People facing a diagnosis of terminal illness, the Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross famously wrote, experience five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The same could also be said of our response to AI’s rapidly expanding capabilities.

At first, it seemed as if AI would not amount to more than a glorified search engine or a chatbot that does a decent job of simulating a human being. That made it easy enough to deny that the technology would have much impact on our lives or professions.

Then AI started cropping up everywhere and in the most infuriating ways. Its influence appeared in lawyers’ briefs with hallucinated case references; in software code with mistakes and security vulnerabilities; in customer service bots that went off script; and (a particular source of irritation for academics like me) in student essays and assignments. These were all good reasons for getting mad.

But then AI got better. The fabrications, hallucinations and mistakes grew rarer. As it became obvious that AI use by students was unstoppable, many started to see an upside in the technology’s potential to enhance learning. It was time to negotiate. We would need to make all kinds of adjustments in how we worked but we told ourselves that there were still inherent limits to what AI could do. It could undertake a vast amount of cognitive and analytical work, and much faster than any human, but questions of........

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