Would Socrates hate ChatGPT? It depends

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/12/2024 (408 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This week, I had two conversations about ChatGPT and its uses. Canadian news outlets are now suing Open AI for copyright infringement, so I’m not the only one who is concerned about AI.

AI scrapes authors’ work and data to “educate” itself, to produce new pieces of digital writing derived from that source material.

It’s a complicated plagiarism of debated legality. This churns out written product, containing dubious information, without a person behind it. However, as the field progresses, it becomes less of a debate and more of a reality.

If I don’t learn how to use new technology, I wonder if I will be left behind. As a Gen-Xer, I remember how some senior citizens without computer skills, who didn’t want new technology, were adrift as everything rapidly changed. These days, finding a person without online access, a cellphone or computer literacy is rare.

My kid experimented with robots in shops class, as part of the Grade 8 curriculum. He taught his robot new moves via ChatGPT and then got upset when things went wrong.

The other situation was more grave: as universities contend with rising plagiarism, professors find students use ChatGPT to do their assignments. While the student wastes their tuition fees, it also wastes professors’ time.

When this happens, professors may also use specialized AI to catch the cheaters. Alas, the plagiarism cases, academic hearings and their outcomes aren’t just AI. Each case takes time and valuable resources. Professors, deans, student advocates and, yes, students spend hours on something that should never happen. If my kid, at age 13, sees the limitations of ChatGPT with his robot experiments, what is going on with these university students?

What can we expect in the future?

All this made me reflect about older technology. There is recent archaeological evidence that stone spindle whorls, for hand-spindles (to make yarn), are approximately 12,000 years old. The archaeologists felt this discovery meant that wheels and whorls were much older technology than previously believed. Yet, before this innovation, people managed to make clothing, whether by spindle or earlier technologies.

Older people, who rolled fibre up their legs to make yarns, were perhaps angry about this invention. I imagine them telling youngsters that while you could produce hand-spun yarns faster on a spindle with a stone whorl, you could also knock somebody’s eye out with this weird new circular weighted spindle!

When the spinning wheel came into existence, dated to the Middle Ages in Europe, but earlier in Asia, I wonder again if elders were annoyed. Consider those who suggested that spindles had served them fine while they made tapestries for castles, all their clothing and even, way back, the Egyptians spun linen for the mummies’ tombs on hand spindles. Old technology isn’t bad technology. Pencils and paper still work for us, too.

A professor and I later discussed rising plagiarism cases where students use ChatGPT.

We considered if the students learn or comprehend new content on their own after becoming dependent on this new tool. Each iteration of technology is new. It feels foreign and frightening, but this phenomenon, this experience of bemoaning new things to learn and wanting to cling to the familiar, is not new.

The Greek philosopher Socrates believed that his students would suffer if they learned to read … he was against it. Plato quoted Socrates in Phaedrus. Here’s a translation:

“(Writing) will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

Socrates worried that students would lose their memory while relying on these written symbols (letters). They would not be able to discern the truth and might be poor learners. Worse, they would be boring discussion partners.

At my first glance, Socrates was wrong. Reading is now widespread and necessary for survival. In 2012, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that every Canadian has the right to read and that schools have the obligation to help all learners gain literacy.

Upon rereading Socrates, I realized there was more to this. Socrates wanted students to continue to think, recall, analyze and synthesize material. He feared that students would lose this as they gained other skills. We need to remember that all of us are capable of learning more, every day. Different tools can get us there. I’m still not a big enthusiast about a technology that steals others’ intellectual property. That said, a kid can see when using ChatGPT works to program his robot, and when using his brain might program the robot better.

It’s my hope that, like Socrates, we can see beyond superficial repetition of ideas or the information regurgitation that the student plagiarists might use. If we want to cultivate great thinkers and new ideas, we may also use new or different tools to do this. That’s OK, if it’s done properly.

Today, we assume everyone should get access to learning to read. It’s a basic and essential human right. We beg school systems and governments to adopt science-based literacy methods and universal assessment for kindergarteners. Reading didn’t stop us from thinking critically, if we want to. Neither will ChatGPT if we use it carefully. The goal is Socrates’s ongoing gift: a chance to seek truth, learn rather than hear and gain true wisdom, rather than just a show.

Joanne Seiff has been contributing opinions and analysis to the Free Press since 2009, without the use of ChatGPT.