Artificial Intelligence and the Sociological Profession: epistemic capture and Public Sociology in the Algorithmic Age

The advent of generative artificial intelligence is not only a technological transformation. It is also an epistemological, professional, and public challenge for the social sciences. This article examines how artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the conditions of sociological work and asks what this transformation means for the future of sociology. The article builds on debates around public sociology in the digital age, epistemic inequalities in the global academic field, AI ethics, and the emerging sociology of artificial intelligence. Its central thesis is exploratory: AI is changing not only the objects of sociological inquiry, but also the ways in which sociological knowledge is produced, evaluated, and communicated. To develop this argument, the article brings together Michael Burawoy’s public sociology and the notion of living sociology, Paolo Benanti’s concept of algorethics (algoretica), and the tradition of Catholic social thought, from Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum to Pope Francis’s G7 address on artificial intelligence and Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. On this basis, the article identifies three interconnected dimensions of the current transformation: the reorganisation of epistemic labour, the intensification of centre–periphery dynamics, and the risk of epistemic capture. The article concludes by outlining the idea of a “reflexive public sociology”: a sociology capable of engaging with AI both as an object of study and as a constitutive element of its own scientific, professional, and public practice.