The development of AI requires us to reflect on the intellectual essence of humanity, and AI may help humanities charge boldly into boundless freedom and an infinite future. Photo: TUCHONG

Seemingly overnight, a wave of “artificial intelligence (AI) anxiety” has swept through the humanities, leaving many scholars grappling with unease. From Bilibili videos to WeChat official accounts, discussions about the opportunities or challenges AI brings to the humanities have become widespread. AI has long stepped out of the confines of quiet laboratories, traversing bustling industrial markets and taking center stage in social trends. It has also powerfully stirred the once-calm waters of the humanities. This surge of interest recalls the waves of discussions sparked by the information age, the biological age, and the digital age.

The rise of  ‘AI anxiety’

Technology is always advancing. In the past, scholars in the humanities might have maintained a certain level of detachment and composure, viewing emerging technologies as mere “tools” while observing the changing tides from the sidelines. However, they have now been jolted by the realization that the massive entity called AI has aggressively entered the domains cherished by the humanities, and is making significant strides in areas of cultural creation that were once considered the exclusive purview of humans. Powered by natural language processing, many general-purpose AI models, equipped with vast datasets, immense computational power, and deep learning architectures, can comprehend human languages, perform reasoning and calculations, and generate text, music, images, and videos. Tools that once served as extensions of human efforts have evolved into “intelligent” machines capable of simulating human thought, learning, and creation—posing a direct challenge to humanity’s unique position in these realms.

Indeed, the competition between machines and humans in the realm of logical reasoning and computational functions has long ceased to be a source of surprise. After all, ever since the invention of computers and the internet, it was foreseeable that man-made machines would surpass humans in the speed and scale of data processing—an outcome precisely in line with the expectations of those who developed such tools. However, the cognitive, interpretive, and creative abilities that humans have long regarded as distinct from abilities of technological tools, especially the artistic creation and literary imagination thought to elude purely logical operations, are now areas where generative AI is making inroads. How could this not provoke anxiety? Once the machine learning process is set in motion, AI’s iterative advancements quickly exceed the boundaries of human imagination. 

Human imagination itself, including the literary imagination that German Romantic thinkers described as one of crowns of the human spirit, seems to be no match for AI’s vast data processing capabilities. AI can digitalize all historical textual and visual materials, uncover the principles behind human poetry and painting from immense combinations of digital data, and then generate literary and artistic products that rival human creations. 

The ethereal sprites of poetry and art, which once transcended the constraints of quantification, now appear to have been captured by the so-called “everything is measurable” digital magic bottle. This phenomenon involves not just market competition but a profound challenge to the intellectual essence of what it means to be human. If technology succeeds in unraveling the essence of the human spirit, how can the humanities—disciplines that take this essence as their object of study—continue to justify their existence? It is little wonder, then, that anxiety first erupted at the employment and educational frontiers of the humanities and has since swept through the entire research ecosystem. Alongside this wave of unease, a doomsday narrative linking AI’s development with the demise of the humanities has gained traction.

Imperative of human-machine collaboration

If we push this doomsday vision to its extreme—imagine humans truly withdrawing from artistic creation, the humanities fading into oblivion, and literary imagination being lost entirely—could AI genuinely take our place? Without human imagination, aesthetic creation and critique, and the constant renewal, input, and iterative training provided by humanity, AI too would eventually exhaust its creative capacity. The very existence of AI is ultimately rooted in human-machine collaboration. Its formidable creative potential remains inseparable from human literary imagination. 

The competitive anxiety AI induces in humans today arises precisely because of the millennia of literary and artistic creation experience accumulated by humanity. The products AI may create in the future will still depend on humanity’s ability to innovate, producing literary and artistic resources that are fresh, vivid, and shining with  human wisdom and ingenuity. This kind of intellectual and cultural renewal hinges on the humanities, disciplines uniquely capable of reviewing the old to realize the new. The humanities not only preserve the fertile soil of human civilization’s heritage but also nurture the seeds of creating the future by humans. 

As German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder once remarked: humans are inherently imperfect beings, and yet, this very imperfection spurs a capacity for learning that surpasses any other creature’s abilities—a capacity that transcends the finite existence of the individual and points toward the infinite. It is this potential for boundless development that grants humanity the freedom to charge boldly into the future. 

Today, we find ourselves facing AI, an entity with a learning capacity seemingly greater than our own. AI appears to have surpassed the limits of individual human existence, embracing a vision of infinite development. Yet this infinity is, and will always be, sustained by the wellspring of human imagination. The boundless potential of AI and that of humanity are not rivals; they are partners that should mutually reinforce one another. The future of AI is also bound to be the future of the humanity. 

Evolution path of humanities in the AI era

From this perspective, the development of AI will, in a certain sense, mark the end of the old humanities and the creation of new ones. However, this is not the first time the humanities have undergone a transformation in the face of technological advancements. 

Modern humanities have consistently progressed amidst anxiety and crisis in the latter half of the 19th century. European society flourished due to the Second Industrial Revolution and sci-tech advancements. Education and research institutions widely admired the paradigms of natural science. Consequently, the humanities faced a legitimacy crisis, prompting a shift toward positivism to reconstruct their research paradigms and establish their scientific credentials. 

Dissatisfied with this trend, German thinker Wilhelm Dilthey and other humanists reevaluated the essence of the humanities. Dilthey differentiated natural sciences, which focus on the immutable laws of nature and employ experimental methods, from the humanities, which center on the historical, dynamic development of human life and adopt hermeneutics as their method. He emphasized that the core of the humanities lies in the realm of lived experience, which cannot be fully explained by natural laws. 

This focus on understanding, perceiving, empathizing, imagining, and creating within the human community constitutes the humanities’ unique value. It also reflects the discipline’s distinctive path to addressing the existential question of “what it means to be human.” In an era when the machine industry was booming, reestablishing such ideals and paradigms for the humanities served as a critical counterbalance. This foundation paved the way for the rich diversity of humanistic thought and cultural reform movements in the 20th century.

Integrating humanities & technology

At present, the rapid development of AI technology and industry is profoundly transforming human society and the global community. Dilthey’s vision of the division between the humanities and sciences is no longer sufficient to position the humanities as an independent field capable of rivaling technology. Instead, the evolution of AI itself is calling for and fostering the integration of the humanities and sciences. 

Key aspects of human intellectual life—understanding, perception, imagination, and creativity—are increasingly central to AI’s attempts to simulate human intelligence. Through data collection and deep learning, AI is absorbing, at an accelerated pace, the rich experiences of emotional interaction and cultural creation that the humanities have cultivated over centuries. While AI lacks its own intellectual life and empathetic needs, it can, after mastering the digitalized versions of these human traits, extract and replicate human life experiences. In this sense, human literary imagination serves as an ideal template for AI’s continued learning. 

Yet, AI’s learning also presents  profound challenges for future humanities research. Dilthey’s philosophy of life remains a source of insight: the need and capacity for understanding human life experiences stem from the uniqueness of individuals, the richness of communities, and the empathetic abilities inherent in human interaction. AI’s continual advancements can reflect this richness through the correlation and recombination of vast datasets, while its interfaces increasingly demonstrate mechanisms for reproducing empathy. 

The intersection where AI depends on the humanities is also the starting point for a renewed trajectory for the humanities. AI compels us to reconsider what it means to be human, prompting us to reevaluate our place and potential. In the reflective mirror of AI, our literary imagination will continue to strive toward boundless freedom and an infinite future.

Li Shuangzhi is a professor from the College of Foreign Languages and Literature at Fudan University.

Edited by ZHAO YUAN