The Humanities in the Age of AI

By Professor Jason R. Young, Director of the Institute for the Humanities

This mode of thinking is crucial for processing nuanced, subtle and contradictory information. Slow thinking demands focused attention, persistent effort and contextual awareness. Perhaps most important, slow thinking relies on distinctly human modes of discernment and judgment.

In recent years, the University of Michigan has emerged as a recognized leader in artificial intelligence. In 2023, U-M was the first major university in the United States to launch its own suite of custom, secure generative AI tools.

In 2025, U-M launched the AI Institutes at Michigan to “expand the development and deployment of artificial intelligence and data science”. In addition, U-M has embraced advanced technology as one of six core impact areas that comprise the university’s Look to Michigan campaign.

By focusing on these technologies, U-M plans to support “the development and deployment of artificial intelligence and data science by investing in supercomputing infrastructure, state-of-the-art high-speed storage, and specialized generative AI tools that will expand university-wide capabilities”.

The results of these commitments can already be seen, with the promise of even deeper integrations of advanced technology in U-M’s teaching, research and health missions to emerge in the near future.

In academia, as in many other areas of public life, the promise of AI is compelling. Supporters predict a soon-to-be future where much of academic research and teaching will be increasingly streamlined, integrated and responsive to emerging needs. For the humanities in particular, these tools portend massive changes to the way we conduct research, generate arguments, translate languages and develop ideas.

With respect to teaching, some of these changes are already upon us. U-M, like many other universities across the country, has integrated generative AI into the user experience at the library, embedded these tools in learning management systems and embraced advanced technology across the larger ecosystem of teaching and research.

But for all of the promise of emergent AI systems, deep and abiding concerns persist.

Despite the proliferation of technologies that promise immediate access to information and instant communication across the globe, feelings of angst, division and alienation are on the rise. This sense of digital loneliness reflects a curious paradox: the hyper-connectivity made possible by digital tools too often leaves us feeling unfulfilled and isolated. While technology enables us to cross borders and cover vast distances in our digital lives, studies suggest that using these tools may increase feelings of loneliness, especially for vulnerable users.

Partly in an effort to cope with these difficulties, some young people are increasingly seeking out AI-generated romantic partners. LSA has cautioned users of its own AI systems to be aware of the Eliza effect, in which users not only project human emotions, motivations and understanding onto artificial computer systems, but also perceive that these emotional connections are reciprocated. The Eliza effect can have significant consequences for users’ emotional health and well-being.

In addition to these interpersonal challenges, the emergence and proliferation of AI systems has raised crucial societal questions related to its environmental impacts.

In addition, the ubiquity and popularity of generative AI raise critical questions about the meaning and limits of human authorship. Recent court battles have raised serious questions about the role that some LLMs may be playing in the wholesale plagiarism of unattributed and unacknowledged published material.

Unfortunately, reliance on AI systems may produce what researchers call ‘cognitive surrender,’ a process whereby users relinquish their own problem-solving skills and cognitive control to AI systems, often adopting AI-generated conclusions and judgments as their own. Over time, continued use of AI systems may quash confidence and hinder a user’s ability to remain engaged with difficult or complicated problems.

To be sure, a certain amount of cognitive surrender often attends technological innovation. I no longer commit phone numbers to memory or refer to detailed maps in advance of a long road trip because my smartphone reliably does that work for me. But advanced technology is different not only in scale but also in type from the technologies embedded in a calculator, a map or a phone book.

We now have the ability to export virtually the whole of the human cognitive process to external systems using AI technologies. The power and promise of these systems will require clear-eyed consideration of what may well be a wholesale shift in the way that we teach and learn.

This is a phenomenon that I have witnessed firsthand in the classroom. Some of my students increasingly feel pressure to outsource their reading to AI-generated summaries and their writing to generative AI tools. Perhaps most troubling, some students outsource their opinions and convictions to external systems, not through apathy, but rather through a perception that AI-generated outputs must be “right.”

Many students are understandably convinced by the grammatically correct, sequentially organized outputs generated by AI systems, often preferring those results to their own thought process and argumentation. When considered in light of the still lingering effects of COVID on education and instruction, AI-generated outputs can be especially alluring.

Some experts fear that this reliance on external cognition may portend a new post-literate age, marked by the end of reading as we know it.

It is precisely in an age of accelerated technology that the benefits of slow, deliberative, but deeply rewarding study–the very hallmark of the humanities–come into sharp focus.

Perhaps surprisingly, the recent acceleration of AI has produced new opportunities for people working in humanities fields. Employers are increasingly recognizing the value of the skills regularly taught in the humanities and have actively recruited students with high-level interpretive and analytical abilities in a move that some are calling “the revenge of the philosophy majors.”

The humanities are crucial precisely because we are entering an era of advanced technology that will present us with a suite of value-laden challenges that will require not only our technical expertise but also, if not more so, the best of our deep, deliberate and critical capacities. Far from diminishing the value of the humanities, the rise of AI has made that value difficult to ignore.

At the LSA Institute for the Humanities, we fund scholarly and creative projects that explore the diverse histories and cultures that define the human experience. We offer faculty and graduate student research fellowships, lectures, community-based initiatives, exhibitions, undergraduate and graduate student internships and other programming that provides opportunities for humanities exploration. We embrace open inquiry and the free exchange of ideas. We have hosted artists working at the intersection of art and AI and have supported faculty researchers whose work engages deeply with AI systems.

The Institute for the Humanities works collaboratively with colleagues across U-M, including with the Michigan Institute for Data and AI in Society, the Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, and Optimism Network and others, to convene conversations across the disciplines. I look forward to continuing this very important work.

It is from the humanities that we derive and define the ethics and values necessary to address pressing social challenges. In an era of continued technological innovation, we will continue to celebrate what it means to be human.