CAMBRIDGE — People facing a diagnosis of terminal illness, the Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross famously wrote, experience five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The same could also be said of our response to artificial intelligence (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 u