The doomscrollers have already had their day with the liberal arts. What is the purpose, cynics argue, of learning to write, paint, or play an instrument, if artificial intelligence can make a piece of music or write a novel within minutes?
At first glance, they do have a point. Multiple AI models have been known to produce art and entire stories written by chatbots. As the models continue to improve and self-learn, it may be difficult to distinguish between human- and machine-produced products. In such a scenario, the liberal arts, with their focus on organised writing, thoughtful discussions and creative output, seem to be outdated.
And yet, counterintuitively, the liberal arts are making a comeback, albeit gradually.
In fact, experts suggest that consumption on the Internet itself has peaked. There is only so much that is attractive about 30-second reels of cats playing piano or the latest food trend.
Expressing oneself has been a human instinct from the beginning of time. Evidence for this comes from prehistoric cave paintings, Sumerian writing and texts on palm fronds. All this historically indicated the need to document mercantile trade, but also to reflect on human pain, aspiration and achievement.
Today, AI may write, but there is something incomplete about its style, which is defined as ‘frictionless, repetitive, and pretending to sound profound'. The sentences are too perfect, smooth and complete. In short, it is exactly what human writing is not. There is tension, struggle, variation and change in voice when we write – AI completes each idea with total confidence in itself. It is literally too good to be true.
The increasing distrust of AI-generated writing is exactly why liberal arts are seeing an upsurge. While mechanical writing may be everywhere, it is now important to actually learn how to use these ideas, how to synthesise them, and even communicate them with a specific audience and their own unique level. These are not skills that AI can ever master. A high school student in Mexico is not the same as an 18-year-old in Fiji, for example, as they both have vastly different backstories and cultural frames. Knowing such variations is a human skill, not a digital one.
Institutions and companies will also require humans with emotional intelligence, those who can understand human psychology and go beyond the broad strokes and generalisations that AI can muster up.
It is also important to understand the ethics of using content generated by third parties. Nuanced questions like whose novel it is when written by a human and AI together, or who gets the copyright and royalties when music is solely produced digitally, cannot be answered by AI – there are just too many variables. This requires critical thinking, application of theories to specific contexts and experimentation with emerging ideas.
This is exactly what liberal arts were doing all along. Whether it is philosophy, literature or languages, the questions raised have been about ‘how’ and ‘why’ of concepts, ideas and trends. It asks fundamental questions like the meaning of existence and the truth about the universe. These are nuanced ideas that cannot be answered in simple binary terms. As an article in Forbes magazine said, these are “enduring human skills in uncertain and rapidly evolving times”.
Liberal arts have always taught us to understand a changing world. Today, we will still have to turn to the humanities to help us face and cope with this latest challenge.
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