Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence? Notes

D. Graham Burnett's essay explores how artificial intelligence (AI) will transform, rather than merely threaten, the humanities and higher education. He frames AI as a "juggernaut" arriving on campuses, which often show reluctance to adapt, despite widespread warnings and the clear capabilities of AI.

Burnett's personal experiments demonstrate AI's advanced analytical and synthesis abilities, performing at a high level in discussions and content generation, even producing podcasts from extensive course materials like a $900$-page packet. He notes that AI creates an "intimacy economy," where machines offer patient and seemingly perceptive attention, raising ethical questions about human interaction and the nature of genuine attention, echoing Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch.

Through various student case studies, interactions with AI are shown to prompt deep self-reflection and new forms of inquiry, revealing what truly constitutes human understanding versus machine-generated responses. Burnett clarifies that AI operates through probabilistic prediction, imitating human reasoning without true consciousness or interior experience.

He argues for a reinvention of the humanities, shifting from "scientistic knowledge production" to a focus on lived experience, ethical cultivation, and existential questions like "How to live?" AI, paradoxically, offers an opportunity to restore attention to the archive and to the experiential dimensions of life. The essay concludes that while AI cannot replace human lived experience, it forces a profound reimagining of teaching, learning, and what it means to be human, urging vigilance and courage in this transformation. The central message is to harness AI to enlarge human understanding, not to replace it, fostering a "reinvigorated humanities" grounded in being and experience.