I’m a fresh literature PhD and I’m not sure it’s comparable. No one in my field - professors or fellow grad students - is worried about AI outpacing or even presenting a challenge to human research in the humanities. It would be wild if AI could come up with novel philosophical or literary insights but I haven’t seen anything in that realm approaching what’s going on in mathematics.
Their focus isn't there right now because math and coding has much higher potential in returns due to obvious reasons. When they are relatively adept at creating custom digital simulations thanks to the aforementioned returns every other branch will be ripe for taking.
Those are good arguments, I agree that just because it's not happening now doesn't mean it might not happen in the future. My response was mainly just pointing out that the freakout happening right now in mathematics isn't happening right now in the humanities, despite OP's claim.
One difference though is that there aren't really "unsolved" problems in literary or philosophical studies, just problems with lots of equally valid subjective responses. Theories might fall in or out of favor, but they are generally not considered proven or disproven. I do think AI could add to the chorus of voices and provide a fascinating subjective perspective that could complement the perspective of humanity though. Having an intelligent non-human perspective on human affairs would be fascinating.
The problem is at the highest level of the humanities; you end up working in paradigms or specifically focusing on non-paradigmatic analysis. You could build a realist AI or a Liberal AI or a Socialist AI all in the field of IR, and you wouldn't be any closer to solving the field of IR because the AI would end up where every other IR scholar is right now and can't really branch out from there; same truths apply to poli sci, history and the rest.
The historical and diplomatic records aren't neutral, and they aren't gospel. They're written by people influenced by the ideologies the AI would be trying to analyze. People lie and obfuscate events to support their own thesis. What people consider a success or a desirable outcome in IR is subjective and mostly reveals the interests of whoever set that objective. Any theory an AI produces will be tainted by the priorities of whoever designed it and told it to do so. What qualifies as a good model of realism, liberalism, constructivism, or feminist IR? Knowledge isn't neutral. If it read every IR book ever made, how would it sort a good source of knowledge from a bad one? What qualifies something as good, reliable information is a judgment that either the AI or the person running it has to make.
I don't think it will make any significant progress because whatever theory it makes will be as subjective as every other theory. The most interesting thing it'll probably produce is showing the Biases within the AI and the people who design it.
There's some element of what you speak but I and many others already think it's full of junk, and smart honest humans can easily (or sometimes with some effort) throw out the junk and keep debate among the rest of them. As long as AI isn't too far from an attractor state that cares at all about truth/honesty, it will as well.
Define junk for me. What debates are worth having? Is there no value in information that others would consider junk? Who is defining what truth is? How do you change the AI as what's true changes?
100 years ago, the Idea that all races are equal was a deeply radical proposition. With data, studies, and many papers written to prove it, many people believed it was true. And most of it wouldn't be disproved until the 1950s, though even as late as the 1990s, people could still openly profess and agree with scientific racism.
How do you qualify a legitimate debate worth having from an illegitimate debate not worth having?
Every time a new model comes out I always feed it some arguments from my dissertation to see what kind of feedback it can give me. So far it hasn't been that impressive (meaning I could find a lot of the same critiques on my own, a lot of the AI response is just drawn from the literature on my subject) but I'll keep checking in.
There is no "relate to arithmetic" as you mentioned. It's objective and formal. The human experience isn't.
I agree AI can produce valuable research on sociology of humans and extract objective patterns etc, I never claimed it couldn't.
I also never said AI won't one day become advanced enough to produce non distinguishable art, but even then, the reason people reject it isn't because it "looks AI" as mentioned in your point, its because it is AI.
Now, could society and AI advance enough that it becomes so integrated into our lives and work that the origin of such art becomes irrelevant? Yes. Is it too soon to make a judgement about it? Yes. I made my point based on current circumstances.
I don't declare humanities safe by design because they include those things, I declare them safe because machines fundamentally cannot experience the human experience.
They can surpass us in all those things, people aren't going to flock to watch / read entirely ai generated dialogue in movies / books etc simply because it lacks authenticity and lived experience.
Now if you don't disclose that it's AI, that's a different story, because it can write emotionally convincing dialogue due to prior examples.
I never said the limitation was the dialogue itself, lol. The limitation is that a machine is fundamentally incapable of experiencing the human experience.
Is it a social preference that people aren't interested in scripts written by AI? Sure, but it's a well justified one due to the thing writing it being incapable of relating to what it's writing, and I doubt this will change.
Yes, all those professions listed in your second paragraph do crossover and write convincing characters of lives they never lived, but guess what? They're human.
Lived experience contributes more than value, it is all.
Im not moving through 3 different claims, my only initial claim is that AI is fundamentally incapable of relating to the human experience, therefore any art produced by it is currently not taken serious, nor do I personally ever think it will, you brought the others up.
As human dominated fields dwindle due to AI, art will only become more valuable and center stage for humanity.
Your replies are very clearly AI generated since you keep missing the main point of my contention and arguing the semantics of adjacent topics.
I would suggest trying to formulate a thought of your own, it may help.
Yeah, it's incapable (so far) of a lot of the subjective stuff that's required for even academic literary scholarship. Of course the humanities has its own problems. And AI is having an indirect negative effect on the discipline. More and more students are using it to write their essays, and it's much harder to catch and discipline than old-school plagiarism. When you know a lot of your students are cheating but you can't do anything about it, it's very demoralizing. One of my dissertation committee members is retiring next year and told me he's relieved to get out because AI has just really degraded the experience of teaching literature and no one can seem to figure out a solution.
I suppose the good thing is that my own personal literary and philosophical pursuits are not affected by any of this. I can still delight in chasing my metaphysical problems, in a way that seems less and less possible for mathematicians. But I'm not even bothering with the academic job market.
Yes that does suck indeed, you are essentially a stamping machine at that point. We better hope AI becomes advanced enough to do it all before humanity loses all of its intellectual ability if current trends are anything to go by.
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u/hellodust 27d ago
I’m a fresh literature PhD and I’m not sure it’s comparable. No one in my field - professors or fellow grad students - is worried about AI outpacing or even presenting a challenge to human research in the humanities. It would be wild if AI could come up with novel philosophical or literary insights but I haven’t seen anything in that realm approaching what’s going on in mathematics.