Amruta Krishnan Srinivasan is a high school student at Stratford Preparatory Blackford, and was a member of the Stanford Daily Summer Journalism Workshop ’25. She enjoys creative writing, and her novel, Dissidents of Perfection, was published the summer of 2023.

In “A Man Without a Country,” Kurt Vonnegut says that the arts are “a very human way of making life more bearable.” Vonnegut’s words have been made even more potent by the passage of time. Today, artificial intelligence seems to threaten the humanity in art that Vonnegut spoke of with such devotion. AI-generated short stories win prestigious awards, major newspapers publish articles written by generative AI—in a world like this, it seems as if the only role AI has in the humanities is to replace it. The reaction in higher education to this encroachment has been fierce: professors have pushed back against AI’s incorporation and sought out better tools to root it out. However, Stanford has taken a different approach, embracing and enriching the relationship between AI and the humanities through a novel program: the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). 

HAI is uniquely impactful because it identifies and addresses a key harmful factor that often plagues the intersection between arts and AI: corporate interference. AI companies are more than happy to sacrifice quality of education in the name of profit, so when we let them dictate how AI interacts with humanities in higher education, they do just that. At Stanford, HAI shows how the relationship between AI and the humanities does not need to be parasitic—instead, by cutting out the corporate middleman, both fields can grow and thrive together. 

To learn more about how and why HAI achieves this, I interviewed Professor Michele Elam, an interdisciplinary humanities scholar and senior fellow at HAI. She authored the article “Poetry Will Not Optimize,” which succinctly captures discourse between the humanities and artificial intelligence. She pointed out how literature simply cannot be made more efficient, and therein lies its beauty. While AI may be able to mimic the structure of poems and fiction, it has no way of giving meaning to it, which proves it cannot replace the humanities. 

Along with its unnecessary insertion in education, one of the main issues with the current interactions between the humanities and AI is the inclusion of corporate rhetoric. “The coercion of tech in shaping your decisions is often invisible,” Professor Elam said. When tech companies attempt to push themselves into classrooms and dictate how the humanities are taught, it quickly becomes an impediment to the students’ education. 

Technology, contrary to the narrative large tech corporations often push, does not always advance in a linear fashion. Just because we can use generative AI to create a sub-par self-published book doesn’t mean that we have to, nor does it mean that we will be ushered into a new era of artistry. AI is not the single solution to every field’s problem. Heralding it as such is ludicrous at best, and deeply harmful at worst. 

Further, most of the direct encouragement to use AI in education stems from AI corporations themselves. For example, OpenAI forcefully undercut competitors in order to push ChatGPT Edu to universities. Through this aggressive sales tactic, more students and staff adopted AI tools, and universities started to embrace them. The interest behind spreading the influence of AI in education is understandable from a monetary point of view. When students start to rely on AI starting from their primary school classroom, that dependence is bound to follow the student throughout their life.

Of course, it can always be argued that generative AI is a tool to aid human creativity. If artificial intelligence generates something based on a human idea, can that still qualify as art? Professor Elam answered this with her remark on intent, mentioning that “human beings tend to imbue the things we create with sentience and meaning.” Even though we give a vague sort of idea to generative AI when we prompt it, we are not the creators of its output. The product no longer belongs to us; therefore, it has no meaning. 

As HAI has proven, AI and the humanities can have a relationship that is mutually beneficial, where AI does not attempt to replace the art involved in it. Instead of falling prey to AI, these fields can flourish alongside it. To find out more about the ways AI could benefit the arts, I spoke with Professor Cheryl Phillips, a journalist who has been teaching her field at Stanford since 2014. While AI may not be suitable for creative works, Professor Phillips points out how it can be beneficial in a field like journalism. Data journalism, for example, frequently uses AI and machine learning to analyze and predict trends from large droves of data, something that Phillips says “we would otherwise not be able to do.” In fields like journalism, AI does not replace human-made work and writing. Instead, it aids the already existing machinery in order to analyze data and make predictions. According to Phillips, it can also “lower the cost of accountability reporting” and “help with news detection,” revolutionizing the field as a whole. 

The introduction of HAI into Stanford is a peek into how AI and the humanities can interact without a corporation pushing the relationship. It’s a sign of how the field will endure—through the rise of generative AI, through the momentary drops in those majoring in it, and through all future developments AI has in store for us. The humanities are as old as the very first claim and the very first rebuttal. As Vonnegut said, “practicing an art…is a way to make your soul grow,” and regardless of what art that is, or how it is practiced, the artist “will get an enormous award” of having “creat[ed] something.” I, for one, can’t think of anything grander.