Barriers to Artificial Intelligence (AI) Implementation in Humanities Research Across Arab Countries

Abstract

Human knowledge production and technological involvement have passed through three innovative stages in the last century: the manual period, the digital period, and the upcoming artificial intelligence (AI) period. The manual era was marked by manpower extensive empirical protocols, and the representatives of humanities conducted their work with the use of physical archives, handwritten notes and analog approaches to work with cultural and historical sources. The emerging age of AI expands these tools and advances with an injection of machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and more advanced pattern recognition to the research workflows which previously have only been made possible by extensive human effort, allowing more depth and scale of analysis than ever before. With regard to Arab world, this trend carries an immense promise. Although some countries of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) made significant investments in AI projects, leading to significant achievements in cultural heritage maintenance and language technologies, other states, especially those involved in conflicts or those with few economic resources, experience problems in operation at the same pace. It is the listing of major structural, institutional, and socio-cultural constraints to the use of AI in humanities research throughout the Arab world. The findings suggest that the targeted policy reforms, regional cooperation and capacity-building programs, and investment in open access digitization projects will be required. Limiting these obstacles, the Arab countries will be able not only to preserve the high cultural heritage but increase the involvement of worldwide scholarly communities in them, so that the AI revolution in the humanities can be inclusive and holistic in terms of representation