# Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence? **Author:** D. Graham Burnett **Published:** 26 April 2025 **Length:** Long-form essay (Reader reading time unavailable) ## In Summary Drawing on experiments with AI in his Princeton teaching, D. Graham Burnett argues that generative systems challenge the humanities' conventional emphasis on producing and transmitting scholarly knowledge. Students' conversations with chatbots about music, consciousness and attention provoke fascination, anxiety and reflection on what distinguishes lived experience from simulated understanding. Burnett suggests that the humanities might be renewed by attending less to accumulating answers and more to cultivating desire, judgement, existential questioning and the capacity to live with uncertainty. His predictions about academic publishing remain speculative. **Source:** [https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/will-the-humanities-survive-artificial-intelligence](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/will-the-humanities-survive-artificial-intelligence) ## What might this mean for us? Could Electric Dreams use dialogue with AI not simply to deliver information, but to make students' assumptions about creativity, attention and agency visible? Burnett's classroom examples suggest opportunities for reflective, discipline-led encounters with AI. How might pilots distinguish the experience of being heard by a responsive system from genuinely reciprocal human dialogue, while protecting the difficult questions and choices at the centre of creative education? ## Links in this reading - [Original essay, The New Yorker](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/will-the-humanities-survive-artificial-intelligence)