Many humanists are skeptical of language models and concerned about their effects on universities. However, researchers with a background in the humanities are also actively engaging with artificial intelligence — seeking not only to adopt language models as tools, but to steer them toward a more flexible, contextual representation of written culture.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals
Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription
$32.99 / 30 days
cancel any time
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 12 digital issues and online access to articles
$119.00 per year
only $9.92 per issue
Buy this article
- Purchase on SpringerLink
- Instant access to the full article PDF.
USD 39.95
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
References
Kirschenbaum, M. et al. PMLA 139, 512 (2024).
Rorty, R. (ed.) The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method (Univ. Chicago Press, 1967).
Gugerty, L. Proc. Hum. Factors Ergon. Soc. Annu. Meet. 50, 880–884 (2006).
Millière, R. & Buckner, C. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.03910 (2024).
Gopnik, A. What AI still doesn’t know how to do. Wall Street Journal (15 July 2022).
Underwood, T. The empirical triumph of theory. In the Moment (29 June 2023).
Ziems, C. et al. Comput. Linguist. 50, 237–291 (2024).
Bamman, D., Chang, K. K., Lucy, L. & Zhou, N. On classification with large language models in cultural analytics. In CHR 2024: Computational Humanities Research Conference, Vol. 3843, 494–527 (Computational Humanities Research, 2024).
Campregher Paiva, I. & Diecke, J. J. Cult. Anal. 9, 118497 (2024).
Varnum, M. E. W., Baumard, N., Atari, M. & Gray, K. PNAS 121, e2407639121 (2024).
Williams, R. The Long Revolution, 66 (Penguin, 1984).
Boelaert, J. et al. Sociol. Methods Res. https://doi.org/10.1177/00491241251330582 (2025).
Rao, A. S., Yerukola, A., Shah, V., Reinecke, K. & Sapet, M. NormAd: A framework for measuring the cultural adaptability of large language models. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1: Long Papers, 2373–2403 (Association for Computational Linguistics, 2025).
Zhou, N., Bamman, D. & Bleaman, I. L. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12057 (2025).
Klein, L. et al. Preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.19190 (2025).
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by DELTA at NCSA through allocation HUM240002 from the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) program, which is supported by US National Science Foundation grants #2138259, #2138286, #2138307, #2137603, and #2138296.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The author declares no competing interests.
Peer review
Peer review information
Nature Computational Science thanks the anonymous reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Underwood, T. The impact of language models on the humanities and vice versa. Nat Comput Sci 5, 695–697 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-025-00819-4
Published:
Version of record:
Issue date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-025-00819-4