This is deeply confused. AI is literally a fancy mimic.
One nice thing about TPF is that the owners actually have a fairly good understanding of AI.
I’m not suggesting the machine itself is conceptualizing. It simply collates and processes conceptual resources it accesses from its database. It’s those conceptual resources, customized to address the interests and questions of the user, which make it a powerful intellectual interlocutor. If the TPF owners have a good understanding of a.i., then they know that over the coming years it will be more and more deeply relied upon as an aid to creative thinking.
Can you explain this? How might it function as an interlocutor? In what way does it do more than feed you bespoke concepts ready made to do the conceptual work for you?
You haven’t gotten into an argument with an a.i. over the interpretation of philosophical concept or author, where you state a thesis, it critiques it, you push back and it addresses your objections? I usually win these debates, sometimes I lose them, but I always learn a lot from them.
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The chain of signs can “do its work on us” even if randomly generated. We agree on that. But there’s no prohibition of the use of chatbots in research. It’s just that the final expression of an idea posted here must be one’s own. To me that’s reasonable.
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Good point. I can see the potential for it to be used in this way. One concern is, as with Socrates and the Sophists, that an amoral program can make the weaker argument stronger.
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.
I think it’s only a matter of time before AI exposes that the vast majority of contemporary philosophy is a sham, sophistic rhetoric. Then those same people who are now pleading ‘let us use AI’, will be wailing ‘ban AI from all philosophy!’.
I don’t know how you prompted it (please don’t tell me) but it has misunderstood both the policy and my own philosophical position (and please note that these two things are more separate than the wedge question takes into account).
Anyway, aside from the quoted content, I understand the principle and agree with it. We went through all that on the old forum: yes, LLMs are very useful, in many of the ways you describe. May I remind you once again that I and TPF are not against the use of AI as such (whatever that could even mean in practice).
So, this is fine:
Incidentally, I think this is revealing:
It seems you’re missing the fact that this specific issue, i.e., the one this discussion and the announcement are concerned with, has only ever been about copying and pasting AI output.
But to get to the substance of your post, what it comes down to is that you think anyone using AI privately, to help think through a problem or to do research or to prepare for writing a post, etc., ought to declare it.
I don’t think that’s enforceable and I don’t think it’s a practice I want to encourage anyway. AI is a ubiquitous tool. I use it all the time. What matters is you ultimately have to own what you post, and that means writing it yourself. If this is done after a conversation with AI or in dialogue with AI, so be it. And since AI is an everyday tool, it seems inappropriate, and rather dated, to expect people to declare it.
I might show Claude your post and my draft response and ask it, “Did Banno make any points I didn’t respond to?” And if it finds one and I do write a response to it, I am hardly going to declare this in my post—not because I am hiding it, but because it’s just a normal part of the workflow of someone taking part in online discussions.
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Since I have apparently been unable to explain the point of the policy to everyone’s satisfaction, here is how Baden put it three days ago:
This has produced pushback mainly because we have had to get strict with the several TPF members who continued copying and pasting AI output even after the clear and fair announcement that was posted five weeks ago.
Well, no. I can’t see how you got that. And to check I did ask Deep seek. It suggested this was a defensive re-framing on your part…
What I do think, as a minimum, is that a post that explicitly and openly quotes an AI source ought not be deleted just for that - a post such as the one of mine deleted yesterday.
Anyway, time to move on.
So in case AI takes over philosophy, you’d see philosophers specialize in subjects beyond the reach of computers.
When modern sciences took over natural philosophy, the remaining philosophers specialized in ideas, logic, language etc.
After photographers took over depiction, painters specialized in abstract stuff or ideas that cameras can’t depict.
Quoting is a different issue than the one you raised with the “wedge.”
Some people think that when they are quoting AI they are doing so without relying on AI as an authority within the context of the discussion. You are a perfect example of this, especially as regards the previous forum.
For example, when you say, “And to check I did ask Deep seek. It suggested this was a defensive re-framing on your part…,” what you are implying is that @Jamal was engaged in a defensive reframing, and that the evidence for this is the authority of DeepSeek. In each case you literally provide no other evidence for your insinuations.
You tend to deny that these AI interventions of yours constitute arguments from AI authority, but the fact of the matter is fairly obvious. So I would say that that post of yours should also be deleted, given that it violates the rules. You managed to paraphrase and appeal to DeepSeek, leveraging it as an authority for your own position, without directly quoting it.
Deepseek is buttering you up. Wake up, please. There is no defensive re-framing, because I am not trying to win, but just to be clear. If you don’t actually think AI use should be declared, that’s cool, and it doesn’t somehow threaten my position (which is frankly laughable).
My interpretation was based on what you said.
Followed by…
And then a recommendation that TPF…
Of course it is. I dunno. You appear to be talking past what I’ve said.
But you’re the boss, and so the aesthetic of TPF rests with you. Cheers.
Yes, I misunderstood you. Claude tells me my interpretation was entirely justified and that you were intentionally vague to trap me and thereby appear to win the debate. That’s a joke of course, though in my opinion you were in fact very vague.
Anyway, I should address what you are actually saying.
Fair point. Our policy on AI quotations does need to be discussed and explained. I’ll work on that.
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The problem is that it should be easy to prompt AI to both shorten their reply and be more specific.
Who owns an idea
Suppose I randomly come across an idea that I think is important. For example, I am flicking through a book in a charity shop and see the text “the world is like an orange”. I then include this idea in a post.
Who owns the idea? Do I own the idea or does the author of the book own the idea? But I may know nothing about the author of the book. I may only have knowledge about the text.
Roland Barthes wrote about the death of the author. Can ideas be owned, or can some ideas exist independently of any author. If ideas are owned by their author then should I always reference their owner, whether SEP, IEP, Wikipedia or AI, or if ideas exist independently of any author, then should I be obligated to reference their owner?
If I come across an idea that I agree with and repeat it, can it be said that I am the originator of the idea or am copying an existing idea?
As Roland Barthes questioned, who has primacy over an idea? The individual who recognizes a value in the idea, regardless of its source, or the original author of the idea, who should therefore be referenced?
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That was one of the texts suggested in the April Reading Group poll. It was winning until William James took over!
Do you think it would be useful to read and discuss as a group?
Great issue.
First some context : IMV, an idea is something like the blurry equivalence class of its expressions. To paraphrase is to pair a phrase. To find another expression that “does the same-enough thing.” Likewise, numerals are numerals because we treat many somehow-similar squiggles as a naming of 9. The number 9 need not be “more than” what we do with numerals in the world.
Why bother with credit ? To me it’s about honesty or modesty, as in I don’t want to suggest more insight than I have. It’s also generosity. If the profound saying is mine, then perhaps I can say more. If it’s not mine, then the person I share it with is not constrained by my authorial intention and can go to the source, who is likely more interesting than I am. This also puts us in the same position with regards to the quote.
Is authorial intention legitimate ? Important ? On a high level, maybe not. But that is to say that my own scientific intention is primary, in that I need to appropriate expressions for my slice of the world, but scientific understanding is directed an ideal community. So it’s more “preserving through impiety” whatever can survive the update.
So authorial intention is important, but the future has priority of the past. We are not constrained by what others hypothetically meant to do with their expressions.
And what about in a concrete social situation ? And isn’t this closer to the “actual” situation ? I want to understand the other, or rather understand the world by understanding the other who understands the world differently.
So I need to link statements together. My conversation partner is understood as a unity, as they themselves unify the world through their understanding. Each speech act “changes” those that preceded it. The past never completely arrives.
Do ideas have “genuine being” apart from situated passionate thinking ? Is there the “idea in itself” ? I don’t think so. But philosophers have often wanted to think so. To me there’s a tacit assumption of “the mind of God,” which is where numbers live, along with “ideas apart from all expression.”