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Great Philosophers Against AI
I wrote an article about how the philosophers Zhuangzi, Plato, Martin Heidegger, and C. S. Lewis can give us some good advice about the dangers of using AI in academic writing. It’s open-access here. I’ll borrow a few quotes below.
Using AI in our writing can bring some benefits, such as the ability to produce (somewhat) reliable summaries of large blocks of text in an instant. But what is it, like all the other writing technologies, taking away? If we’re not careful, AI writing trains us to follow preexisting patterns of words with minimal comprehension.
Observations of student submissions reveal notable changes following the introduction of ChatGPT. Turnitin similarity scores have generally decreased, while the overall quality of English grammar in written assignments has improved. But I often find in student assignments piles of information consistent with easily accessible internet material, with little to no evidence of conscious interaction with course content. My students are accumulating information with no knowledge.
Plato teaches us not to let technology substitute for the necessary work of human thought, producing more information with less comprehension. Students daily are using AI-writing to produce more information faster, but with less input from their own minds and less understanding. Heidegger warns us to not reduce ourselves to parts of a machine creating products. Academic writing should be a process of people using their writing tools to shape a little bit of the world. It should not be a process that uses people to create a product. Students are now letting AI create their writing, surrendering to an algorithm their own role as shepherds of the process. Zhuangzi urges us to not follow social convention, but AI-writing all too often takes social conventions as manifested on the internet and distills them into a neat little package. And Lewis says that we destroy our own humanity when we use powerful technology to get what we want without first learning to want what is good. AI-writing sacrifices the human love of discovering and understanding the truth, submitting our words to conditioning by someone who wrote some algorithms.
These great philosophies warn us that the use of AI in writing can steal a piece of our humanity from us. A character in Star Trek: Insurrection, probably the most Daoist of Star Trek productions, introduced the idea well enough: “We believe when you create a machine to do the work of a man, you take something away from the man” (Frakes, 1999).
Published in General
How should we proceed with this information? The first step is to develop an awareness of the situation. Perhaps the strongest protection against losing some of ourselves to a careless use of this new technology is simply to recognize the value—the objective value, Lewis reminds us—of what is at risk. A human being, and some hard work by that human being in learning for himself to think and to communicate well—those things matter.
He wasn’t just a fan of the Nazis. He was a Naxi. And even when Habermas tried to get him to recant his Nazism he did not. His affair with Arendt was perverse as she was his student. Bizarrely Richard Rorty wrote an essay attempting to exculpate Heidegger for his Nazism by claiming that if Heidegger had just married a nice Jewish girl he would not have been a Nazi,eliding entirely the fact that Heidegger had an affair with Arendt. Both men are quite depraved, as was Arendt. (That is clear from her opposition to the Eichmann trial). And Heidegger, to my understanding, is the one who signed the papers firing Husserl because he was Jewish. Plus Heidegger, who was the most influential person of the 29th Century, According to Allan Bloom, asked and answered all the wrong questions. His philosophy is utter garbage, and so is all the post modernist philosophy that follows him, from Foucault to Rorty. Heidegger is the central figure in 20th Century philosophy, which has something to do with the fact that the 20th Century was the bloodiest century in the history of the World, and why the Western world is coming apart at the seams in the 21st Century.
I can see why you separate the art from the artist in a lot of circumstances. You can find Wagner’s music beautiful while ignoring his politics. A moral philosopher who went Nazi, however, maybe you want to double check his conclusions. Like maybe you still wouldn’t want to ride with a guy who’s had nine DUIs despite his race car driving career.
That said, I still think this is a worthwhile warning:
Heidegger wasn’t a fan of the Nazis. He was a Nazi. He joined the party. He never recanted his Nazism, even when Habermas, long after the fact, challenged him to do so. Heidegger, as the Rector at Freiburg, was responsible for purging Jews from the faculty on behalf of the Nazi party, and is the one who fired Husserl, his mentor, because he was a Jew. And, as Allan Bloom has noted, Heidegger was the most influential person of the 20th Century. He influenced Derrida, Foucault, essentially all of the post Modernists, as well as philosophers in America, chief among them Richard Rorty. All of these individuals were preverse individuals but hugely influential.
Rorty actually wrote an essay trying to excuse Heidegger’s Nazism, by claiming that if he had just married a nice Jewish girl, he would never have been an anti-Semite, eliding entirely the fact of Heidegger’s illicit affair with Arendt (who was his student). Arendt had her own problems with moral insight, exemplified by her disdain for Ben Gurion for try8ing Eichmann. And, contra Arendt, evil is not banal. it is evil.
The vast influence of Heidegger and his acolytes (and predecessors, like Nietzsche) defined the thinking of the 20th Century, which was the bloodiest Century in the history of the world. And in the 21st Century, his philosophy is inducing the Suicide of the West.
To paraphrase Solzhenitsyn’s observation about Russia, all of this is happening because they expunged God from Western Civilization. They didn’t just forget God. They actively expunged God.
He’ll probably still be that then….
Good pickup.
Okay I had no idea that a single philosopher was responsible for the bloodshed of the Twentieth Century.
Quite a while ago, I came to the conclusion that when the important people of a given era are handed the blame for the activities of X, Y and Z being undertaken, that simplistic blame assignment overlooks the gestalt of the era itself. I have overheard conversations about how if Hitler had been different, and more of a moderate, then the Third Reich would have been more moderate. Although I should point out: I am just as likely as anyone else to wish there was some kind of time machine that would allow some one or group of us to go back in time and bring about a more moderate little Adolph. (I mean, what would have happened if he had simply been accepted at the art school he applied to?) The time machine conundrum allows for the day dream that with a more moderate Adolph, then all would have been well and it truly would have been springtime in Germany.
But if Hitler had been a moderate person, then how would he have achieved the political advantages inside the Brown Shirt movement? So almost certainly someone else would have become the Fuhrer.
So regardless if we are talking about the political leader of the Third Reich, or the philosopher Heidegger, who seems to be the one assigned the role of all bloodshed brought about in the Twentieth Century, the gestalt of the era is key to understanding who is crowned Fuhrer of Germany or who is assigned the role of The Father of Twentieth Century philosophy. If Heidegger had never existed, his philosophical doppleganger would have then been handed that role. (Significant ideas, attitudes and inventions are always espoused by multiple people with one person having the ability to reign supreme over somebody else.)