Can we untangle our humanity from the artificial intelligence ouroboros?

Every generative AI tool, from ChatGPT to Midjourney, is linked in the same unfortunate way. The Text with Jesus app is inextricably linked to the deepfake nudes generated by supercharged tools from Microsoft and Google — in that they share one foolish premise at core. It’s this: The creative ideas and beauty that exist as expressions of our uniquely human experience are capable of existing without the humans who express or experience them, and not only should this beauty and these ideas be treated as commercial products but the act of creation itself should be a product.

Talk about separating the art from the artist. It’s rich, then, that the answer to whether any particular version of generative AI is sophisticated enough now depends on whether it can produce something uniquely human, like poetry and art. But the question that is never answered is this: Sophisticated enough for what exactly? Who wants to live in a society that devalues human creative art, the one thing we’ve been compelled to do (besides mating and murdering) since the dawn of time?

As Spalding University’s Lynnell Edwards put it recently: “When did poetry become the new Turing test?”

With all the fumbling haste of AI’s emergence, it’s easy to laugh and deride companies like Microsoft when outlandish AI-generated tourist guides recommend food banks as a destination. It’s harder when entire faux-news propaganda websites appear to be generated out of thin air, and The New York Times mulls its capitulation strategy over OpenAI’s alleged copyright infringement.

The money’s no joke either. Some projections expect the global generative AI market will be worth $51.8 billion by 2028. And per Gartner’s latest estimates, AI-ready hardware like semiconductors and high-performance graphics processors will reach $53.4 billion this year — an estimate updated from the firm’s 2022 projection of $558 million, largely driven by the spread of generative AI.

The AI-generated rot of history’s first draft and its splash in a mercurial market both have surface-level impacts; news moves as fast as money and can course-correct just as quickly. More worrisome is that AI is now sneaking into academic journals, with one recent poll even finding that 20% of post-graduate students have used AI to complete coursework. In a recent interview with Toronto Life, Tulane University PhD candidate Joseph Keegin nailed the heart of the AI crisis on modern campuses.

People teach, Keegin said, “because they believe in the ennobling of the human soul through encounters with the great minds of the past.”

And that is the thing about generative AI and language learning models: They exist only by feeding on the ennobled human soul. Generating isn’t the same as creating, after all. Without our original data, our artistic creations, our uniquely flawed opinions and stumbling iterations of truth, generative AI just starves to death.

We know this because when that fresh human-created data isn’t readily accessible to feed a large language model (LLM), some developers have turned to training new AI on another AI’s output. At increasing risk of spreading a contagion of AI-generated hallucinations across the interneted wilds, they are creating the great digital ouroboros — feeding the snake its own tail. Some theorize this incestuous recursion could be the beginning of the end for generative AI. Some of us hope so.

Whether that falls heads or tails, though, generative AI isn’t going to be what kills the arts and humanities. Politically motivated people with power over public education — who gut entire humanities departments while claiming to be STEM and business proponents — are the more immediate threat to writing, arts, history, linguistics and philosophy.

At West Virginia University — a state land-grant flagship school — state legislators bled funding from the college by nearly 36% from 2013 to 2022, amounting to more than $99 million in budget cuts. When declines in enrollment took hold, controversial WVU president E. Gordon Gee went on an unsuccessful recruitment spending-spree aimed at out-of-state students that further saddled the university with $810 million in liabilities. And when the rubber met the road? Gee announced that WVU’s department of world languages, literatures, and linguistics would be cut entirely — despite generated operating profits of more than $800,000 in each of the last three years.

“To be honest, I don’t know if anything that we can do will help the situation. The leadership of the university has made up its mind, they have the backing of state politicians and the board they appointed to oversee the university, and they will not be swayed by appeals to reason or ideals,” wrote WVU associate linguistics professor Jonah Katz in his August remarks to the university.

“What they may respond to is public pressure, and to that end I am asking my colleagues to share what is happening here as widely as you can through all available media and professional networks. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and we need a whole lot of disinfectant at my institution.”

Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon’s weekly newsletter Lab Notes.

Just as much as their AI tech-baron counterparts, the kinds of powerful people who gut humanities department also fail to realize the obvious: Science and technology can’t exist without the humanities. From Shakespearean sonnets eaten by LLMs to the mythology obsession behind Newtonian physics, the humanities are the cradle from which all sciences are born, the driving aspiration behind every scientific pursuit and the final stewards of every scientist’s history.

Those who seek to kill the creative and thinking arts, or abandon them for cheap digital counterfeits, are doomed to starve their own machines. And those who cut history classes are doomed to learn that the hard way. For those people, I have only one piece of cautionary advice: Eat tail and die.

An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Salon’s Lab Notes, a weekly newsletter from our Health & Science team.