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ChatGPT, the ultimate sophist?
Why the ongoing craze about Artificial Intelligence is misguided
The Sophists were paid teachers of rhetoric in Ancient Greece, much criticized — fairly or not — by Plato and often the target of Socratic dialogues. I was thinking about sophistry the other day, while talking to a colleague about the meaning of ChatGPT, the AI system that has been all the rage during the past few weeks. The possibility struck me as worth investigating: is ChatGPT a modern-day sophist?
The first obvious thing to do was to ask Chat (as I shall call it). Here is the response I got:
“No, I am not a modern-day sophist. As an artificial intelligence language model, my purpose is to assist and provide helpful responses to the best of my ability based on the input I receive. My responses are not intended to deceive or manipulate people but to provide factual and informative answers to the questions asked of me. Unlike sophists, my responses are not aimed at winning arguments or persuading people to adopt a particular point of view, but rather to help users gain a better understanding of the topics they are interested in.”
So Chat claims in no uncertain terms not to be a sophist. We shall see about that. It occurred to me that there is another similar possibility: Chat may be a bullshitter in the…
