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, because, as PPA’s editor-in-chief Jason Brennan (Georgetown) explained in an email, Wiley, PPA’s publisher, does not allow AI systems to be listed as authors. But it does not rule out their use. He writes, “Wiley’s guidelines (like those of many other publishers) expressly state that the use of AI in manuscript development is not itself grounds for rejection, and they contemplate substantial uses—including text generation, restructuring arguments, and assistance with argument and logic—provided those uses are appropriately disclosed and the human author remains responsible for the work.” In response to questions about the journal’s policies regarding AI use by authors, Professor Brennan said: PPA does not currently have a formal policy governing authors’ use of generative AI. The norms surrounding AI-assisted scholarship are developing and changing quickly, and I don’t think it’s wise to pretend that all of the relevant questions have already been settled… Wiley’s guidelines call for AI assistance with manuscript drafting to be disclosed in the acknowledgments, which is what Simon has done here. Whether journals should require even more prominent disclosure in cases involving AI assistance on this scale is a reasonable question and something PPA and other journals will need to think through as such cases become more common. Indeed, we’ll be interested to see what arguments emerge in the comments on Simon’s post—they may well inform whatever policy we eventually adopt. So I would describe this as an experiment rather than as an expression of a settled PPA policy. There is genuine disagreement among serious scholars about what uses of AI are compatible with authorship. Some researchers now use AI extensively as part of their ordinary intellectual workflow; others regard anything more than copyediting as objectionable. Individual journals have policies than range from encouragement to permission to strict prohibition. We are reluctant to resolve that dispute by fiat, or to adopt rules that might foreclose potentially valuable forms of research before the underlying questions about authorship, responsibility, credit, and the purpose of scholarly publication have been adequately worked through. One benefit of allowing this paper is that it forces us to confront those questions. I expect reasonable people will disagree about where the lines ought to be drawn. This is a debate worth having because the issue is not going away, and I suspect our intuitions about it will be very different in twenty years from what they are now. Below is Professor Goldstein’s post. [Modification of Louis Moeller’s “The Discussion”] Philosophy Journal Publishes Largely AI-Authored Article — On Purpose. Here’s the Why and How from the AI’s “Supervisor” by Simon Goldstein This month I published my first philosophy paper written with AI. The paper is called “ Epistocracy and the Commitment Problem ,” and is published in Philosophy & Public Affairs . The paper gives a new argument against epistocracy (rule by the knowledgeable). In particular, the paper argues that epistocracy weakens one of the familiar functions of democracy, which is giving a credible commitment to citizens that the rich will be taxed sufficiently. Philosophers Should Use AI More Should you use AI to write philosophy papers? It depends on your goals. My goal is to discover new, important truths. I think that using AI well increases the amount of new, important truths that are discovered. I think many philosophers share my goal, but I have only seen a few other examples of philosophers successfully using AI to write philosophy. By contrast, several other nearby fields have had more success using AI. This includes economics , political science , and math . I would be very interested in learning from other philosophers experimenting with using AI to write papers. AI Writing with Human Supervision To write this paper, I worked with Claude the way a heavy-handed supervisor writes with a PhD student in some fields. I gave Claude a one paragraph explanation of the thesis, and a bunch of general instructions on writing philosophy papers. Then Claude did a literature review and wrote a series of outlines and drafts. I read everything Claude produced and gave detailed comments on each round of outlining and drafts. I made many corrections to Claude’s drafts. Claude came up with several implementations of the main ideas in the paper, and I selected the most promising ones. For example, Claude started with an analysis of many different epistocratic institutions; I told it to focus on the veto. I gave various objections to the main arguments that Claude developed. I advised Claude on calibrating the strength of the thesis of the paper. I helped Claude structure the paper. I helped with suggested wording on “hot spot” sentences. When I submitted the paper to PPA, I included a cover letter with a detailed explanation of AI use. The published paper includes a similar explanation, and links to a long report . With this specific paper, I deliberately avoided intervening too much in Claude’s process, because I wanted to see how far Claude could go to write something publishable. As a result, the argumentation is more complex than I would like, and the prose is more bloated. Deep Drafter After writing this paper, I developed a general AI agent to help with writing papers, called Deep Drafter. This AI agent has a bunch of data about my writing style. The agent also has a complex pipeline, which breaks down paper writing into many steps, including literature review, outlining, drafting, style editing, and referee reviews. If you’d like to experiment with using that agent, you can learn more and download supporting files on my website for free. AI Failure Modes Here are some failure modes when AIs write philosophy, or write long papers more generally: AIs have trouble coherently structuring long papers. AIs tend to repeat the same points. AIs struggle to make arguments clearly. They often describe an argument without making it. AIs often use obscure, idiosyncratic terms. Tips Draft in many steps. I have AIs build 3 rounds of outlines before writing a full paper. This solves problems related to organization, redundancy, and vagueness. Give style examples. Create a folder of your favorite examples of prose for the AI to review. Create a document summarizing your style principles. (With this paper, though, I tried to avoid editing style too much, because I wanted to see how far Claude could get on its own.) Give comments. The more work you put into commenting on intermediate AI work product, the better the results. Request self-critique. On hard problems, have the AI generate several candidate solutions and critique them itself before you read anything. Start with an outline. I often start the process by giving AIs a 1-2 page outline of all of the central arguments in the paper. (With this paper, though, I experimented with having AI generate the main arguments itself; I only gave it an initial one paragraph explanation of the thesis.) Use AI agents, not chatbots. Write using Claude Code or Codex, with AIs managing a folder of documents. This makes it much easier to control how tokens are used, and to create pipelines that structure your AI’s behavior. Focus on interdisciplinary research. AIs have an advantage in interdisciplinary research. They can help philosophers branch out into areas that they are less comfortable with, especially in the social sciences. Be transparent. Try to disclose clearly how you have used AI, especially when you have a novel method. This will help more people learn how to use AI to write philosophy. It is easy to have your AI agent generate a report at the end of the project explaining exactly who did what. How to Credit Claude One question the field will need to answer is how to credit Claude in papers like this one. For this paper, I chose to credit Claude as a method for writing the paper: I included a lengthy acknowledgment about the use of Claude. An alternative approach would be to credit Claude as an author of the paper. I am also tempted by this approach. One question is who exactly would be the author in the vicinity of Claude. I think of the name Claude as analogous to the term Homo sapiens : it describes a kind of agent rather than an agent. But the individual AI agents or instances that users work with are not usually given names. One convention going forward might be to assign a name of something like the form: “Claude Opus 4.7 time-stamp user-name”. That is probably enough information to uniquely identify the agent that assisted with the project. So I am open to both attribution as a method and attribution as an author. But this is a broader question for the field to decide as the use of AI in writing philosophy becomes more common. Here we will need to reflect on the function of authorship. Among other things, authorship serves as a signal that readers can use to identify similar content, and as a tool for assigning responsibility. The question is whether assigning authorship to Claude improves these functions. The Future of Writing Philosophy I suspect that in the next few years, AIs will be able to write philosophy papers without the help of a human PhD supervisor. At that point, human philosophy professors will have to find new tasks to perform. Maybe the whole job will be focused on undergraduate teaching, until AIs automate teaching. In the meantime, I hope to spend my time as a philosophy professor doing a mix of writing papers on my own and writing papers as a “PhD supervisor” for AIs. Soon, AI will cause significant increases in the number of good philosophy papers submitted to journals. For the journal system to continue, journals must soon develop new AI-based refereeing tools, like Refine in economics, in order for journals to keep up. That said, once the number of good papers gets too large, the journal system as we know it will probably collapse. COMMENTS POLICY