Chatbots and the Craft of Ethnography: Exploring AI's Impact on Anthropological Teaching and Practice

This paper examines how AI chatbots are reshaping ethnographic pedagogy and practice through four short encounters. We argue that the emergence of large language models (LLMs) presents anthropological education with challenges comparable to the crisis of representation in the 1980s, forcing us to reconsider fundamental questions of authorship, authority and the relationship between experience and text. Through examining the use of AI chatbots in thesis writing, theoretical engagement, fieldnote analysis, and questions of authenticity, we demonstrate how generative AI both threatens core ethnographic practices – and has the potential to enrich them. We suggest the importance of an ’AI literacy’ that moves beyond a skill-focus towards strategic and critical engagement with chatbots while preserving anthropology's commitment to experiential knowledge and careful observation. Our findings suggest the need for new pedagogical approaches that neither fully embrace nor reject AI, but rather incorporate it as another methodological mirror for anthropological reflection.