I'm attending a digital humanities event in Montreal. There was a keynote on AI and something about the talk made me wonder if it had been written by Claude. I said as much in the Q&A. As I posed the question, the speaker shifted, looking slightly uncomfortable. What he said next shocked the room + In fact, the speaker admitted to "working very closely with Claude", to the point where he's currently "writing" a book entirely written by AI. People in the amphitheater gasped. The speaker - a scholar from France - then shared that his "experiment" has led him to feel useless as an intellectual. There's so much to say about this, but what is particularly striking is that the keynote speaker said absolutely nothing about using Claude to write his academic work until I intervened in the Q&A. It appears that he was not going to share this fairly important detail unless asked.. The moment was shocking for us in the audience. I was surprised at the level of anger expressed by colleagues - many of whom are experts in digital humanities - who came up to me afterwards, appalled to have sat through a keynote in which the speaker belatedly confessed to "authoring a book" with AI I could scarcely believe my intuition was right. I sort of said it as a joke -- "How do we know your talk wasn't written by AI?" But in truth, something in the rhetoric, argumentation, possibly even the tone, felt AI-ish. When he shifted in his seat, I thought he was offended by the implication.. Perhaps he was uncomfortable with being clocked. After all, he did not share at any point in the talk that he "works very closely with Claude". But I notice that he strangely encouraged the audience to work with AI as much as possible, romanticized "getting better" with prompts the "more you use it" I'd been interested in some of what he said at the beginning of his talk about feminist standpoint theory, the fact that all knowledge is situated despite efforts of those pushing AI to assert technological neutrality. There was a passing reference to the Western-bias of algorithms, etc, and yet + He kept coming back, repeatedly (in the way AI often loops) to this idea of AI (specifically Claude) representing "a position without an address", and it became increasingly clear to me that there was some odd mystification happening. Of course LLM products have an address. It's a corporate address. I said as much in the Q&A, pointing out this pattern of mystification in his talk, asking why he didn't frame any of the phenomena he was describing in terms of a Marxist analysis of the ways in which tech companies are seizing the means of mental production to enrich a tiny power hungry minority + .. and impose ever-increasing mechanisms of social control. He didn't answer that question. In fact, he was not able to answer most questions colleagues asked in the Q&A. Someone asked him about Heidegger since he talked at length about phenomenology. He had no response. Did he need to ask Claude? Anyway. Back to this man telling the audience he felt useless. It's actually worse than that. He said he felt we would all be rendered useless by AI's computational prowess. This reminded me immediately of the Ivy-league professor who recently penned an op-ed calling himself useless in the age of AI I actually had a conversation with the keynote speaker afterwards, and told him what a shame it was that he allowed an LLM to make him believe in his own worthlessness. I tried to reason with him: "That's exactly what these companies want you to believe, and it's ridiculous." He was unmoved.. As I walked away, I had another funny feeling. What if this "book" and his entire "experiment" is funded by an AI company? This is exactly the kind of "scholarship" tech bro overlords want -- influential academics, preferably men, telling the rest of us that we are now useless in the age of AI. I'm still not angry like many of my colleagues in the digital humanities who were deeply offended to realize they sat through a talk by a scholar who confessed, ONLY when asked, to "writing" his entire book with AI and proudly proclaiming that his goal was to not write a single word himself.. I did actually find the talk thought provoking and brilliant, albeit in a diabolical way. It raised many reflections for me, but more than anything, an embodied feeling -- a sense that something wasn't right. And to receive that confirmation in real time was one of the wildest moments in my career.. Interestingly, the intuition I felt and spoke from -- that embodied knowing -- is precisely the kind of thing AI, for all of its performative anthropomorphic gesturing at the simulacrum of personhood, can't do. Tech billionaires want us to believe that our embodied/human ways of knowing are useless! Last thing for now: He never directly said the keynote was written by Claude. What he admitted was worse--an entire current book authored by AI. We were all left to infer what it meant for him to "work closely with AI" in relation to the keynote itself. And none of this was mentioned until I asked.