Acknowledgments

The work underlying this book was made possible in part by a New Frontiers grant awarded by the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell. I wish to thank the very first readers of this book, especially Marc Aymes, Morten Christiansen, Stéphane Delorme, Laurent Ferri, Paul Fleming, Jacob Matthews, and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, as well as the members of the Humanities Lab at Cornell and particularly my collaborators for the experimental work, the participants in “The Art and Science of Thinking” 2022 workshop and conference I directed and in the 2023 edition of “The Future of the Social Sciences” meeting organized by Victor Nee, the colleagues from the Humanities and AI faculty group I co-led with Fleming at Cornell in 2023, and the students attending the 2023 installment of the “Culture, Cognition, and the Humanities” seminar I co-teach with Christiansen.

Some ideas I am defending here about AI were first uttered in a roundtable I organized at Cornell in March 2023 titled “ChatGPT in the Humanities” and later published as “Metal Machine Music,” Harper’s Magazine, July 2024. It goes without saying that I am not trying here to represent the views of a group or of the individuals or institutions I just listed.