Socrates (via Plato) presaged modern AI when he said, “Your invention is a potion for jogging the memory, not for remembering. You provide your students with the appearance of intelligence, not real intelligence. Because your students will be widely read, though without any contact with a teacher, they will seem to be men of wide knowledge, when they will usually be ignorant. And this spurious appearance of intelligence will make them difficult company.” He was talking about writing, but it's really all continuous invention, leading to self-writing machines today.

Socrates describes it all in a pre-modern thought experiment when he asked,

SOCRATES: Well, here’s a question for you. Suppose someone came up to your friend Eryximachus or his father Acumenus, and said, ‘I know how to treat the body in ways which allow me to raise or lower temperatures, to get people to vomit, to make their bowels move, and so on and so forth—whatever I choose or decide is best. And since I have this knowledge I regard myself as a professional doctor, and I claim to be able to make others doctors too by imparting this knowledge to them.’ How do you think they would respond to this speech? 

PHAEDRUS: I’m sure they’d ask him whether he also knew whom he should treat in these ways, and when, and how much.

SOCRATES: And what if he said, ‘No, I don’t. But I claim that anyone who learnt these treatments from me would be able to do what you ask’?      

PHAEDRUS: I think they’d say that the man was out of his mind, and was imagining that he’d become a doctor after having heard someone reading from some book or other, or after having accidentally come across some minor drugs, but that he really had no understanding of this area of expertise.

Ain't this the way with the stock-jobbing swindle called OpenAI, which sells the illusion of expertise but really has no understanding? Socrates is talking about writing, which was the disruptive invention of his day, but it's all one continues disruption, ever since the brainworm of language started re-programming our brains. To make us dumber, by the way.

Socrates looked down on writing, which he said lacked a soul. Socrates is very clear about soul, which he describes in some crazy metaphor about horsedrawn chariots that rise to the edge of heaven but keep falling back down due to karma or whatever. I find the definition of soul unclear and, as a Buddhist, unbelievable (no-self), but I must admit that soul is a pulse I can feel, though I can't put my finger on it. You know soul when it's there, and with AI it's clear that there's no there there.

The point of words, to Socrates, is not just stringing words together. The point of words is soul-searching, and soul-finding. To him the word is a living thing as long as it's expressed through living things, without which it becomes just a dead image. He continues the sexy metaphor (honestly, the whole work Phaedrus is nominally about seducing young boys) whe he says, about good words,

Words of this kind should be attributed to him as his legitimate sons—above all the words within himself, if he has found them and they are there, but secondly the words that are at once the offspring and the brothers of these internal ones of his, and have duly grown in others’ souls.

Soul soul soul, Socrates was a soul brother, and AI is an orphan. It's as soulless as they come. As Socrates said (about the proto-AI), “there’s something odd about writing, Phaedrus, which makes it exactly like painting. The offspring of painting stand there as if alive, but if you ask them a question they maintain an aloof silence.” Socrates in fact described modern AI exactly when he talked about probabilities. Machine learning is basically hopped-up statistics, ie probability.

Presenting ‘the wolf's tale’ (playing devil's advocate), he said “Whatever kind of speech one is giving, one should aim for probability (which often means saying farewell to the truth), because rhetorical skill depends entirely on one’s speeches being infused throughout by probability.” And, indeed, this is precisely what AI tries. It says farewell to the truth for pretty little lies. Its rhetorical skill depends entirely on its speeches being infused with probability, which often means saying farewell to the truth.

Generative AI works on the masses because of its similarity to truth, its truthiness. As Socrates said, “this probability of yours actually takes root in the minds of the masses because of its similarity to the truth.” This is what modern generative AI offers people, a facsimile of intelligence, Reddit and Stack Overflow passed through a fax machine, producing something that looks passable, until you look at it closely. Then it's all empty calories. Like dialectical Doritos. What Socrates said about the written word rings true about the self-written word today. It just feels empty and un-nutritious. Socrate said then,

There’s something odd about writing, Phaedrus, which makes it exactly like painting. The offspring of painting stand there as if alive, but if you ask them a question they maintain an aloof silence. It’s the same with written words: you might think they were speaking as if they had some intelligence, but if you want an explanation of any of the things they’re saying and you ask them about it, they just go on and on for ever giving the same single piece of information.

Don't you feel that experience talking to ChatGPT or whatever your poison? This is called artificial intelligence but it feels soulless and dumb. In conversation, Phaedrus asked if there was something superior to writing, and we can insert ourselves into the conversation to draw conclusions about modern AI vs human-produced stuff. Socrates said, about good rhetoric,

SOCRATES: It is the kind that is written along with knowledge in the soul of a student. It is capable of defending itself, and it knows how to speak to those it should and keep silent in the company of those to whom it shouldn’t speak.

PHAEDRUS: You’re talking about the living, ensouled speech of a man of knowledge. We’d be right to describe the written word as a mere image of this.

This is the Socratic method, asking and answering questions, with at least two souls having verbal intercourse, not just one soul mechanically masturbating. He said, “It’s far better, in my opinion, to treat justice and so on seriously, which is what happens when an expert dialectician takes hold of a suitable soul and uses his knowledge to plant and sow the kinds of words which are capable of defending both themselves and the one who planted them. So far from being barren, these words bear a seed from which other words grow in other environments.”

Thus Socrates has an idea of the word made flesh through flesh, it has to pass from teacher to student and back again to be true, productive intercourse. Anything else was just the sound of one hand fapping. Thus what Socrates said about writing applies even more so to its degeneration into generative AI. As he said to us (to repeat in conclusion), “Your invention is a potion for jogging the memory, not for remembering. You provide your students with the appearance of intelligence, not real intelligence. Because your students will be widely read, though without any contact with a teacher, they will seem to be men of wide knowledge, when they will usually be ignorant. And this spurious appearance of intelligence will make them difficult company.”

Read: Phaedrus by Plato but with Socrates as the main character.