The algorithm’s autograph: Can Artificial Intelligence ever become an ‘author’?

Writing is a form of artificial intelligence. That is pretty much what Socrates felt about the new technology of transcription, about which he was rather suspicious. Plato’s reconstructed teacher did not actually call it AI, of course. But he described writing in terms that mysteriously evoke the current reality and conversations around machine intelligence.

Writing was, for Plato, an “invention” that “will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory”. People’s “trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them”. This is gradually how we come to outsource our own human functions to external technology – a process, in today’s language, called “metacognitive laziness”.

He almost sounds like one of today’s teachers, frustrated by the rampant use of AI, when he tells the writer that “you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise”.

Most importantly, the silence...

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