Are You a Man or a Machine?

The linguistics professor Naomi S. Baron recently wrote a valuable, judicious book entitled Who Wrote This? How AI and the Lure of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing (Stanford University Press, 2023), which surveys a set of issues that educational institutions all over the world are now being forced to address. One wishes she had shown at least some awareness of the profound, important body of work of the polymathic French Protestant Jacques Ellul (1912–1994), whose 1954 book The Technological Society was translated and published in English at the behest of Aldous Huxley.