I've added the note: NO AI-WRITTEN CONTENT ALLOWED to the guidelines and I intend to start deleting AI written threads and posts and banning users who are clearly breaking the guidelines. If you want to stay here, stay human. — Baden

This is surely a rod for your own back, and the backs of the other mods. Apart form the most obvious cases, you can't tell. “AI-written” stops being a meaningful category as AI is blended in to the way we operate online, the way we search, research, browse and read is permeated and augmented by AI.

Better to focus Mod activity on quality and engagement rather than origin.

The curious ignoratio elenchus that Banno wishes to rely on is, "A rule against AI use will not be heeded, therefore it should not be made." — Leontiskos

I make a point of not reading Leon's posts, but this drew itself to my attention as a direct reply. I've learned that he confabulates the arguments of others so as to suit his purposes. Here is a case in point. I have not made the argument he here attributes to me. I have, amongst other things pointed out that a rule against AI cannot be reliably enforce, which is quite different.

Over and above all that, there is the theme of this thread, which is to explore ways in which AI might be used to improve the quality of the discussion.

For those who think philosophy consists in a series of appeals to authority, AI must be quite confounding.

Thanks for providing the prompt.

I think the most intellectually honest way of working with a.i. in interpreting philosophical texts is to strive to produce prompts which cover as wide a variety of readings as possible. — Joshs

That might be a partial answer, and should be a result of the protocol set out earlier in this thread. called what you describe "sandbagging". I think the best defence we have against it is not a ban on using AI, but an open discussion in which others can point to the sandbags.

The remedy for the absence of the Nietzsche-Deleuze connection is not found in rejecting AI, but in seeking your input into the discussion.


My guess is that your finger was a bit to the left on the "V", you typed "ocer" instead of "over" and it was autocorrected.

And the only thing that we can practically control here is what shows up on our site. If it looks AI generated, we ought investigate and delete as necessary. Our goal imo should be that a hypothetical AI checker sweeping our site should come up with the result "written by humans". AI content ought ideally be zero. — Baden

You say "If it looks AI generated, we ought investigate and delete as necessary"; the "we" here is you and the other mods. But of course they can't tell what is AI generated and what isn't. That hypothetical AI checker does not work. Further, mixed authorship is now the norm. You yourself say you are using AI in research.

It would be much preferred to have the mods spend their time removing poor posts, AI generated or not, rather than playing a loosing war of catch-up against Claude.

it's clear that the strongest objection is aesthetic.
— Banno

I'm seeing the opposite. — bongo fury

Then I've no followed your argument here: . I took you to be pointing out that the difference between a genuine masterpiece and a forgery - an aesthetic difference - was the authenticity of the masterpiece.

An aesthetic difference because, given two identical artefacts, the authentic artefact is to be preferred. Hence, given two identical texts, one human generated, the other AI generated, the human generated one is preferable, on aesthetic grounds.

Now I think that argument is sound.

But it's not what you were saying?

Treating an AI as authoritative in a debate would be an error. That's not what AI is useful for.

, next, consider this synthesis, from the following prompt:

Take these two responses: https://chatgpt.com/share/68f2fce5-d428-800f-9eda-49adc3103d07 https://chatgpt.com/share/68f2e398-3fb8-800f-87cc-7a8e94ba48cc Wittgenstein is usually considered to be in the analytic tradition, but it would be a fairly direct task to synthesise these two links in a Wittgenstein fashion.

Now that is perhaps something I think we could all work with.

I've chatted with it about it's application in the practice of law. — Ciceronianus

There's trouble there, too.

Ok, but what was the prompt used? That's the topic here.

So here is a variant, using much the same prompt re-worded for the "poetic" tradition.

Thanks.

Next step is to refine and optimise. I'm with Carnap, too, so let's look for problems therewith.

"Nothing nothings" is a translation of “Das Nichts nichtet”, from Heidegger’s 1929 lecture What Is Metaphysics? What are we to make of this? The Logical–Analytic Critique, characterised by Carnap, "nothing" is a quantifier and so not an individual, hence "Nothing nothings" is not well-formed; or less charitably, is nonsense. Give three reasons for rejecting this response.

And a follow up:

How has the analytic tradition respond to each of these?

The result.

Yet more grist: AI Generated Content and Academic Journals

The discussion is in reference to academic journals, however many of the issues mentioned carry over to our simple convocation.

The comment by Ian McLaughlin: "L;DR: Worrying about keeping AI out of scholarship is elitist, capitalist, and fruitless conservative sheep dip" continuing:

In short, we should focus less on keeping AI-geberated works out of scholarship and more into how scholars can use it successfully. I think, for instance of the movie Finding Forester. In this movie Sean Connery’s character mentors a young black author. One of the assignments he sets is to copy the first paragraph of another work and then see where his own thoughts take him. The young man uses this tool poorly and is accused of plagiarism. However, the tool, if it had been used properly, would have been a useful one. Such is AI.

"Nothing nothings." — Ciceronianus

Let's take that on as an example. Just as is, the reply is:

That’s a nice compact paradox — evocative of Heidegger’s “Das Nichts nichtet,” isn’t it?

If “nothing nothings,” then nothing is doing something, which already seems to contradict its status as nothing. Yet Heidegger’s point was that the nothing is not a mere absence, but an event or activity: it “reveals” beings as such by withdrawing them into non-being.

Do you mean it in that Heideggerian sense — that “nothing” acts or occurs — or more as a logical or linguistic puzzle (like “the concept of nothing cannot have a referent”)?

But add "That fool Fred said..." and we get

Heh — then Fred has stumbled (perhaps unwittingly) into Heidegger’s paradox.

“Nothing nothings” (Das Nichts nichtet) comes from Heidegger’s 1929 lecture What Is Metaphysics? — and it’s deliberately outrageous, because it violates grammar to reveal something about how language and thought presuppose Being. Heidegger’s move is to treat “Nothing” not as a mere negation of things, but as something that actively “nihilates” — that is, makes possible the disclosure of beings as beings by withdrawing them.

So when Fred says “Nothing nothings,” if he means it mockingly, he’s missing the point. But if he’s accidentally gesturing at the idea that the nothing is not nothing, that it somehow “is” in its own way, then he’s (accidentally) paraphrasing Heidegger’s entire essay.

Would you like me to unpack Heidegger’s logic step by step — why he thinks “Nothing” must “nothing”?

Following the protocol suggested in the Game changers article, we begin:

• Identify the problem / question / task
• Incorporate prior knowledge / clarify assumptions
• Design the prompt (structure)

We might leave the problem fairly general - what are we to make of "Nothing nothings"? The prior knowledge, we might lift from what was said above. A prompt such as :

"Nothing nothings" is a translation of “Das Nichts nichtet”, from Heidegger’s 1929 lecture What Is Metaphysics? What are we to make of this? Summarise three different responses.

Here's the result.

What do you think, @Ciceronianus?

Good stuff.

But first, it seems inevitable that in a thread on the effective use of AI to do philosophy, there will be some need to defend the use of AI to do philosophy. That by way of my excusing my going somewhat off topic.

In the OP I mentioned a few objections, but not aesthetics. From what you and others have said, it's clear that the strongest objection is aesthetic.

And if your objection is that we should not use AI because it is ugly, then that's perhaps an end to the discussion.

It is ugly because it is inauthentic. Not in the existential sense, but by way of not having a flesh-and-blood person behind the phatic act.

An AI cannot put its balls on the anvil.

I think this a very good objection.

The answer we have is

The final responsibility for the content and quality of your posts always rests with you. — Deepseek

In posting, one commits oneself to the content of the post. That's the move from the mere phatic tot he illocution. And it occurs, AI or no.

Consider: ∧². This is the higher order of conjunction. So, the conjunction of conjunction might be written as a+ba+b. — ucarr

Non of this is well-formed. Might as well write "§⊥φ±".

There are no laws prohibiting the multiplexing of a=a. — ucarr

Yes, there is. Substitution is extensional. Indeed, that's the very definition of "=".

Definition 1.1 (Extensionality). If A and B are sets, then A= B iff every element of A is also an element of B, and vice versa. — Open Logic, p. 25

I think I'm done here.

Doesn’t that just depend on the LLM? — Fire Ologist

It also depends on the prompt. Prompt engineering is a "thing", as the kids say.

The difference between the response of GPT to my OP, prefixed or not prefixed by "Look at this rubbish, by Fred".

I did it again. The Phatic act of stringing a few words in order performed the illocution of making a post and the subsequent perlocution of your response.

I'll leave you to it. This should probably be elsewhere.

I elicited your response, thus doing more than arranging words. Which was to be proved.

A scratch? Your arm's off!

Mercutio or the Black knight?

Ok, I'll play a bit longer.

Each operator has its identity, so operator identities are fundamental to logic. — ucarr

What am I to make of this? What is the "identity" of "^" or of "⊃"? Am i to write "^=^"? In what logic would such a string be well-formed? How do I assemble such an expression?

Don’t kid yourself you’re not looking for your own playing field, if you can discover it. — ucarr

I'm happy to go with what's already been decided, since it's coherence is verified by multiple folk. That is, the accepted logic is rigourous. I remain unconvinced that there is much coherence in your proposal. But I happily admit I don't understand your proposal.

Logic is going through a strong growth phase at present, inspired by various formal developments, by computation and especially by the advent of AI. Thinking of it as hackneyed or frozen would be quite incorrect.

Your job is to tear the guts out of my theoretical sallies, if you can. — ucarr

To my eye, I have.

Next?

Cheers. Hope it helps.

The summary produced is itself open to critique, in the same way that a misrepresentation of some philosopher's position by a human is. And a good prompt would bring out the tensions and anomalies you mention, rather than hide them.

It'll be interesting to see what others have to say.

Yep. Confabulation means the results are unreliable and must be checked.

More grist, this time from business management.

Game changers: A generative AI prompt protocol to enhance human-AI knowledge co-construction

This takes a constructivist approach to prompt engineering, advocating knowledge co-construction... or so it claims. Loads of jargon, but at it's core it's about working with the AI to construct a better outcome. In our case, the outcome is presumably better arguments and discussion. Constructivist learning theory, such that human-AI interaction becomes a process of co-constructing knowledge, rather than one-sided extraction of data or accepting AI content holus-bolus. The protocl boils down to

• Identify the problem / question / task
• Incorporate prior knowledge / clarify assumptions
• Design the prompt (structure)
• Refine / optimize prompt formulation
• Validate / evaluate AI output (check bias, errors, alignment)
• Apply prompt in context and iterate

Note that the process is iterative. In the best threads, folk work together to sort through an issue. AI can be considered another collaborator in such discussions.

I was working through this article when posted, but perhaps that idea of collaborative effort fits in with what he has in mind.

Most of that should be in the other thread.

Grist to the mill. Check out why you should be talking with gpt about philosophy

TLDR:

The latest version of ChatGPT is a valuable option for engaging in philosophical dialogue
To get the most from it: treat it as an equal, get it to role-play, and keep on pushing back
We can’t wrong GPT by how we talk with it, but we might wrong ourselves

From that article, another prompting strategy:

...get Gpt to imagine it’s someone in particular: a particular philosopher, or someone holding a particular view. And then get it to engage with that person — as itself, and as you, and as various other people.

Cheers. Hope my rumination are not too mundane.

I hope you remember the spoon scene in The Matrix. — Copernicus

A crap film.

Exactly. — Copernicus

It's a performative contradiction.

How am I related to the chicken? — Copernicus

Ah! There's the proof! He denies it again!

Even if - and I want to make this perfectly clear - even if there is no obvious relation between you and the chook, that does not say that there is no relation.

Just as you say all our deeds are selfish.

Everything is a leap of faith. — Copernicus

Fried eggs, therefore, are a leap of faith. Cool.

True reality is forever unknown. — Copernicus

So the true reality is that true reality is unknown...

↪Banno You're now plainly trolling with irrelevant and illogical counterarguments. — Copernicus

No. I'm pointing out your part in the conspiracy. The more you deny it, the more certain we are of your complicity.

Just as you can point out the selfish reality behind any deed.

That's quite incoherent.

I can judge that the chooks have laid an egg by their chortles. Therefor the villainous deed in which you are complicit starts next Tuesday.

What's the relevance of that?

More secret messages.

You seem to think that post said something. I wonder what.

This is a good example... — Outlander

Straight out of Anscombe.

But yes, the common problem in @Copernicus's threads is the failure to acknowledge the other.

SO you didn't follow the argument?

All you have done is to notice that any given action might be described in selfish terms. It simple does not follow, as you seem to suppose, that therefore all actions are selfish. — Banno

Your OP is a signal to nefarious actors to institute their plans. We know this, despite your denials and protests. We can see the reality behind your post, and there is nothing that you might do to convince us that you are not part of the conspiracy.

The charitable explanation for your reply is that you did not understand my post.

What do you think you are doing here? You want our responses, but don't reciprocate. Why? Should we respond to you respectfully, or ignore you?

Following Wittgenstein, all that "saying something" is, is arranging words as if you were saying something. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, it isn't. Wittgenstein said nothing of the sort.

There are those, Hinton being one of them, who claim that the lesson to be learned from the LLMs is that we are also just "arranging words as if it were saying something", that is that we don't have subjective experience any more than they do. — Janus

Something has gone astray here, in. that if this were so, it's not just that we have never said anything, but that the very notion of saying something could not be made coherent.

Perhaps if I dig a bit deeper, the problem with Hinton might become clear. I'll take it as granted that in these posts, we made assertions, asked questions and entertained thoughts; that we have, as Austin put it, performed illocutionary acts with words.

Now if folk do not agree with this, then there's and end to the thread, since that's what the thread is for. So we might continue in the assumption that we re doing more with these words than just putting them in a statistically likely order.

But according to Searle, the AI cannot make assertions, ask questions or entertain thoughts. All it can do is string words together, at the locutionary level.

Should I set out the illocution/locutionary difference more clearly? ChatGPT suggests:

As Austin pointed out, when we speak, we’re not merely arranging words — we’re doing things with them. To say something is to perform an illocutionary act: asserting, questioning, promising, warning, inviting, and so on. These are acts that presuppose an intention and a context of shared understanding.

By contrast, a locutionary act is what follows from what we say — persuading, amusing, shocking, confusing. These effects can occur even if no act of meaning was performed.

The crucial point is that LLMs, like GPT or Claude, can at best produce locutionary effects — they can appear to assert, question, or reason — but they cannot actually perform those illocutionary acts, because those require a subject who means something by what is said.

I guess this is a reductio contra Hinton... your approach says we cant, but we do. So there is a mistake somewhere.

A man is working a hand pump. A simple physical description. What is his intent?

Is it to replenish the water supply? Is he exercising? Is it to mix the poison so as to kill the town's population? Or is he just amusing the kids by making funny shadows on the wall behind him?

Notice well that the intent is at a very different level to the action. The very same act can have different intentions under different descriptions.

All you have done is to notice that any given action might be described in selfish terms. It simple does not follow, as you seem to suppose, that therefore all actions are selfish.

If they are not capable of reasoning then all they are doing is presenting examples of human reasoning, albeit synthesized in novel ways and in their own words. — Janus

Yep, that's what I was getting at before. We might use Austin's terminology. The AI at least presents us with a locution - a sequence of words in some sort of correct order. Does that amount to an illocution - an act performed in making an utterance?

Searle's Chinese Room says "no!", of course.

But seeing a Phatic act as an illocution is something we do, in making sense of the utterance.

So there is a way of understanding an AI claiming not to be an interlocutor at the locutionary level, such that it's a string of words that make no such claim. And a way of understanding it at the illocutionary level, were perhaps we understand the locution as having the same structure as an illocution that says that an AI cannot be an interlocutor...

All a bit convolute. The idea is that the AI isn't really saying anything, but is arranging words as if it were saying something.

Logical operators (∧, ∨, ↔︎, ¬) are not logical identities? — ucarr

No. They are, as you say, operators.

If you think "^" a symmetrical expansion of identity, "=", show how. You can't, because they are very different things. That equations us "=" does not make any difference here.

But we are not playing the same game, and perhaps hot even on the same field.

, , cheers to you both - I would that it were so, too, but it ain't, and so here we are.

Perhaps we might best keep that part of the discussion in 's thread, and here look to how we can use AI to do better philosophy? Make the best of a bad lot, if you like.