Statement on the Use of Artificial Intelligence
“I did not write this book in spite of AI. I wrote it with AI.” The position I stand by.
This book was written with the help of artificial intelligence.
But also with the insufferable Microsoft Word and its spellchecker, the splendid Google Sheets and its way with tables, the marvellous copy-and-paste and cut-and-paste, search engines, Wikipedia, French-language dictionaries (CNRTL, OQLF), specialized websites such as those of IBM, Oracle or Amazon Web Services, several hundred Google searches, at least as many articles and exchanges on LinkedIn, not to mention the endless discussions with my friend Éric Kavanagh or the provocative prodding of my colleague Marcello Vitali-Rosati, who agreed to be the critical reader of this book and whose remarks brought many improvements.
In other words, this book was written the way most serious texts are written today: through an ecosystem of tools, documents, software, sources, conversations and assorted mediations.
ChatGPT and Claude were used at many stages: to explore avenues, propose terms, discuss definitions, test formulations, criticize certain passages, suggest improvements, spot ambiguities, rephrase sentences, apply systematic corrections, prepare the final manuscript, and so on. But these systems were only an aid, and never exercised an author’s judgment over the content of the book, its structure, its approach, its conceptual choices, its final wording. Those decisions belong to the author. The systems’ proposals were systematically assessed, verified, accepted, modified or rejected.
I did not write this book in spite of AI. I wrote it with AI.
And, to be honest, I have no idea whether it took me more or less time in the end than it would have without AI, so many hundreds of times did I go back and forth between my thoughts, tools, documents, sources, conversations with AI, conversations with colleagues, online exchanges, notes taken and other bursts of inspiration in the shower… No prompt could have generated this book.
Like every intellectual technology before it — from the clay tablet to the printed book, from the word processor to the search engine — AI has become one working instrument among others, at least for those who do not want to give up their capacity to think and who have understood that there is no prompt magic.
AI does not do away with the work of writing: it inserts a new layer of labour, faster and more efficient in some respects but no less intellectually demanding and laborious, whether in ideation, structuring, background research, putting into words, rephrasing, correcting or proofreading — and all of this without ever taking the place of the author, in order, finally, to stimulate us and push us towards even higher standards.
If some pages of this book strike you as illuminating, the credit goes to the quality of the intellectual work I put into them. If they strike you as questionable or inaccurate, the responsibility is likewise mine.
Artificial intelligence can assist with writing. It never exempts us from thinking.
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How to cite this text
Vial, S. (2026). Statement on the use of artificial intelligence. In A Living Lexicon of Artificial Intelligence (pp. 129–130). Stéphane Vial, publisher, Montréal.
