Many of us have likely heard one or several horror stories of people engaging with LLMs as companions and friends, speaking and learning from them.
As Walter Rüegg puts it,
(They) called (them) friends, to whom one could address questions and who could answer them, and in whose company one felt at ease, whose soul met one’s own soul in reading, and who gave on strength.
And from the letter of a certain Italian thinker:
I feed on that food which only is mine and which I was born for, where I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; and for four hours of time I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not frightened by death; entirely I give myself over to them.
Except, the first quote describes the reaction of authors and students to the introduction of the book.1 The second quote is, of course, from Machiavelli.2
There is something here that introduces, as far as I see it, a slight wrinkle in Marc Jones’s argument against AI, that is, it perverts the true end of conversation
While I agree with the idea, it is worthwhile to consider other techniques with whom, as with a companion, earlier philosophers felt a close, conversational attachment.
AI is obviously different than books, as a technique, as a means by which we form ourselves and the world. But we have been having “conversations” with inventions for some time.
Footnotes
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The full quote runs: “Humanists of various standing, including the professor and later diplmat Vergerio (1370-1444), Saint Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444), the teacher Guarino da Verona (1374-1460), the statesman and political philosopher Machiavelli (1469-1527), and the cosmopolitan scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam (about 1466-1536), called books friends, to whom one could address questions and who could answer them, and in whose company one felt at ease, whose soul met one’s own soul in reading, and who gave on strength.” - W. Rüegg, A History of the University in Europe. vol. I, 447. (italics added) ↩
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True, he is describing the authors of the books, not the books themselves; but the time he is spending is not with the authors, but with the authors mediated by books. Also, italics added to the quote, obviously, since letters back then were written without the ability to italicize, despite the Italian pen. ↩