We hear a lot about the history of AI and the ethics of AI—but what about the AI of history? Or the AI of ethics, architecture, literature or the arts?
When Eric and I spent time with the Schmidt Sciences team earlier this year, we learned about how AI is already transforming the humanities and changing the way we think about ourselves and our place in the world. In one experiment, an art historian had a particle accelerator throw particles at a painting to pinpoint when it was made by understanding the composition of the pigments. Pigment is a particularly rich area of study in the arts—there are some you can’t even make any more—and they are complex and deeply connected to the time and culture from which they came. Other researchers are literally rewriting the course of human history by using AI to reference multiple translations of Plato’s Republic, or reading what’s written on a scroll without unrolling it.
The richness of this new area of AI applications is ripe for philanthropic support—it’s essential, but expensive, high risk, and not immediately profitable. Schmidt Sciences’ new program, the Humanities and AI Virtual Institute, is seeking short proposals from researchers who want to bring AI technology to their humanities research, or who want to infuse AI with a more humanistic approach (we definitely need it).
AI has often advantaged simplicity and clarity, like a large language model finding the most obvious next word. But for AI to be truly useful in fields outside strict science, it needs to seek complexity, multiple meanings, nuance—all the stuff that makes us human.
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