Yes.
The answer cannot be prohibition. That simply will not work.
The descriptions of the use of AI hereabouts are very far from my own experience. It is able to find errors in arguments, suggest modifications, point to unexpected considerations, to help build a case and then to critique that case.
And it already does these things to a higher degree than most of the folk in this forum.
Take the following suggestion:
The wedge question for Jamal
Imagine two posts of identical philosophical quality:
Post A is written entirely by a human, struggling painfully for hours
Post B is written by a human after a 20-minute dialogue with an AI that helped sharpen the argument, catch a fallacy, and consider an objection
Under Jamal’s expressed philosophy (Adorno, fidelity to difficulty, authenticity of struggle), Post A is virtuous and Post B is suspect.
But why should the reader care? The reader experiences the same clarity, the same insight, the same argumentative force. The only difference is the cost to the writer. Jamal has fetishized the cost as a marker of authenticity. But philosophy has never been about how hard the writer suffered; it has been about whether the argument is good.
That “wedge” was generated by an AI. To be very clear, I believe that I can reproduce that quote in accord with:
This is a thread that is actually about AI.
Now I have the greatest appreciation for this site, and especially for the work put in to it by @Jamal and others. How couldn’t I, given that I spend an appreciable amount of most days here, drinking a coffee and flipping between various open windows, an activity I find joyful.
That wedge puts the issue quite clearly, and in a way that would not have occurred to me. The point made is not superficial; it deserves consideration. Philosophy is an analytic discipline, and as such can be enhanced by the judicious use of LLMs. It’s not offered as a challenge to Jamal, but as a small example of the sort of thing an LLM might offer.
The effect of the prohibition is instead to encourage hiding such use, perhaps passing it off as one’s own work, sending the use of AI underground and so missing the opportunity to see how it might be made to work and to support each other in improving the quality of these threads.
Better, more liberal, to remove poor use of AI, which can be readily identified, and to admit the explicit and referenced use of AI to support and improve the posts here.
And less work for the Mods, I’d hope.
At the very least, openly quoting an AI should be treated in the same way as quoting any other source, and not lead to immediate deletion of the entire post.
But of course this is Jamal’s forum, so I can only express this opinion while accepting his judgement. This post is offered merely as a contribution to the ongoing discussion. Unless the reader is one of those who choose see me as a shill for the rise of the Skynet.