08/25/2025
When the historian D. Graham Burnett first asked his class of 30 Princeton undergraduates whether any had used A.I., not a single hand went up. Even after some enthusiastic prodding (“Hey! I use these tools! They’re incredible! Let’s talk about this!”), he got nowhere. He soon found out that nearly every syllabus now included a warning: Use ChatGPT or similar tools, and you’ll be reported to the academic deans. Nobody wanted to risk it.
But Burnett didn’t want to pretend that “the most significant revolution in the world of thought in the past century” wasn’t happening. Instead, he assigned his students an unorthodox philosophy project: 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,” Burnett writes. Read the full story: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/6bvNIU
