Many people here already chimed in on the emotion of being caught reading something that might not have felt AI so I will offer another angle. Akin to many The New Yorker article in the past, I felt disconnected with the article for a good portion at the beginning. So much so that I had to skip most of it.
The piece that got me very hooked was when he drove to Carol Lindgren’s farm. I read the remainder of the text and thought the content was engaging and thought provoking, in some sense. I loved the idea of manual override that logged into the system and changed the system behaviour over time. That's something that got me thinking about AI, actually.
Now, I would be curious which part of the author's genesis made it into the final text and how much of that couples with what I found to be intellectually engaging.