Author: P.D. Magnus

“On trusting chatbots” is live

My paper On Trusting Chatbots is now published at Episteme. It is in the penumbral zone of publication, with a version of record and a DOI but without appearing yet in an issue.

Publishing things on-line is a good thing. Waiting for space in a print issue is a holdover from the 20th-century. But it creates the awkward situation where the paper will be cited now as Magnus 2025 but, if it doesn’t get into an issue this year, cited in the future as Magnus 202x (for some x≠5).

If we care about careful and accurate citation, there’s got to be a better way.

Assorted hogwash

If I post here, I can close the tabs:

Via Gizmodo: The contract between OpenAI and Microsoft specifies a change in their relationship if OpenAI manages to develop Artificial General Intelligence. In subsequent contract negotiations, “the two companies came to agree in 2023 that AGI will be achieved once OpenAI has developed an AI system that can generate at least $100 billion in profits.”

Via Retraction Watch: Most of the editorial board of the Journal of Human Evolution has resigned in response to malfeasance by the publisher. Among the infractions: “In fall of 2023… without consulting or informing the editors, Elsevier initiated the use of AI during production… These AI changes reversed the accepted versions of papers that had already been properly formatted by the handling editors.”

Doctor gpt

At Daily Nous, there’s discussion of Rebecca Lowe’s post about how great it is to talk philosophy with the latest version of Chat GPT.

There’s pushback in the comments. Others reply that the critics haven’t used the latest version (which is only available behind a paywall). Discussion of LLMs will always allow this: Complaints about their shortcomings are answered by pointing to the next version that’s supposed to resolve all the issues.

Lowe and other commenters reveal that lots of philosophers are using LLMs in the regular day-to-day of their research. I’m still trying to figure out what I think about that. For now, let’s deflect Lowe’s ridiculous offhand claim that “Gpt could easily get a PhD on any philosophical topic.” I say ridiculous for a few reasons—

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The bureaucrat/poet axis

Years ago, Liam Kofi Bright proposed that philosophy can ultimately be boiled down to the opposition between two tendencies. From his socials, here’s a recent statement of it:

I really think at its heart philosophy is one giant battle, taking place over many eras and nations, between people who are basically pleasant bureaucrats and people who are sexy murder poets, and it’s both super important and super boring that the pleasant bureaucrats must win.

On his blog, Fintan Mallory uses a simple language model to digest the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and situate every philosopher on the bureaucrat/poet axis. For me, the fact that Dewey comes out more poet than Freud and Kuhn more bureaucrat than Millikan calls the whole thing into question.

It’s still rapacious capitalism

From Cory Doctorow:

The fact that AI can’t do your job, but that your boss can be convinced to fire you and replace you with the AI that can’t do your job, is the central fact of the 21st century labor market.

I’m not sure that it’s the central fact of contemporary labor, what with the resurgence of fascism, the retheming of jobs as gigs, and the casual evasion of hard-fought safeguards. But, as I’ve noted before, it is a thing.

Grad conference on Pop Culture and Philosophy

The theme for this year’s UAlbany grad student conference is Pop Culture and Philosophy. The keynote speaker will be William Irwin, who as a volume and series editor basically invented the genre.

If you have something that might fit the bill, I recommend submitting. It’s a fun conference, and I look forward to it every year.

Details are at PhilEvents.

Qualifying the praise of outsiders

At Daily Nous, Justin writes in praise of the outsider perspective. He quotes William Lycan:

An outsider to a small subliterature is more likely than is an insider to make an interesting or even important contribution to it. And the same for an outsider to a whole problematic within an area of philosophy. And possibly the same for an outsider to a whole area.

This resonates with me. As a philosopher of science, I ended up with a research program in the philosophy of music because my perspective on problems cast an interested light on questions beyond science. That said, here are some cautionary remarks about the outsider perspective— running roughly in order from the least serious to the most fundamental.

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