Beyond AI literacy to irreplaceable human capacities: What nursing education must teach in the AI era

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has prompted urgent calls for AI literacy in nursing education, yet literacy in operating AI tools is no longer a sufficient educational goal. As AI absorbs more routine cognitive and technical work, the more consequential question becomes which forms of human thinking grow more essential when AI is ubiquitous. This short communication argues that nursing education must deliberately cultivate the human capacities AI does not supply-clinical judgment, contextual interpretation, meaning-making, and, as its central focus, interdisciplinary creativity. These are framed not as new educational aims but as long-standing nursing commitments-including clinical judgment, reflective practice, and professional formation-whose relative importance and visibility AI renders newly decisive. The paper develops interdisciplinary creativity as a professional necessity: not the juxtaposition of nursing and data science but the construction of conceptual bridges through which their knowledge becomes mutually intelligible. It distinguishes genuine integration from mere combination, names what is lost when a clinical construct is reduced to a model variable, and argues that nurses should be prepared to contribute to-not merely use-AI. The argument is then translated into concrete pedagogical, assessment, and faculty-development practices, including an ethic of interdisciplinary supervision and a frank account of the structural barriers such work confronts. Offered as a framing and a research agenda rather than a settled prescription, it suggests that teaching nurses to use AI, without cultivating these capacities, risks preparing them for a world that will no longer need them.