Are Australian Arts and Humanities Ready for AI?

Alan Warburton / https://betterimagesofai.org / Image by BBC.

The 2025 QS World Universities Rankings by Subject showed a concerning decline in the global rankings of Australian arts and humanities courses. Australia has six universities in the QS Top 100 in arts and humanities in 2025, but all except one (RMIT) declined in their global position. Of the 17 universities in the top 300, 15 saw their ranking decline between 2020 and 2025, with only two – RMIT and Newcastle – improving their ranking between 2020 and 2025.

QS World Universities Rankings by Subject, Arts and Humanities for Australian Universities, 2020 and 2025

In some instances, particularly in newer universities, this may be explained by the institution shifting its focus from “traditional” humanities to fields with high student demand, such as Communication and Media Studies. But the trends in this discipline are, if anything, worse. All Australian universities except the ANU have a lower global ranking in 2025 than they did in 2020, and only 11 universities feature in the top 200 in 2025, as compared to 16 in 2025.

QS World Universities Rankings by Subject, Communication and Media Studies for Australian Universities,  2020 and 2025

Policy measures such as the Job-Ready Graduates package, which increased the HECS debt of Arts graduates have had an impact, as have shifts in school leaver preferences such a shift away from languages and traditional humanities subjects such as History. These trends have been replicated in other countries, as the STEM disciplines appear to generate better graduate job outcomes.

It may also reflect a shift in priorities of Australian universities themselves, choosing to concentrate resources in areas that seem to align more with government priorities, such as artificial intelligence (AI). 

But it would be a mistake not to see the arts and humanities as being pivotal to the development and deployment of AI. This is not simply in the sense of the humanist scholar being a critic of the hubris of the digerati and the limits of scientific rationality. It points to at least five issues which the rapid growth in the application and use of AI brings to the fore, and which arts and humanities researchers are particularly good at addressing.

First, there is the question of what requires human knowledge and creativity. This is of course a core question of philosophy, but AI gives it new resonance as it is clear that generative AI systems can be smart enough to do many things that once only people could do. We have AI-generated books, AI-generated films, AI-generated music and much more.

As writers such as Margaret Boden have observed, the question of whether computers are “becoming human” is not the right one. We don’t need computers to be able to cry, or what is termed full sentience, in order for them to generate outputs akin to those arising out of uniquely human attributes such as emotion and consciousness. These questions are about more than AI ethics, which is where much current debate is focused.

Second, AI is fundamentally changing the process of communication. We have long worked from the premise that communications have involved humans sending and receiving messages from other humans, using information processing machines such as telephones, computers and other digital devices. But we have now moved quickly to a stage where these devices are no longer simply processing and storing information but are themselves a part of the conversation, whether as chatbots dealing with our queries, as prompters to us to take certain actions, and as devices trained to know our stylistic quirks in writing.

Moreover, machines increasingly communicate with other machines, as with the Internet of Things. This is all at some level communication as the field has been understood for over a century, but it is not premised upon the sender-message-receiver information processing paradigm.

Third, arts and humanities provide insights into the impact of AI on the future of work. We have long anticipated the automation of unskilled and semi-skilled jobs through the application of robots, and even the automation of certain types of professional work, such as being a law clerk or an accountant. But the reach of AI has now clearly extended into creative work, from journalism to scriptwriting.

The Hollywood Writers’ Strike of 2023 drew stark attention to the concerns of “below-the-line” workers in the film and television industries about the automation of their work and professional craft, and similar issues are arising in newsrooms as stories are increasingly AI-generated. These are partly issues about job protection and reskilling. At the same time, they are also issues about what creative talents bring to the creative process: if their value is minimal, they will be replaced by AI.

The AI-led transformation of media industries also presents us with questions about the future of information and entertainment. The failure to develop a suitable regulatory framework for controlling misinformation on social media is doing long-term damage to the public sphere and, with it, to democratic institutions. Further generation of deepfakes, fake news and “AI slop” will further erode trust in information which will promote disengagement from civil society and political institutions. There is an appetite for reliable and trustworthy information sources, and the challenge is how can AI be harnessed to a positive purpose in this regard.

Finally, the arts and humanities can tell us a lot about the future of teaching and learning. ChatGPT-3 registered in the minds of academics around the world when it became apparent that a perfectly serviceable 2500-word student essay could be generated through it across a diverse array of topics. Programs such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, DeepSeek and others are now being complemented by programs such as Deep Research and Google Notebook, which do for the PhD literature review what has already been done with the undergraduate essay.

This is not necessarily a problem of learning. It is definitely a problem of assessment, and the idea that certain forms of learning are demonstrated through mastery of particular types of assessment such as the long-form essay. The essay has been the most administratively convenient way of assessing at scale, but it is now very much a product that can be generated through AI. If we can rethink the relationship between learning and assessment, this will be transformative to the higher education experience, which students are demonstrating a degree of disengagement form at present.

Arts and humanities have historically been good at posing questions of why things matter and reaching conclusions through discourse, dialogue and shared experiences. These are attributes that are highly valuable in an age of generative AI.

This article first appeared in Koala International Education News, April 7, 2025.