Having posted two blogs on HASTAC about AI, I’ve decided to write an (ir)regular series of posts on this topic, entitled “Intelligent Artifice: Thinking Wisely and Well With, Through, About, Around, and Despite AI.” I’ll be posting this on HASTAC Commons as well as on this author blog.

Neither an AI booster nor an AI hater, I believe that we need to use our own best human intelligence to gain a better hold on this automated, computational tool that can dramatically change our lives. Right now, it is up to us to decide how we want, as individuals, to use or not use AI. It is up to our schools and communities to make the same decision. And it is up to our local, state, federal, and international governance bodies to make such intelligent decisions to. How can we use this powerful information tool for good? How much damage can it do to us if used for malignant, authoritarian, oligarchic purposes?

In short, the motivation of my blog is to find ways to give us agencyand responsibility for intelligently, humanly managing and controlling AI. I’ll be reviewing books on AI that I’m reading, new experiments being conducted, new research projects, and new ideas that I encounter on social media (@cathyndavidson.bsky.social) and elsewhere.

I am engaged in this extensive, in depth research on AI because I am currently writing a book that offers a long, historical view on today’s AI with the pragmatic goal of helping readers to gain a better hold on what AI can and cannot do and what benefits and risks it offers to us as individuals, communities, nations, and as a planet. I want individuals to have tools to make intelligent decisions about Artificial Intelligence, and to make claims, offer opinions, and exert control, choice and responsibility more confidently. Far too many of the books on AI are as full of hype and hysterial (positive and negative) as the pundits. I’ve now read some forty books and myriad articles on this subject, both on my own and in tandem with my excellent colleagues in the ST&SV (Society, Technology, and Social Values) Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ). I’ll be posting reviews of these books and articles, and also offering general observations when I read “breaking news” about some new AI development.

My goal is to illuminate where things are murky, offer advice where I can, and to offer other sources for readers to turn to.

I welcome comments in the comment section below. I hope the HASTAC community will jump in, adding ideas, asserting contrary opinions when you have them, adding citations, agreeing or disagreeing.

I have written two “Intelligent Artifice” posts to date. They are:

“Artificial Ignorance and Data Sycophancy”

“Auditing AI: A Great Book That Holds AI Accountable—And Shows How We Can Too”