Society of Fellows Alumnus D. Graham Burnett (1997–1999) wrote the April 26, 2025 "Weekend Essay" for The New Yorker on the impact of AI on the humanities. "Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?" examines the influences, risks, and limitations of AI, and probes into the intrinsic character of the humanities.

"...An assignment in my class asked students to engage one of the new A.I. tools in a conversation about the history of attention. The idea was to let them take a topic that they now understood in some depth and explore what these systems could do with it. It was also a chance to confront the attention economy’s “killer app”: totally algorithmic pseudo-persons who are sensitive, competent, and infinitely patient; know everything about everyone; and will, of course, be turned to the business of extracting money from us. These systems promise a new mode of attention capture—what some are calling the “intimacy economy” (“human fracking” comes closer to the truth).

The assignment was simple: have a conversation with a chatbot about the history of attention, edit the text down to four pages, and turn it in.

Reading the results, on my living-room couch, turned out to be the most profound experience of my teaching career. I’m not sure how to describe it. In a basic way, I felt I was watching a new kind of creature being born, and also watching a generation come face to face with that birth: an encounter with something part sibling, part rival, part careless child-god, part mechanomorphic shadow—an alien familiar..."

Continue reading at newyorker.com.