Preface

On AI Collaboration

The first complete draft of this textbook was written in about a week.

Not because I worked around the clock, but because I collaborated with AI—primarily Claude (Anthropic)—in a way that felt less like using a tool and more like pulling threads from a wormhole.

Here’s what that means: AI systems contain near-infinite knowledge, but knowledge without direction is noise. My role was to provide the direction—five years of teaching this course, clinical experience that knows what actually matters, and the judgment to say “yes, that belongs” or “no, that’s wrong.” Claude’s role was synthesis at a speed and breadth I couldn’t achieve alone.

The result is something neither of us could have made independently.

As a course teaching AI methods for medicine, using AI to write it isn’t a shortcut—it’s practicing what we preach. This is what the future of knowledge work looks like: human expertise setting direction, AI amplifying reach, and the collaboration producing something new.

Every chapter continues to be refined as the course progresses. The human remains the curator, the filter, the one who pulls the right thread from infinite possibility.

—Rafe McBeth, December 2025