Epilogue

There can be no conclusion, strictly speaking, to a book of this sort. AI will continue to make progress. There are tasks that it cannot currently do that it will be able to within the lifetime of the reader, and others within only a year or two. We are nonetheless completely confident of two points that have been emphasized throughout this book from the very beginning. One is that there will always be ways to teach students humanities subjects in ways that take AI into account, while not diluting or taking away from the quality of their own work. In fact, we outline how to encourage the trajectory that sees students using AI tools meaningfully and still achieving the same outcomes. The other key point is that it will remain necessary for human educators to teach the humanities to human students. By way of analogy, industrial automation revolutionized human life, and though on the surface it seemed as if it ended the careers of workers left and right, the truth is that society increased its demand for human capital over time. We weld by hand less often, almost never manually fill out tax forms, and haven’t used card catalogs in years.^[1] Yet, here we are, with more people and more jobs than ever before.

Technology will continue to transform life and work for human beings. The importance of the humanities is precisely that it focuses and guides technology at the fringes of its ability—the role of humanity, the meaning and purpose of life, and more concretely, addressing ethical questions that are crucial when (and ideally before) every new technological step is made. It focuses on cultivation of the flexibility and creativity to adapt to changes and remain not merely relevant but valuable.

The future of AI is unpredictable. The future of education is at least somewhat less so. The output of generative AI is like a carnival mirror that distorts, magnifies, shrinks, or reshapes our human reality (as represented by past training data) into reflections that are both oddly familiar yet somehow strange to humans. Our task as humans and educators is to unravel these differences, make sense of them, and teach our students the same. Many of the most sensational headlines about AI are based on an AI’s performance on one specific task, as presented by the marketing department of the company whose product it is. After reading this book, you presumably know that it is a defining characteristic of AI that it does exceptionally well at a specific narrowly-defined task. If an AI can outperform people on a specific exam related to law or medical school content, that does not mean that it can replace human doctors and lawyers. A close look at what AI generates reveals that the image in the mirror is indeed distorted. In response, we as educators are charged with judiciously training and testing students in ways that develop their ability to transfer and apply knowledge and skills. These skills are more important than ever because they are what distinguish humans from AI. They will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, and perhaps forever.

So go forth and distinguish yourself, your students, and your work from AI. Teaching and learning in the era of generative AI is no carnival, despite our hall of mirrors analogy. But you can certainly get on the ride and see how it goes. Hopefully the assignments and activities we have provided, as well as the information about the technology itself, has restored your sense of the importance of what you do and what you teach your students. We hope that we made this challenging material enjoyable, and in so doing provided an example of the kind of fun learning that is possible at the intersection of the humanities and artificial intelligence.