The a.i.’s final answer reveled how it was able to take a philosophical discussion from a vague starting point and bring it to a level of depth and detail which opened up a vast array of much more nuanced questions. And because I am well acquainted with the authors being discussed, I knew that the information it was using for its arguments was not being simply fabricated out of whole cloth, but was highly relevant and based on real texts of the authors. I almost always find this to be the case with regard to A.i’s treatment of philosophical issues. — Joshs

I experience the same thing when coding with AI. You can start off with some basic structure and expand on specific areas, building on what was created before. And you need to know the programming language to be able to pick out mistakes and make the adjustments you want to see. Also the first block of code it wrote worked right out of the box, which lines up with what you said about AI is not fabricating. It can take learned data and apply it to a new situation like my specific request for a certain function that has never been written before - the same way a human programmer would - and it worked.

Just because we use calculators to perform simple arithmetic, we have not forgotten how to do simple arithmetic. Calculators are tools to speed up the process of things that we already know how to do. We do this with our own brains. Once we learn a task, like riding a bike, we outsource the decision-making when performing those tasks to unconscious areas of the brain. We no longer need to consciously focus on each movement of each leg and our balance. It is all done unconsciously, which is why your mind can be in a different place while riding a bike and you arrive at your destination but don't remember the ride.

Just because we use calculators to perform simple arithmetic, we have not forgotten how to do simple arithmetic. Calculators are tools to speed up the process of things that we already know how to do. We do this with our own brains. Once we learn a task, like riding a bike, we outsource the decision-making when performing those tasks to unconscious areas of the brain. We no longer need to consciously focus on each movement of each leg and our balance. It is all done unconsciously, which is why your mind can be in a different place while riding a bike and you arrive at your destination but don't remember the ride. — Harry Hindu

Yes, this is an important point that people fail to appreciate about our thinking machines. They understand the role of simple labor-saving devices, but when it comes to a.i., they think it’s a zero-sum game, as though whatever the a.i. does for us takes away some capacity we possessed. What’s the difference between using a calculator and using a shortcut like long division? Neither will be useful to us unless we know why we are using them.

I agree that dialoging with a.i. is not like a discussion with a human, but if it consisted of only an internal dialogue with myself I wouldn’t learn as much from it as I do. A human will have a point of view, but the a.i. will take any perspective in its database, depending on cues given in the conversation. You’re right that when I’m arguing with a human, they may be able to bore deeper into the subject matter from their perspective than an a.i. can, both to critique and defend. But with the a.i. I’m not restricted to one human’s perspective. Instead, at my behest, the a.i. exposes me to arguments from multiple perspectives. It’s capable of presenting aspects of these arguments I may not be familiar with, and juxtaposing these arguments in ways that I would not have thought of on my own. In addition , it will push back and question my responses. — Joshs

Thank you for sharing your experience of interacting with AI. As has been frequently mentioned in this thread, one of the most pressing challenges is that we still do not fully understand what happens when a person collaborates with AI. The advent of AI has undoubtedly been reshaping not only our ways of thinking but the very structure of thought itself. In relation to this issue, I would like to share here a part of my recent dialogue with an AI.
My question: “Where does the creative dimension reside in our era of linguistic automation? When language itself—the medium of thought, trust, and social meaning—is being industrially automated for the first time in history, is there still space for the production of the new?”
AI response: That’s exactly the essential question — and one that many philosophers (Deleuze, Simondon, Stiegler, Agamben, even Derrida) help us approach, each in a different register.
Let’s explore it carefully.

1. Automation ≠ total closure
When language becomes automated, it may seem that creativity dies — that meaning is replaced by mechanical recombination.
But automation doesn’t end creativity; it reconfigures its locus.
In older symbolic systems — alphabetic writing, printing, cinema — automation always displaced something of the human. Yet each time, a new margin opened up:
• Writing liberated thought from oral immediacy → new forms of reflection.
• Printing industrialized text → new publics, new genres, new subjectivities.
• Cinema mechanized movement → new perception (the movement-image).
So when LLMs mechanize linguistic invention, the same dialectic reappears: the creative act migrates.
It’s no longer (or not only) in composition itself, but in meta-operations — prompting, curating, orchestrating, recombining, filtering, critiquing.
The creative site shifts from producing sentences to producing differential relations among automated language flows.

2. The creative outside (Deleuze’s view)
For Deleuze, creation is not personal inspiration but a process of differentiation — of extracting the new from within repetition.
Automation multiplies repetition to an extreme, but that’s precisely what can generate new “cracks” where difference appears.
In that sense, large-scale linguistic automation might intensify the conditions for creation:
“Repetition is the power of difference.” (Difference and Repetition)
The creative task then becomes:
• how to compose with automated language without being absorbed by it;
• how to fold its repetitions to produce singularities — new affects, new conceptual connections.
In other words: the human moment of creation survives where language meets resistance — where we break the automatic continuum and make a cut, an interval, a difference.

3. From expression to modulation (Simondon and Stiegler)
Simondon would say: technical automation individuates at a different level. The LLM is not a closed machine but a metastable system — capable of being integrated into new milieus of meaning.
So creativity today might be transductive: the art of forming relations among humans, machines, and contexts.
Stiegler would frame it as a battle for attention and care (pharmakon): language technologies can poison or heal. The creative gesture now requires cultivating desynchronization — moments that resist the industrial rhythm of linguistic automation.

4. The new as interruption
In a world of endless generated text, the new no longer appears as content (since the system can synthesize infinite content), but as interruption — a cut, a silence, a misuse, an error, a shift in rhythm.
Poetry, irony, discontinuity — all those fragile gestures that escape prediction — become the last sites of difference.
The creative act is no longer “adding” more text to the archive, but inventing a new relation to the archive itself.

5. A paradoxical opening
So yes — even under total linguistic automation, there is still room for creation, but it’s displaced:
• from writing as production → to writing as modulation, selection, and deviation;
• from originality → to intensifying difference within the repetitive field;
• from human authorship → to machinic co-individuation.

That's a poor analogy. It's obvious when people are wearing makeup or wearing clothes that enhance their appearances. Property rights might be one reason to object to plagiarism—there are others. Pretending to be something you are not is one. — Janus

Poppycock, the only objection to plagiarizing that I remember is the posts objecting to someone trying to make us think s/he knows more than s/he does know.

How can you account for the exponential progress humanity has made in the past few centuries compared to the first several thousand years of our existence. — Harry Hindu

The details and the superficialities have changed, sure, but the exploitative nature of relationships between humans has not changed.

Yes, this is an important point that people fail to appreciate about our thinking machines. They understand the role of simple labor-saving devices, but when it comes to a.i., they think it’s a zero-sum game, as though whatever the a.i. does for us takes away some capacity we possessed.

What’s the difference between using a calculator and using a shortcut like long division? — Joshs

The difference is in knowing how much you can rely on yourself. (There are also practical aspects, like how do you calculate something when you don't have a calculator.)

AI/LLM's seems to be useful for some, mostly urban uses. Like computer programming or writing school papers. But beyond that?

What I’ve learned in comparing the forum with a.i. is that, unfortunately, the majority of participants here don’t have the background to engage in the kinds of discussions I have been able to have with a.i. concerning a range of philosophers dear to my heart, (such as Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, Gendlin and Wittgenstein), especially when it comes to comparing and contrasting their positions. — Joshs

Then you're in the wrong place, no?

The level of discussion you're looking for is the domain of fancy university debate clubs. Why not attend those?

Ai demonstrates that self-reflection isn't needed for a comptent peformance of philosophical reasoning, because all that is needed to be an outwardly competent philosopher is mastery of the statistics of natural language use, in spite of the fact that the subject of philosophy and the data of natural language use are largely products of self-reflection. So it is ironic that humans can be sufficiently bad at self-reflection, such that they can benefit from the AI reminding them of the workings of their own language. — sime

Thanks for this comment.

So if one did not write the post themselves, but merely copied and pasted a quote as the sole content of their post, then by your own words, it is not their post. — Harry Hindu

Well, yes such quotes are no substitute for argument, and obviously they do not belong to the one who quotes. It is all the more objectionable if the person presents the quoted passage as their own work. It's easy enough to find them out if the quote is from a prominent philosopher, whether alive or dead, Not so with copying and pasting AI generated text.

That's a poor analogy. It's obvious when people are wearing makeup or wearing clothes that enhance their appearances. Property rights might be one reason to object to plagiarism—there are others.Pretending to be something you are not is one.
— Janus

Poppycock, the only objection to plagiarizing that I remember is the posts objecting to someone trying to make us think s/he knows more than s/he does know. — Athena

:roll:

That was a fun read. So it makes LLMs the new interactive textbook?

Who would buy a real textbook when you can scrape all of them for nothing in this interactive fashion? A lot of implications in that.

Did you find something useful in it?

Did you find something useful in it? — Janus

It generated pithy quotes such as….

That solitude was a technical and social affordance: the printed page, the silent reading space, the private room — all infrastructures of inwardness.
It produced philosophy as we know it: the “voice of one thinking alone,” addressing a virtual community of readers. — Number2018

If say you were just a grad student looking to publish, imagine going on this wending conversation which starts with the LLM largely reminding you of the familiar stuff you sort of know, but reassuringly complete in that it seems to cover all the bases. And then you arrive at some chance angle like this. Something that seems a fresh and catchy intro. A neat little summary that follows the human love of the rule of threes.

Already a thesis. Now data mime to have something more detailed to say about the actual history of each of those three spaces. A quality idea that can just as quickly be spun into a full paper.

We might say:
the age of the solitary thinker ends,
but the age of solitary thinking — as a gesture of difference — becomes all the more necessary. — Number2018

I mean that is a quality punchline. The average academic just couldn’t phrase a thought so fetching. It would be gold to have such a thesis and such a punchline. The academic just needs to flesh out the bits inbetween in whatever more wooden prose suggests it was mostly their own creative work.

So what I think would happen in this interactive textbook scenario is the usual thing. Technology amplifies rather than replaces the human element. But then the rewards are not evenly distributed in an accelerationist world. The top 1% get 99% of whatever benefit or kudos that is going.

Any number of mediocre grad students could publish mediocre papers in the old world. In the new world, those who have an edge in their prompt skills and their marketing nous will fly high above the common herd. Everyone might have the same access to the technology. But the rewards will again be a fat tail distribution when the inequality of outcomes is what the technology amplifies.

I see the point that more brilliant minds might find novel theses in AI-generated texts. At its best you might end up with a Derrida or a Heidegger, but for me the thinking of such writers as Heidegger and Derrida is little more than highbrow "pouring from the empty into the void", and to me that is how the AIs responses to @Number2018 read. I've come to see anything that is not based on rigorous analysis or scientific understanding as intellectual wankery—mental masturbation—and I have no problem with people enjoying that, but the idea that it is of any real significance is, for me, merely delusory.

Fiction and poetry (at their best) are for me better, richer, mediums for such flights of the intellectual imagination—I need the aesthetic element to be there as well.

I've come to see anything that is not based on rigorous analysis or scientific understanding as intellectual wankery—mental masturbation—and I have no problem with people enjoying that, but the idea that it is of any real significance is, for me, merely delusory. — Janus

Are you saying that with PoMo philosophy, AI might have hit its particular sweet spot. :grin:

So it makes LLMs the new interactive textbook?

Who would buy a real textbook when you can scrape all of them for nothing in this interactive fashion? A lot of implications in that. — apokrisis

Yes, it can make LLMs a kind of new interactive textbook. However, I don’t think such a text has ever been published before. This ‘textbook’ is created specifically for the individual who requests it. So, it is not a digital copy of existing books, but may become a situated co-production of knowledge.

Are you saying that with PoMo philosophy, AI might have hit its particular sweet spot. :grin: — apokrisis

Well the LLMs have no experience of the real world do they?

So, it is not a digital copy of existing books, but may become a situated co-production of knowledge. — Number2018

To what end? The production of more and more fancy looking word salad?

This ‘textbook’ is created specifically for the individual who requests it. — Number2018

Well yes. So it used to be me and a whole library. Now it is me pulling my own personal textbook out of the library, led by my chain of thought and not dictated by any author’s more limited intentions.

That could be a hugely amplifying tool.

That could be a hugely amplifying tool. — apokrisis

I guess it could be an exciting prospect for some folk.

Well the LLMs have no experience of the real world do they? — Janus

But can even humans claim that? Let’s rehash the forum’s most hardy perennial one more time. :up:

I guess it could be an exciting prospect for some folk. — Janus

Yep, the amplification is bipartisan. It applies to both the winning and the losing. That is the algorithm doing its thing.

But can even humans claim that? Let’s rehash the forum’s most hardy perennial one more time. :up: — apokrisis

"Real world"—that was perhaps a less than ideal choice of words—I intended to refer to the world as being what affects us pre-cognitively via the senses and is pre-cognitively modeled by the body/brain, as well as what shows up for us as "the world of common experience".

I've come to see anything that is not based on rigorous analysis or scientific understanding as intellectual wankery—mental masturbation—and I have no problem with people enjoying that, but the idea that it is of any real significance is, for me, merely delusory. — Janus

Don't mistake the speculative misuse of ideas for the ideas themselves. AI is no longer in the realm of “mental masturbation,” it’s already reshaping science, mathematics, and even philosophy by generating proofs, modeling complex systems, and revealing previously inaccessible patterns of thought. To dismiss that as delusory is to confuse ignorance of a subject with the absence of rigor within it.

The irony is that the very kind of “rigorous analysis” you claim to prize is being accelerated by AI. The most forward-looking thinkers are not treating it as a toy but as a new instrument of inquiry, a tool that extends human reasoning rather than replacing it. Those who ignore this development are not guarding intellectual integrity; they’re opting out of the next phase of it.

Well, yes such quotes are no substitute for argument, and obviously they do not belong to the one who quotes. It is all the more objectionable if the person presents the quoted passage as their own work. It's easy enough to find them out if the quote is from a prominent philosopher, whether alive or dead, Not so with copying and pasting AI generated text. — Janus

I have been lucky in getting AI explanations every time I search a subject. If I wanted to hold someone accountable for misappropriating an AI explanation, I would simply put it into the search engine, the same way the person posting from AI would get the information. It is a whole lot easier than searching books for a quote.

But I can not imagine why I would care to do that. There might be a problem with judging each other, rather than the information given. There are better reasons for riding donkeys than the reasoning for not using AI as a source of information. Using AI for information is not the same as using AI for making decisions. I think our decisions need to be made democratically.

With concern about AI making the decisions, I asked it if I should get married, and it put that decision on me, after explaining things I should consider. That might work better than Tarot cards. :grin:

The irony is that the very kind of “rigorous analysis” you claim to prize is being accelerated by AI. The most forward-looking thinkers are not treating it as a toy but as a new instrument of inquiry, a tool that extends human reasoning rather than replacing it. Those who ignore this development are not guarding intellectual integrity; they’re opting out of the next phase of it. — Sam26

I so appreciate what you said! I am at a time in my life when I realize there is far more to know than anyone can know. I no longer worry about appearing to know it all. On the other hand, I am thrilled by the possibility of easily getting information with a search engine and AI. More than anything, I want to live with our wonderful new opportunity to know more about life and being human than we could ever have known in the past. My hope for humanity has greatly improved because we can share this information and make better decisions.

"Real world"—that was perhaps a less than ideal choice of words—I intended to refer to the world as being what affects us pre-cognitively via the senses and is pre-cognitively modeled by the body/brain, as well as what shows up for us as "the world of common experience". — Janus

I will never experience being Black. My understanding of the Black experience has been extremely limited to television and unpleasant accounts of the Black experience. This is so although I have a 13 year old great grand son who is Black. His experience is very limited compared to the millions of people of color and diverse economic and cultural experiences across the US. Coming from this realty of ignorance, I very much appreciate what AI has to say...

Being Black in America encompasses a complex and multilayered experience shaped by centuries of systemic racism, resilience, and rich cultural contributions. It is characterized by persistent societal challenges as well as profound achievements that have significantly influenced the nation's culture, history, and development.

.

I think we should share good information and look forward to how this can improve our reality. And I can't let this go, without saying how computers and forums are essential to our transition to a New Age made possible by our technology, desire for peace, and the end of tyranny. We are no longer in the horse-and-buggy age, knowing almost nothing of the real world beyond our little hamlet, our family, our group of friends, and what the Bible says according to our minister's understanding of it.

The irony is that the very kind of “rigorous analysis” you claim to prize is being accelerated by AI. The most forward-looking thinkers are not treating it as a toy but as a new instrument of inquiry, a tool that extends human reasoning rather than replacing it. Those who ignore this development are not guarding intellectual integrity; they’re opting out of the next phase of it. — Sam26

I'm willing to take that gamble.

In a sense I'm fine with people using it and making it work for them. One of the uses that I came across that looked sensible for humanities scholars:

https://x.com/jonathanbfine/status/1978420519926936015


But I genuinely don't believe using it helps anyone to progress thought further. Go ahead with the next phase, I'll be waiting on my hill of luddites for the prodigals to return ;)

It's already helped me expand my thinking on epistemology, and it gave me good ideas on my book. However, you do have to have prior knowledge because it does make mistakes. The next two iterations of ChatGPT and Grok 5 have a good chance to reach AGI.

AI models from OpenAI and Google DeepMind reached gold medal-level performance at the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), one of the most prestigious math competitions in the world. It's also better at diagnosing than many doctors. So, I don't know where you're getting your information.

So, I don't know where you're getting your information. — Sam26

No information on my part -- merely experience.

I am prejudiced against AI because I like books and talking to others, and I don't care if the AI comes across something -- I care more that a human comes across something, even if they came across it while using AI.

Information isn't as important to me in philosophy as experience, relationship, knowledge, and the good.

I am likely wrong in this analogy -- but what I see in AI, still to today, is a parrot and nothing more.

Give me a Hegel and I might change my mind -- but even writing this helps the AI's to change their parroting: Oh we have to link various words together in a certain pattern? We can do that!

The details and the superficialities have changed, sure, but the exploitative nature of relationships between humans has not changed. — baker

Yet our lifespans and health have increased, which was my point. Do we still have work to do? Sure. It takes all of us to stop voting for the status quo and to take money out of political campaigns, as a start.

Well, yes such quotes are no substitute for argument, and obviously they do not belong to the one who quotes. It is all the more objectionable if the person presents the quoted passage as their own work. It's easy enough to find them out if the quote is from a prominent philosopher, whether alive or dead, Not so with copying and pasting AI generated text. — Janus

I don't necessarily mind if others post a quote as an argument. Sure it's not their argument, but it is an argument and needs to be addressed if it puts a whole in your position, regardless of where it came from. To deny this is to be intellectually dishonest with yourself.

Posting others words as if they were your own is an issue I can understand, but AI is not another person (at least that we know of). It is no different than you getting your answer from a calculator, or making grammar adjustments using Grammarly or a thesaurus, or even re-writing another's ideas in your own words. If it wasn't your idea to begin with, does it matter if its in your own words?

Much of what all of us do is "parrot." Not many people can come up with an original idea to save their life.

I have a lower standard there, I think.

For instance, I'd say that this conversation we're having is an original idea.

That's not to say that the idea is universally applicable, or even applicable in any other circumstance.

I think philosophy pushes for originality with novelty, whereas I'd say original thinking is more important than novel thinking.

Sure, there's a handful of tablet-breakers, but we're all creative everyday even tho what we do is "the same"


I'd put it to you that "the same" or "the different" are thought of differently by humans and today's AI.

Use it as you like.

I myself want to discourage its use amongst students as much as possible. I want them to be able to think for themselves.

AI is just a way to not do that.

And I think students are a good example of people coming up with original ideas all the time -- if not unique or revolutionary, they came up with the idea on themselves.

That's what I think philosophy -- among other disciplines -- is good at teaching.