelligence,” Cohen Cole said. “We are surrounded by takes which range from optimistic to negative… So it is in this context of both hopes and fears that we have invited Professor Jones to help us navigate between these two poles.”