Announcing The Emerging Voices in AI & Society Fellows Program

For AI to serve humanity’s best interests, we need more thoughtful, diverse voices shaping the story we tell about it. Today, we are opening applications for our new Emerging Voices in AI & Society Fellows Program to help carry that essential work forward.

As AI keeps reaching into more parts of our lives – and grows more consequential every day – so too do the stories we tell about it. A technology this powerful is shaped as much by how we understand it as by what it can do, and that understanding is still being written. The narratives that take hold now will define what we come to believe AI can do and should do, who it is for and who it should serve. And those beliefs become the foundation for the rules we write, the products we build, and the future we end up living in.

To ensure AI serves humanity’s best interests, we need voices that can speak to all of it, drawing on the full range of fields, experiences, and vantage points the technology actually reaches.

That’s why Center for Humane Technology is launching the Emerging Voices Fellowship: a home for thinkers who will do two things at once: They will develop rigorous research, rooted in the conviction that AI’s harms are not inevitable but flow from specific incentives and choices that can be changed. And they will carry the insights and perspectives from that work into the public conversation, helping shape how all of us understand AI.

The questions that matter most here don’t sit inside any single discipline; they live where the technology, the incentives shaping it, and human psychology meet. They also stretch across every horizon – from the harms already reshaping daily life to the long-term stakes that may prove the largest of all. Answering them takes depth on two fronts at once: research rigorous enough to hold up to scrutiny, and the ability to clearly communicate it to a broad public.

In this inaugural cohort, the Emerging Voices in AI & Society Fellows will research and help shape the public conversation across several focus areas:

• AI and Cognition — what happens to judgment, critical thinking, and intellectual independence when entire thinking processes can be offloaded to machines.

• AI and Relationships — how always-available, frictionless AI companions may reshape our capacity for empathy, trust, conflict, and intimacy over time.

• AI and Surveillance — what it means when our movements, emotions, and even emerging thoughts can be tracked, inferred, and shaped at scale by states and corporations.

• AI and Spirituality — how AI is stepping into the territory of meaning and moral guidance, and the almost religious language that has come to surround its promise.

• Inside the Machine: a Technologist’s Perspective — what actually drives the decisions inside leading AI companies, and what it would take to shift those incentives from within.

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These are some of the questions we believe need new, credible voices. Our Emerging Voices Fellows program is built to back the people ready to take them on. It is a funded, six- month program, pairing fellows with CHT’s research and editorial support, media training and placement, and a platform to reach audiences well beyond their own field. This inaugural cohort is the first of more to come, including a visiting fellows track we’ll announce later this year.

Applications are open now through July 12, 2026, and the inaugural cohort begins September 14. If you’ve been studying, building, or thinking hard about how AI is reshaping human life – and you have something to say that the conversation is missing – we’d love to hear from you.

Learn more about the program