Preface How This Book Was Created

AI for All is the result of a collaborative effort involving faculty, students, and AI. The editor, Jan Pearce, developed the overall vision for the textbook, established the learning objectives, organized the material, and provided both technical and editorial review. Student contributors researched topics, wrote draft sections, developed examples, identified resources, and reviewed the material throughout the writing process. During the development of this edition, the authors also used OpenAI’s “ChatGPT”, based primarily on the GPT-5.5 model, as an editorial and creative assistant.

ChatGPT assisted with a variety of tasks, including reviewing drafts for clarity and consistency, suggesting improvements to organization and pedagogy, identifying opportunities for additional explanation, proposing examples and exercises, generating original illustrations and diagrams, and helping maintain a consistent voice across chapters. AI systems occasionally produce incorrect or misleading information. For this reason, all AI-generated content was treated as a draft requiring human review rather than as an authoritative source. The faculty editor remains responsible for the accuracy, quality, and educational value of all content.

The collaborative process used to create this textbook reflects one of its central themes: artificial intelligence is most effective when it complements human knowledge, creativity, and judgment. Throughout this project, faculty, students, and AI each contributed different strengths. We hope this textbook not only teaches the principles of artificial intelligence but also demonstrates how AI can be used thoughtfully, responsibly, and transparently in scholarship and education.

Unless otherwise noted, all original text, illustrations, and other materials in this textbook are distributed under the same Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) License as the textbook itself.