Around the country, the liberal arts—and often with humanistic perspectives at the forefront—are informing approaches to human-centered AI initiatives.
In spring 2026, Duke released a public summary of the university’s strategic focus on AI. It outlines priorities related to research, infrastructure, governance, education, and operations writ large. But what stands out is the emphasis on an approach to AI that is “deeply technical and deeply human,” with consistent attention to “societal impact,” “environmental sustainability,” and “social responsibility,” leaning on Duke strengths such as its culture of interdisciplinarity, policy orientation, medical enterprise, and liberal arts mission.
A similar spirit infuses Emory’s approach. Focus areas such as human health, business and enterprise, and law combine with arts, humanities, and ethics. There is a new center dedicated to AI and learning and the Empathetic AI for Health Institute. Tellingly, the whole initiative operates under the title AI.Humanity. Elsewhere, the SUNY system has been investing in AI and society departments and research centers, with responsible use, ethical implications, community, and economic opportunity being the gravitational forces for the initiatives across campuses. Again, a case of deep links to the liberal arts. ASU’s embrace of AI pledges to “create positive change for humanity” by following tenets well aligned with the mission of a liberal education. And a recent $200 million donation to USC to incorporate AI across every facet hinges on the university being more agile and open, embracing the power and imperative of being adaptive.
These examples show large universities attempting to pivot, to reimagine, to design, and to create quickly, but with careful consideration for centering humanity and responsible use, and in ways where a liberal arts mission is the guiding force behind the initiatives.
Some recent initiatives at my home institution (Washington University in St. Louis) have shown—much to my surprise—just how much potential humanistic inquiry has to lead in the age of AI and, simultaneously, how AI tools can push the frontiers of human discovery.
An April event, for instance, brought several colleagues from political science, public health, our office of public scholarship, literary studies, and anthropology together with a leading industry voice in the space of digital technologies to reflect on that heart of human activity that is storytelling. The unscripted conversation could have gone in any direction, but AI stole the show (in a way). That is, guests and audience alike marveled at the potential for AI across fields and economic sectors. But the throughline of the AI story was one you might expect in humanities classes or conversations among humanists themselves: the imperative to prevent homogenization of thought with AI tools largely trained on material in English from North American and western Europe; how such tools can combat the spread of election misinformation, allow patients to have deeper exchanges with health care providers, or serve as personal editors for authors; whether human experiences with art can be expanded or enhanced through AI (fitting given the event took place in the campus art museum).
I witnessed a similar kind of humanistically informed reflection on AI in daily life among students in a course I co-taught last spring semester. Titled “AI, You, and Now: Stories that Win,” the writing-intensive class focused on origin stories across millennia, why certain stories are retold generation after generation while others vanish into oblivion, and how AI introduces a suite of new forces into the narratives that shape our world. The catch: students had to engage in writing for every class session as well as work with a personalized chatbot to generate AI versions of their responses, too. Some commented that this comparative activity helped demystify AI; others appreciated being required to experiment with the tools throughout the semester (in contrast to them being prohibited in many classes or simply not mentioned). In the AI versions of their writing, students identified issues with tone, vocabulary, the order of things, the exaggerated use of the em dash that they frankly hated, despite having provided the AI with examples of their own writing and detailed prompts. A couple noted that by seeing such faults, they actually used AI less than in previous semesters.
Most rewarding, though, was that students’ interactions with AI and the AI assignments they did pushed them to be more discerning in how powerful their own voice can be, in how they tell their stories, and the ways in which they may collaborate with AI to allow for their ideas to reach broader or new audiences. A few students remarked that they had become less fearful of how to use AI strategically. This discernment was especially visible when students wrote their own origin stories and then asked AI to create a version, too. A comment at the end of the semester from Edward Kombe, an incredibly engaged and creative student in the class, sums this up well: “In a world where the winning narrative is often tied to the concept of AI domination, I’ve come to internalize that this is not the case. Instead, I’ve been able to recognize how and where AI is powerful, but also where I as an individual hold power… I’ve learned how I can leverage my sense of self and technology to create a winning narrative for myself.”
Framed succinctly, AI engagement helped these students become more aware of their unique identity, voice, and life stories. In a word, more human. By facilitating more AI experimentation, discussions of its applications, and reflections on its limits, social and environmental impacts, and links to the workforce, liberal education and the humanities have a unique opportunity to play the leading role in fostering a new kind of human discovery and exploration.
Some faculty are understandably skeptical about, critical of, or outright opposed to the rapid influence of AI in academic life. Commencement speakers were recently booed for their mentions of AI. “AI rejectionism” has grown rapidly over the past six months, as a recent WSJ article outlines. “The only thing growing faster than the artificial-intelligence industry,” notes this article, “may be Americans’ negative feelings about it.” Aside from the velocity the backlash has gained across the spectrum, one of the most significant features of this trend is the demographic profile—namely, people under the age of 30.
Members of Gen Z report regular use of generative AI. Yet over the past year excitement and optimism have declined among these users as anger surrounding the tools and their deployment has risen. In fact, as a recent survey reports, 14- to 29-year-olds are “not convinced that AI enhances creativity or critical thinking, and the majority believe it may come at a cost, particularly to learning.”
Universities should not read this skepticism necessarily as rejectionism. Rather, as Mim Rahimi suggests in Nature, it is a call for careful AI adoption. In other words, students themselves may be the biggest advocates for the human-centered approach to AI tools that the liberal arts and the humanities can foster.
And so here we are, at an inflection point. What are the limits of human creativity in the age of AI? The liberal arts can help us push these limits in ways that I suspect will continue to surprise. At the same time, universities will be constrained by financial resources and the amount of time we consider which directions to pursue. The pace at which AI is moving does not overlap well with higher education time. And yet, this issue of misaligned time, with all the possible ramifications that could ensue regarding the future relevance of a major, a department, a school, or an entire institution, may be the type of urgent constraint we need—to borrow from David Epstein—in order to focus more clearly on how we harness new forms of creativity, engagement, industry-academy relationships, and so on. Because of AI. If there was ever a moment to reenergize the meaning, value, and power of the liberal arts, it is clearly now.
Even if you’re not convinced that these tools can push us to be more creative and reorient our sense of humanity, the university, with the liberal arts in the lead, offers our greatest chance to understand their impacts, responsible deployment, and to discipline what Ross Douthat talks about in his reflection on Pope Leo’s encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas” as the voices that AI has introduced into our daily lives. Quite simply, no other institution has the mission, range of focus, or intellectual depth and diversity across so many viewpoints and experiences to play the lead role in defining how this technology can support planetary wellbeing going forward.
Somewhat ironically, as D. Graham Burnett stated in his invitation to consider how generative AI can reveal new understandings our humanity, “we’re entering… a new consciousness of ourselves. This is the pivot where we turn from anxiety and despair to an exhilarating sense of promise. These systems have the power to return us to ourselves in new ways.” We need the humanities and the spirit of liberal learning more broadly to help us—institutions, faculty, current students and those to come—navigate this new sense of humanity’s promise.
