Hi, my name is Jonathan. I work in a library, although I am not a librarian. I help advanced graduate students with their writing, although I do not belong to a writing program. I collaborate with faculty without being faculty myself. My office sits inside a writing and learning centre whose structure bears only a passing resemblance to most writing and learning centres.

I also have a PhD in Sociology, earned in a research area largely unrelated to my present work. Given enough time and a sympathetic audience, I can construct a persuasive account of how the two halves of my career belong together. Some days I even persuade myself, particularly when academics begin discussing systemic problems inside universities.

Roughly forty percent of my work now concerns generative AI, academic integrity, and authenticity, which was an unlikely destination for a sociologist of atheism and pseudoscience. Much of that time goes toward correcting confident claims about AI made by clever people who skimmed three Google Scholar papers published in 2023. The remainder is reserved for discovering that somebody has pasted the private health information of one hundred patients into a chatbot because sorting the spreadsheet looked tedious.

Opinions expressed here are mine. They do not represent the University of Alberta, its libraries, its writing services, its administrators, its lawyers, or anybody else whose presence would make this disclaimer sound more official. Blah blah.