When I was interviewing people in China about AI anxiety and job loss, the roles unexpectedly reversed. “Are you anxious about being replaced?” they asked me.
Journalism and the arts, once warned of shrinking prospects, are now among the first fields disrupted by artificial intelligence. We have moved beyond a simple job market shift, and are now forced to ask if academic and professional disciplines are worth preserving when their technical cores are so easily automated.
Universities are quickly providing the answers.
Earlier this month, the Communication University of China —one of the country’s leading arts and media schools — made headlines for canceling five majors, including photography, comics, and visual communication design. They’ve been folded into new AI-infused programs with names like “intelligent imaging art.” Around the same time, my alma mater, the University of Hong Kong, began promoting what it calls Asia’s first master’s degree in AI filmmaking, under a newly renamed School of Future Media.
These are not isolated changes. Across China, universities are quietly redrawing the boundaries of what counts as a “creative” education, aligning with a broader push to expand AI, data, and science programs.
The solution includes shutting down some subjects and redesigning the curriculum in a way that allows graduates to “bridge the future.” The goal is to learn what work they could hand over to AI, the head of the Communication University said to the press. A total of 8 out of 29 newly added university majors in China last year were under the discipline of creative arts, according to official records.
Elsewhere, particularly in the U.S., arts and humanities programs have been shrinking for years, largely due to declining student demand and economic pressure. But at the same time, despite controversy, a range of higher education institutions are also adding new AI art majors to keep up with the times.
When I spoke to Jack Linzhou Xing, a postdoctoral fellow who researches China’s tech and society at Harvard University, for the AI anxiety story, he said the country, and also the world, is undergoing a transition phase where there is a mismatch between university education and the job market.
“So in the short run, AI will be unsettling. It will create job loss, and many young people may feel a lot of pressure because of how society — and education — has been structured,” he told me.
In China, as in much of Asia, students are often steered toward math and science. That rigidity makes the disruption that AI is bringing harder to absorb. Those who are not in these disciplines, or being pushed out of a job because of AI, are left more vulnerable, Xing said.
“But in the long run, I am actually more optimistic,” he said.
“Maybe this will make society finally rethink the true values of work and living.”
My interviewees in China were right to turn the tables: I should be worried, but not for the reasons I once thought. The real threat to journalism — and every other field — isn’t just a “better writing machine.” It’s a crisis of purpose. We are all being pushed to define why our work matters in an automated world. Only by distilling what remains irreducibly human can we answer the question those strangers asked me, and see the value in what we do.
