• The editorial director of NotebookLM told BI that humanities skills are gaining value in AI.
• Steven Johnson says a new "AI wrangler" role requires knowledge of models and what they can do.
• He said philosophical and psychological skills are increasingly important.

Traditionally, a degree in the humanities wouldn't translate to a job in tech — but that might change in the age of AI.

In an interview with Business Insider, Steven Johnson, who co-founded several startups and worked as an author before becoming editorial director of NotebookLM at Google Labs, said humanities might be making a comeback.

Johnson, who is helping to build Google's AI-powered note-taking and research tool NotebookLM, said in the age of large language models, there's a "revenge of the humanities." Not only is an English major valuable, but philosophical and psychological skills are also useful.

"There's just a whole set of questions around AI that no one was thinking about, except for philosophers, until about two years ago," Johnson said, adding that "those kinds of philosophical skills are really important."

Johnson said fine-tuning a model's tone and conversational mode is a "huge part" of the product. He pointed to Amanda Askell, a philosopher who works as an alignment fine-tuning researcher for Anthropic, as an example of someone who does "character training" for AI models.

In a June interview posted by Anthropic on YouTube, Askell said philosophy doesn't always line up with every aspect of her work, but building Claude's character feels "philosophically rich." She said she has to work through complex questions like whether AI models should have moral considerations and what human principles they should be trained on.

"Lots of people are like, 'See, I told you the degree would be useful,'" Askell said in response to a question about whether it was strange to be a philosopher training an AI model.

Google and Anthropic aren't the only companies recognizing the value of a humanities degree. One AI startup founder told BI they seek out and said those with liberal arts backgrounds have a "creative and human-centric approach" and a strong understanding of how AI can be applied in their fields.

The role of the 'AI wrangler'

When he started at Google Labs, Johnson initially helped write prompts for AI models. As the AI boom took off, the role of prompt engineer similarly captured the attention of other English majors interested in AI.

Johnson said that prompting will change, especially as AI models improve at rewriting prompts — but a new role, which he referred to as the "AI wrangler," has emerged.

"That's maybe the next stage of the prompt engineer," Johnson said.

Johnson describes the AI wrangler role as not necessarily requiring coding expertise but involving deep knowledge of the latest models and their capabilities.

For example, if someone wants to create a 30-second animated video with AI, the AI wrangler would know the best tool for that task and how to use it, Johnson said. He said the role requires a "certain level of technical sophistication" but doesn't require knowing how to program.

Johnson said one of the most important skills to learn right now is fluency in the latest models and their functions.

"That's just a general purpose skill that is actually going to be valuable in every single industry," Johnson said.

Technical skills aren't going away

While there may be a growing need for humanities skills to help build how models interact, that doesn't mean that technical skills are no longer valuable or necessary. Those from a humanities background may need to skill up in technical areas to open up opportunities for themselves in the field.

A Google AI sales leader who studied journalism and started his career in filmmaking eventually joined the tech giant in its media, entertainment, and gaming sectors for AI sales. However, he told BI he had to earn technical certifications and work his way up in engineering roles before taking on AI leadership roles.

Johnson, a published author of 14 books, came to Google with a strong understanding of technology, having sold startups and written extensively on the subject.

"If you're going to try and make API calls to a bunch of these models, you probably need some more technical skills," Johnson said, adding that " if someone wants to hire you to get the best outputs out of the best models, you don't really need a lot of technical skills to do that."

Who hasn’t sat up at night, pondering what it would be like to play a musical mobile game about peanut butter and jelly, performed in faux Shakespearean verse and animated in the style of Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python shorts? Well, wonder no more: The absurdist PBJ - The Musical (first previewed at Day of the Devs ’24) heads to the App Store on March 26.

Kamibox’s PBJ - The Musical is a collaboration between studio founder Philipp Stollenmayer and English musician and comedian Lorraine Bowen, famous for the delightfully whimsical “The Crumble Song.” “When I saw Lorraine performing on Britain’s Got Talent in 2015, getting the Golden Buzzer from David Walliams, I knew I wanted to make something with her,” Stollenmayer said. “The quirkiness of her songs totally resonated with the vibe of my games,” which include Sometimes You Die and the thematically similar Bacon - The Game.

Kamibox

PBJ - The Musical borrows elements of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, blending it with musical theatre (performed mostly by children!) and animated paper landscapes from actual cutouts. (When he isn’t designing deceptively zany games, Stollenmayer is also a papercraft artist.) Peanut Boy, hailing from a black and white post-war America, steps in for Romeo, while Strawberry Girl, from a colorful and sweet world that raves of royalty, tackles the game’s equivalent of Juliet. You control characters through simple taps and drags as you push and pull cutout figures through the diorama.

The developer says that, unlike the Bard’s version, this is no tragic play culminating in dual suicides. (Or, at least, not the kind to be sad about.) Kamibox says the game’s happy ending involves — surprise! — the creation of the beloved peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which a modern-day Shakespeare may have called “The brightest heaven of invention” as he packed little Susanna’s lunchbox.

You can catch a snippet of the zany PBJ - The Musical in the trailer below. It arrives for iPhone and iPad on March 26 for $4. You can preorder it now in the App Store.

There's more nuance to Doomguy than him just being a fella who eradicates hellspawn with the BFG. He's quite the art connoisseur as well — or at least that's what a new Doom mod might have you believe.

Modders Filippo Meozzi and Liam Stone turned E1M1, the first map in the original game, into an interactive art gallery. Doom: The Gallery Experience, which is a free browser game on Itch.io and Newgrounds, sees Doomguy wielding a glass of wine or can of beer as he peruses classic works of art, collects cash and listens to Johann Sebastian Bach's "Suite No. 1 in G major."

"Doom: The Gallery Experience was created as an art piece designed to parody the wonderfully pretentious world of gallery openings," the game's Itch.io page reads. "In this experience, you will be able to walk around and appreciate some fine art while sipping some wine and enjoying the complimentary hors d’oeuvres in the beautifully renovated and re-imagined E1M1 of id Software's Doom (1993)."

You can use the cash to buy items like socks and a tote from the gift shop, and munch on hors d'oeuvres to fill up a cheese meter (there's one for drinks too). Doomguy even sports a pair of fashionable glasses here. 

When you interact with artworks such as Jacopo da Sellaio's Scenes from the Story of the Argonauts or Piero di Cosimo's The Return from the Hunt, you'll see a link to the relevant Metropolitan Museum of Art webpage. Alternatively, Doomguy might tell you he doesn't want to look at a particular piece anymore. Maybe he just wants to get back to shooting demons. Same, Doomguy, same.

It's the start of a new year, which means a fresh crop of creative works have entered the public domain. Today, many materials that were copyrighted in 1929, along with sound recordings from 1924, become fair game to freely adapt, reuse, copy and share. The Center for Public Domain at Duke Law School collected some of the more notable properties that entered public domain with the start of 2025.

This is a big year when it comes to film, with several seminal directors debuting their first projects with sound, such as Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail and Cecil B. DeMille's Dynamite. 1929 was also the year when Walt Disney directed the iconic Skeleton Dance short animated by Ub Iwerks, as well as when Mickey Mouse starred in his first talkie. The intrepid Tintin and original Popeye characters have arrived in the public domain as well.

The compositions for several great songs joined the public domain today. There are memorable show tunes like Singin' in the Rain and An American in Paris alongside jazz standards Ain't Misbehavin' and (What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue and classical hits like the masterwork Boléro. On the recording side are tracks like George Gershwin's beautiful Rhapsody in Blue and the legendary singer Marian Anderson's take on My Way's Cloudy.

Finally, several authors had titles in the Duke Law roundup. Noir fans will be happy to see Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest here. Other notable literary works now in public domain include A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemmingway, Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. And for the verse lovers, the original German version of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet is also on the list.

Yesterday, at the Disney APAC Content Showcase in Singapore, the company revealed Volume 3 of Star Wars: Visions. This anthology of nine short animations from nine separate anime studios is set to release next year. In keeping with tradition from prior volumes, each studio is allowed considerable creative freedom and will likely produce shorts with distinctive art styles that fans will recognize instantly.

Based on the Star Wars website’s blog post, we can immediately see four returning studios: Kamikaze Douga, Kinema citrus Co., Production I.G and TRIGGER. These studios are responsible for anime adaptations of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Made in Abyss, Haikyu!! and Kill la Kill, respectively.

To improve the diversity of styles, Disney invited five new studios to create the remaining shorts. They are ANIMA (collaborating with Kamikaze Douga), David Production, Polygon Pictures, Project Studio Q and WIT Studio.

ANIMA is an animation studio specializing in 3D CG movies, and you may know it as the studio behind cutscenes from Xenoblade 3, certain Fire Emblem Heroes movies and Pokemon Unite. David Production animated Fire Force and Undead Unluck, among many other anime. Some Star Wars: The Clone Wars episodes and Tron: Uprising were Polygon Pictures’ work.

Project Studio Q is a less-known name, but it’s responsible for some 3D animation in DARLING in the FRANXX episodes. As for WIT Studio, it’s of Spy x Family and Attack on Titan (the first three seasons) fame.

With such a stacked roster of studios, Disney is sparing no expense on this anthology. The wait might be long, but Volumes 1 and 2 are still available on Disney+.