Why AI is Ultimate Case for the Liberal Arts
I spent ten minutes the other day engaging in a digital tug-of-war with an AI chatbot. I was testing a meme I had seen online regarding a seemingly simple question: How many “r’s” are in the word strawberry?
The chatbot, which happens to have a female voice and is friendly in a way that makes me suspicious, declared with absolute certainty that there are two “r’s ’” in strawberry. When I asked if she was sure, the bot replied, “Yes, definitely,” then spelled the word incorrectly to prove the point. I spelled it correctly; the bot agreed with my spelling, yet she still only saw two “r’s” in the word. We went in circles—an endless loop of polite, confident error.
AI experts tell us this specific disagreement about reality stems from tokenization—the way these models process groups of characters rather than individual letters. That is technically true. But from where I sit, it is a perfect illustration of why, in our AI-engaged future, an educated “human-in-the-loop” matters so much. AI is the ultimate use case for the very thing society has been devaluing for decades: A university education with a core of foundational human knowledge, the liberal arts.
There is no disputing the incredible feats that AI can accomplish. Need a gap analysis of a report you wrote, based on the source documents? Easy. Need a thematic analysis of seventy-five budget initiative proposals? No sweat. Want an analysis of your last five years’ performance on your Peloton bike? On it.
But the limits of AI are just as evident. Beyond the “strawberry” problem, there is the example of a YouTuber showing an AI bot an upside-down cup and asking how he might drink from it. The AI responded confidently: “You can’t. It’s a novelty cup.” When the YouTuber turned it over, the AI didn’t skip a beat: “Oh, I see it now. It’s one of those reversible cups.”
That is authoritative nonsense, a mimicry of logic that lacks any grounding in reality. To navigate a world flooded with this kind of nonsense, we don’t need more “prompt engineers.” We need “human interrogators”—individuals who possess the specific tools from the liberal arts to bridge the gap between a machine’s probabilistic guesses and the actual truth.
As a higher education administrator, I have been in the rooms where the fate of the liberal arts is decided. It is time we rethink the math of higher education. In an AI-engaged world, the most technical and irreplaceable skill of all is the ability to relentlessly interrogate the machine using the knowledge and skills the liberal arts teach us.
Think about four pillars of education we often take for granted: Literacy, Mathematics, Scientific Inquiry, and Critical Thinking.
Literacy in the age of AI isn’t just about reading and writing; it’s about discerning intent. AI can generate a seemingly thoughtful essay in milliseconds and the human-in-the-loop needs disciplinary expertise and a hyper-developed sense of rhetoric to see where the machine is substituting smooth-sounding platitudes for actual insight. Literacy today includes the ability to place a human spark in a firestorm of synthetic text.
Mathematics remains essential, not so we can out-calculate the computer, but so we can understand the nature of probability. An AI bot isn’t thinking—it is just predicting the next most likely character or token. When we understand the math, we lose our awe of the machine’s “intelligence” and gain a healthy skepticism of its certainty. We must realize that probability is not the same thing as truth.
Scientific Inquiry is our best defense against the “upside-down cup” problem. It is the process of checking claims against reality. It teaches us to ask: Does this output align with the physical laws of physics? Can it be replicated? It forces us to step outside the digital interface and check the bot’s laughable “reversible cup” theory against the reality of an upside-down ceramic object sitting on the table.
Finally, Critical Thinking is the foundation of effective use of AI. We should be working to produce graduates who don’t merely know how to operate the machine to save time. Society needs graduates who will critically, deeply, and relentlessly interrogate the machine — individuals with the disciplinary knowledge to know when the output is biased, hallucinated, or fundamentally hollow.
The liberal arts have always been the “freeing arts”—the skills required for a citizen to be truly self-governing. In a world where algorithms increasingly curate our reality, being “free” means knowing how many “r’s” are in strawberry even when the most powerful technology in human history insists they aren’t there.
We cannot afford to give up on human intelligence. We need to foreground the liberal arts as the most essential vocational training of the twenty-first century. Society doesn’t just need AI-literate operators; it needs a generation of thinkers who can look a confident machine in the eye and tell it exactly where, why, and how it is wrong.
About the University of Wisconsin–Parkside
Since its founding in 1968, the University of Wisconsin-Parkside has been a trusted partner for the region’s higher educational needs, empowering students to thrive, advancing applied knowledge, and developing talent for the future. The university offers undergraduate and graduate degrees, as well as certificates and pre-professional programs, designed to foster personal and professional growth through real-world and impactful learning experiences. Located in the dynamic Chicago-Milwaukee corridor, UW-Parkside offers unmatched access to world-class internships, professional networks, and endless career-building opportunities, placing students at the center of it all.
Media Contact:
Communications Manager
University of Wisconsin-Parkside
marcomm@uwp.edu