In the spring of 2025, the federal government discovered a new humanities critic: ChatGPT. According to U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon’s May 7 ruling this year, officials with DOGE , the Department of Government Efficiency associated with Elon Musk ’s government-cutting campaign, used the chatbot to help decide whether National Endowment for the Humanities grants "related at all to DEI." The judge said the government had not meaningfully defined the term and ruled that the resulting mass