Teaching AI, Training Ourselves

ADHO2026 Keynote
Teaching AI, Training Ourselves:
A New Mission for Digital Humanities

For several decades, Digital Humanities has focused on extending humanistic research through computational technologies: digitizing archives, analyzing texts, visualizing networks, and expanding access to cultural knowledge. In the age of generative AI, however, AI is becoming more than a tool for research. It is increasingly an intellectual environment within which human thinking, communication, learning, and cultural activity take place.

This transformation raises a critical question: if AI eventually performs much of humanity’s intellectual labor, how can human beings continue to live as self-directed agents rather than passive consumers of AI-generated meaning?

This keynote argues that the future mission of Digital Humanities is not simply to apply AI to the humanities or preserve traditional scholarship in digital form. Instead, Digital Humanities must become a practical discipline of human self-formation within AI environments.

In the near term, this mission takes the form of “teaching AI humanities”: restructuring classical texts, cultural knowledge, and humanistic traditions into forms that AI can meaningfully interpret. Yet the deeper purpose of this work is not merely to improve AI. By teaching AI, humanists simultaneously train themselves to think critically, act intentionally, and engage creatively within AI-mediated worlds. This process reflects the classical East Asian idea of jiaoxue xiangzhang (敎學相長)—teaching and learning as mutual growth.

As a practical example, this keynote introduces the AI Classical Translation Studies Program and its interactive platform, CCTI (Classical Chinese Text Interpreter). In this educational model, scholars move beyond the role of translators to become guides who help AI engage with the complexities of classical humanistic knowledge. Through iterative cycles of interpretation, knowledge structuring, AI interaction, and critical revision, both AI and human participants develop their capacities. The project demonstrates that structuring humanistic knowledge for AI does not diminish the role of scholars; rather, it provides a practical framework for strengthening human agency in an AI-saturated world.

Ultimately, Digital Humanities should aim not only to preserve knowledge, but also to cultivate the human capacity to choose, interpret, question, and shape one’s own life within an AI-driven civilization. In this sense, Engagement is no longer merely participation in digital culture; it is the ongoing human practice of consciously engaging with AI while retaining the capacity for self-direction and meaningful action.