The author is refreshingly straightforward about what they are doing: "The key insight, made at the beginning of the information age, is to replace word meaning with something that machines can actually measure."

Of course, if you do too much of this sort of meddling with usage, it will really mess with the machines' method for finding 'meaning' in the language. I expect humans would cope with such meddling much better, because they have the advantage of natural understanding.