Philosophy Journal Publishes Largely AI-Authored Article — On Purpose (guest post)

Philosophy & Public Affairs recently—and knowingly—published an article written mostly by Claude, Anthropic’s LLM. The article’s thesis was supplied by Simon Goldstein, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Hong Kong, who, he says, “worked with Claude the way a heavy-handed supervisor writes with a PhD student in some fields.” Professor Goldstein edited some of Claude’s writing, focused the topic, developed some of the article’s arguments, corrected some errors, and approved the various drafts. Claude did the rest. In the guest post below, Professor Goldstein explains his process, explains why he did it, offers some advice for others interested in having AIs write philosophy, and raises some questions about it all. The author of the published PPA article is listed as “Simon Goldstein”. Claude’s use is mentioned in the “acknowledgments” section of the paper, which, under the journal’s current layout, appears at the end of the article. Claude is not listed as an author,…