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Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

newyorker.com

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Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#41

Post by lacker »

peakskill wrote: post #40

There is a fundamental value assigned to human produced work that stems strictly from the fact it’s not AI slop. It comes from empathy. Why are physical paintings more valuable than digital art? Why is manmade art implicitly higher value than imagegen art? Why do we watch Magnus Carlsen when engines are leagues ahead of the top 10? Because the human condition matters. We crave seeing the world through the eyes of oth…

Consider a Turing test, though. Imagine you had two novels in front of you, you read both of them, and they were brilliant. You love them both. But you learn that one of them was written by a human, one of them by an AI. Is the AI-written novel actually inferior, because it was written by an AI, despite the fact that you loved the novel itself?

You might doubt that an AI can ever write a novel as great as the greatest of human writers. I have doubts as well. But I don't think it can be a priori inferior. If an AI ever produces a novel that would have been great if a human wrote it, then that will be a great novel.

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#43

Post by bwfan123 »

Many areas of humanities devolve into a bag of words where the evaluation of it is subjective depending on ones tastes - and LLMs excel here, and academics are rightfully scared.

As an analogy and contrast, take the case of euclidean geometry. This is knowledge about geometry which relates to our "feeling" of space around us. But, it is symbolized in a precise and operational manner which becomes useful in all sorts of endaevors (physics, machines we use etc) - because of the precision. LLMs as machines cannot yet create symbolism and operational definitions of worlds which produce precise and operational inferences. However, they excel at producing persuasive bag-of-words.

As the author notes and concludes, human intuition, experience and the communication of it (which is the purview of humanities) is a pre-cursor to formally encoding it in symbolism (which renders said intuition stale but operationally useful). ie, socratic dialog was a precursor to (and inspired) euclidean geometry, and meta-physics inspires physics.

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#44

Post by cyrillite »

TimorousBestie wrote: post #22
_m_p wrote: post #4

Quote from the article: > Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will read them, and systems such as these will be able to generate them, endlessly, at the push of a button. It is already the case that effectively nobody reads these books. They're basically just "proof of work" for people's tenure dossiers.

At one point, I estimated that the subfield of mathematics that I work in has at most 250 living contributors. It’s an applied field, there’s actually-existing technology that depends on it, but it’s technically challenging and a lot of people left for AI/ML because it’s easier and there’s more low-hanging fruit. Anyway, my colleagues and I, we write monographs for each other more or less, using arXiv to announce res…

This sounds like you’ve found a citation ring, but with all the trimmings of legitimacy. Has it had similar benefits for your career?

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#45

Post by jasonsb »

tianqi wrote: post #35

My answer is yes — at least for now. People tend to believe AI gives the great answers until it touches a field they actually have real expertise in. If you talk to true experts in humanities, you’ll find their depth of insight is on a totally different level compared to AI's surface-level summaries. AI mostly stitches together some published cliche like Max Planck’s driver in the old story.

That was true a few years ago, but now I'm getting better and better answers. Not saying I can totally trust AI, but the rate of progress is astonishing. Even if we see no more progress for the next 10 years, the effect of current models in our society will be profound.

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#46

Post by aeblyve »

It changes the scope of the game, if you will. You can now only seriously do humanities work if you are OK with everything you say being copied and dispersed for free. Potentially without any attribution.

Software has been going through the same productive shift for many decades now, e.g., Free and Open Source Software. Simply because copying bytes is absurdly cheap. It's still around.

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#47

Post by getnormality »

_m_p wrote: post #4

Quote from the article: > Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will read them, and systems such as these will be able to generate them, endlessly, at the push of a button. It is already the case that effectively nobody reads these books. They're basically just "proof of work" for people's tenure dossiers.

Before we make these grand "in five years" proclamations, perhaps we should ask the people who read and care about these works if they can tell human ones from LLM ones, and if so what the difference is. Test them with blind samples if we must.

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#48

Post by jibbit »

bwfan123 wrote: post #43

Many areas of humanities devolve into a bag of words where the evaluation of it is subjective depending on ones tastes - and LLMs excel here, and academics are rightfully scared. As an analogy and contrast, take the case of euclidean geometry. This is knowledge about geometry which relates to our "feeling" of space around us. But, it is symbolized in a precise and operational manner which becomes useful in all sorts…

it's intentionally ironic that this is written in the style of ai slop?

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#49

Post by fire_lake »

ramesh31 wrote: post #19
zkmon wrote: post #16

Any work that is based on knowledge, analysis, cleverness, thinking, expression, art, strategy, prediction, insights etc will be profoundly effected. Humans just need to move out of these territories invaded by AI. To the real world where human physical abilities matter.

>effected Affected

Please move out of the territory of grammar to make room for AI

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#50

Post by OgsyedIE »

analog31 wrote: post #37
OgsyedIE wrote: post #5

In case anybody is wondering, the answer is obviously yes. Assuming a singularity-type event happens, the humanities will have tremendous value to AGIs as systems of thinking for analyzing themselves, their environment and their interactions with their environment in the same way that existing nation-states value the humanities as foundational tools in developing the abilities of their personnel and executives. Survi…

>>> Surviving humans will no longer be free to participate in the academic humanities however, as their study/curation/production etc will exclusively be job roles for AGIs. Only if the AGIs want those roles. We already have super-smart people who don't want to be history professors or classical musicians.

AGIs will have a job market amongst themselves if they don't just figure out some kind of self-brainwashing tech outright.
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