Transcript of Debate Over Whether AI Can Write a Great Book

A panel at St. John's discussing AI and the humanities.

0. Will AI Write a Great Book?

Ari Schulman: I'd like to start this off with a question to Jonathan. Can AI, which is as most of us know it so far as a chat-based technology, can it truly engage in Socratic inquiry? Or does it only stimulate the form while missing the essence?

Johnathan Bi: Yeah, I guess it depends on what we think the essence of Socratic questioning is. One candidate for the essence is just the semantic words themselves, right? And there, a version of the question you can ask is, is there anything the wisest human tutor or even Socrates himself that would be said or could be said to a potential student that an AI couldn't plausibly now or in the future say? Another way to ask this question is, can AI write a great book? Like, if an AI witnessed the fall of Rome, would it have the capacity to write The City of God or something like that? And my stance on that is, clearly it can't do it now, but I don't see a reason why it couldn't do it. So on the level of purely semantic content of the questions asked of the Socratic tutor to the Socratic pupil, I don't think there's anything necessarily that's going to be different.

But now the question is, if there's nothing different in the pure semantic language, does the fact that it comes from a human, does that make it anything more