On the Experience of Using Artificial Intelligence by a Historian of Philosophy: Hallucinations and Bullshit, Creativity and Adaptability
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31649/sent44.03.176Keywords:
history of philosophy, academic integrity, mythmaking, critical thinking, source criticism, text interpretation, cognitive distortionsAbstract
The spread of digital education highlights the risks associated with the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in teaching and research on the history of philosophy, particularly violations of academic integrity through the application of large language models such as ChatGPT. To initiate a conceptual engagement with this problem, the author undertook an empirical exploration – a history-of-philosophy “experiment” with this AI agent. It turned out that the system’s responses, alongside a degree of adaptability and creativity, typically contain various distortions and gaps, falsifications and fabrications, including hallucinations and bullshit. The advantages of AI, while avoiding these pitfalls, can be harnessed through classical tools offered by the history of philosophy – careful Socratic questioning, contextual-interpretative reading of texts, and systematic historical-philological source criticism.
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