How do we enhance the trustworthiness of generative artificial intelligence (AI), such as ChatGPT, as a tool to foster students’ curiosity to learn about humanities subjects in higher education? This study analyzes what conversational AI tools can realistically accomplish in the humanities higher education context and what the substantive, rather than hyped, challenges are. As a proof of concept, this study also discusses a proprietary AI Teaching Assistant designed by Professor Joubin.

     Through case studies of teaching Shakespearean performance, this study offers intersectional strategies to teach with, rather than against, AI, and to produce knowledge collaboratively with students. We can use AI as a heuristic tool to teach metacognition, critical questioning, editing, bias detection, and prompt engineering skills. Sustaining passions for learning, these essential skills help students thrive in the inquiry-driven search culture we now live in.

     There are two challenges. The first challenge is false singularity. While the AI has deficient domain knowledge, it is able to simulate fluent prose which can be mistaken as the ultimate answer to a query. One solution is to promote critical AI literacy, which enables students to grasp the nature of AI-powered simulation, and to nurture metacognition, a self-reflexive understanding of one’s own learning and thought processes.

     The second challenge is the tendency to mistake AI synthesis for critical thinking, the solution to which is the flipped classroom. Instead of writing essays that respond to instructor-generate prompts, students construct open-ended but focused research questions that are refined through reiterative and interactive activities. As a probabilistic text generator, tools such as ChatGPT engage in a performative act of generating texts through paraphrases.

     Since the AI is coded to produce syntheses of anonymized public voices in its datasets, it is a ghost and synthetic version of the publics. AI throttles and controls the general public’s access to information. The fact that ChatGPT is a randomized representation of anonymized public voices makes it useful artistically, too. A number of artists and writers, including Mark Amerika and David Jhave Johnston, have already used ChatGPT as an aesthetic instrument.