Reclaiming Purpose

AI Disclaimer

I used AI in the writing of this book, and because I believe that transparency in the use of AI is an ethical imperative, I will identify those uses:

• First, I used AI as a research assistant, sometimes when seeking an answer to a quick question, such as “Who were the leading researchers that attended the Dartmouth Conference of 1956,” and sometimes for more complicated items, such as “explain backpropagation.”
• Second, I used it as an editorial assistant, as when I asked it to review all nine chapters of the book and to flag redundancies. It was incredibly good at such a task and saved me a lot of time.
• Finally, I used it as a synthetic reader in role-play, uploading a chapter and asking, “What would a critic say of our argument here?” Again, it was a valuable partner in flagging gaps in my arguments or perspectives I had not considered. I then revised accordingly.

I did not use AI to write, as it remains “meh” at best and I write to think, a function I did not want to surrender to a large language model.