Sustainability and Artificial Intelligence: Necessary, Challenging, and Promising Intersections

The need for collaboration between diverse fields of research is increasingly recognised as important by research funding agencies. A significant driver of this need is the current revolution in artificial intelligence (AI) and related technologies. There is a growing interest in the potential impact of AI in different fields including the methodologies they use and the resulting advances in new knowledge, new access and enhanced productivity. However, there is also a corresponding increase in concern about the fundamentals of AI technologies and the way in which trans and/or interdisciplinary research is approached. The resulting collaboration too often ends up as a one-way street where the domain partner acts only as an information provider. For example, the contribution of the AHSS partner might be limited to providing insight about ethics and/or the technology partner may only provide a service to build applied AI-based solutions. In response to this problem, we propose a reciprocal approach to collaboration where both partners seek to understand, cooperate and identify jointly significant impacts. In this paper we explore this relationship between cultural heritage institutions (GLAMs), Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences (AHSS) research and technology-led AI research, especially the impact of current technological advances in AI. Drawing from the history of convergence in GLAM studies, we propose five key practices to form a framework for greater understanding across this divide.

AI literacy provides foundational competencies that support ethical, transparent, and sustainable technological development, although higher-order capabilities such as governance, critical evaluation, and strategic decision-making extend beyond basic literacy into advanced levels of AI competency. This study positions AI literacy as a governance capacity that complements and strengthens all 17 SDGs. It introduces a six-level taxonomy of artificial intelligence reasoning and ethics that extends traditional learning models by incorporating ethical judgement and strategic foresight. This taxonomy forms the foundation of an integrated framework linking education, governance, and sustainable development. A survey of 300 participants from diverse professional backgrounds within a national context which reveals strong technical awareness but limited ethical and governance readiness, highlighting critical gaps in public capacity to manage artificial intelligence responsibly. Findings show that ethical reasoning and reflective thinking are the strongest predictors of sustainable and trustworthy artificial intelligence use. The study proposed to embed literacy-based competencies into curricula, institutional policies, and governance mechanisms to accelerate equitable and responsible progress toward sustainable development goals

The extent to which Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies can trigger generalized paradigm shifts in science is unclear. Although these technologies have revolutionized data collection and analysis in specific fields, their overall impact depends on the scope and ways of adoption. We analyze over 227 million scholarly works from the OpenAlex collection (1960-2024) spanning four scientific domains and 46 fields. To distinguish the use of AI as research method (AI adoption) from mentioning AI-related terms (AI engagement), we developed a two-step AI-assisted semantic classification pipeline, validated through human coding of 911 abstracts and a robustness check on 348,000 full-text articles (PLOS One). We document differences in the timing and extent of AI adoption across domains, with generalized exponential growth after 2015. The transformative nature of this growth, however, is less apparent. AI-supported research is confined to a few topics with strong ties to Computer Science and conventional statistical frameworks, suggesting limited epistemological transformation. It is also associated with an unwarranted citation premium and substantially higher retraction rates than non-AI-supported. Geographically, while wealthy countries lead in AI publications per capita, global South countries in a belt from Indonesia to Algeria lead in AI adoption relative to their national output, signaling a distinctive resource concentration pattern. The transformative capacity of AI in science thus remains untapped, and its rapid adoption underlines challenges in research openness, transparency, reproducibility, and ethics. We discuss how best research practices could boost the benefits of AI adoption and highlight areas that warrant closer scrutiny.