The technological advances and broad applications of artificial intelligence (AI) have profoundly impacted nearly every aspect of human society. But while AI may offer potential solutions to some of the world’s most intractable problems, it also comes with its own perils. Increasingly, the same tools that promise creative innovations, democratic access and economic growth may also reiterate structural inequities, increase corporate influence and jeopardize lives, careers and the environment. 

The Society of Fellows 2025-26 theme, Creativity | Intelligence | Automation, foregrounds the challenges and opportunities of automation and alerts us to the ethical obligations arising from the simulation of human intelligence. For example: How might the history of automation inform how we reckon with this new age? How does this moment push us to reimagine the nature of intelligence? How might we hold to account the automation of biases and erasures? Are there intelligences that should not be automated? What happens to artistic life when creative labor is automated? What other intelligences might we turn to beyond doctrines of human uniqueness? 

The Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme invites Society of Fellows graduate applicants whose projects grapple with the relationship between creativity, intelligence and automation. We welcome projects that compel new understandings of techno-human interdependencies and histories; automation and the politics of labor; theories of personhood; and forms of performativity, communication, learning and cultural expression. The theme focuses on how creativity, intelligence and automation operate across different scales in global contexts and within wider assemblages of biomedical, communicative, cultural, educational, environmental, geopolitical, socioeconomic, carceral and technoscientific forces and relations.