Matthew Ng is the one of the winners of the Harbinger Prize 2025. This is his winning entry.

Artificial intelligence is undeniably a gamechanger for both young people and adults. With the help of AI, we’ve been able to aim for the highest of highs, in ways that human beings alone are simply incapable of doing. Its effect has been revolutionary, with many industries and enterprises embracing AI as if it were godsent.

From Amazon and Google to the UnitedHealth Group and Walmart, firms in the Fortune Global 500 list (an annual ranking of the 500 largest corporations in the US by revenue) have surely had to adapt to this new change or be eliminated.

As students, my peers and I are no exception to these drastic changes, as AI penetrates every aspect of our daily lives. For instance, the increasing popularity of generative chatbots such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek and Gemini has been met with heated debate in academia over its controversial use of copyrighted content, as well as the risk it poses to academic integrity. Concerns have also been raised over its possible enabling of plagiarism among students who over-rely on AI to complete tasks and assignments.

Relationship between science and the arts

It doesn’t help that there has been a greater push in education everywhere for STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) subjects as a strategy to encourage students in the world of AI – this really does not address our concerns and only exacerbates them further.

Many US colleges, including the University of Chicago, have announced that they are cutting the number of liberal arts admissions, due to the termination of federal grants for such programmes. This has also happened at Fudan University in Shanghai, a long-time stronghold of the arts and humanities among China’s top schools. This trend of slashing admissions is expected to continue globally.

While AI is not solely to blame for this, we must remain acutely vigilant of its impact on academia. Higher education has always prided itself on the range of disciplines it offers, as institutions seek to diversify through students from different demographics – but I doubt if that will continue to be the case.

Society’s growing preference for the sciences is the tip of the iceberg – the latter is the wider problem of an imbalance between the two disciplines. The sciences and the arts have always been an intersection; they aren’t mutually exclusive, but complement each other.

The critical and ethical aspects of philosophy and related domains have long shaped human research, helping to facilitate the seeking of new knowledge and discoveries. It is this nuanced framework that provides greater insights into humanity, and our future progress.

Not only does the prioritising of STEM harm the humanities, but it also hinders the development of science itself. Reducing the ways in which we study human experience will certainly lead to less holistic thinking, reasoning and criticism, which are all vital to understanding the complexities of our world.

Dangers of AI

Humanity’s embrace of AI, like any sort of advancement, has repercussions. Among them is our over-reliance on computer systems. If AI continues to replace our cognitive abilities to produce thoughts and formulate them into tangible, decipherable content, our efforts lose a sense of purpose.

I mean, why bother spending hours brainstorming an idea for a written piece, when AI can do it all for you, not just quicker but better?

 

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Most of my peers, including myself, have found it challenging to complete essays without the help of AI, as if our brains are unable to do it on their own. ‘Only use it to fix grammar and structure’, we keep reminding ourselves, as if we don’t ‘unintentionally’ plagiarise entire ideas from chatbots.

In a tragic paradox, we have used a core part of our own humanity – arts and culture – to engineer a tool beyond human, one that casts a growing shadow over our lives. It is simply reckless for us to take out the very arts and humanities that define our humanness, by giving space to an artificial creation that has no intention of stopping evolving.

By allowing this to happen, we risk losing the very essence of humanity – our ability to create and imagine the most wondrous of things and possibilities.

The harm engendered by AI in its current form still seems subtle, but we shouldn’t be surprised to see human artistry eliminated as people become more and more reliant on AI assistance for dealing with every task. With the very cultural foundation of humanity under risk, we must rethink our welcoming of AI with open arms, and whether it would be wiser to restrain and curb its growth.

Will our generation, and those to come, still have the liberty to dream big and fly high despite this technological revolution?

Creativity has always been our collective strength, and for that we should harness it to reach our full potential. This isn’t a declaration of war on AI, but a chance for us, young people, to reflect and attempt to strike a true balance between technology and humanity. We must ensure that AI isn’t just a product that displays our mastery over nature, but rather a helpful assistant to humanity.