Back to the Future: Everything You Wish You’d Asked Derrida About ChatGPT When You Had the Chance!

Abstract

This article considers and then reconsiders what ChatGPT produces and how it produces it, using the work of a range of critical theorists and authors. In particular, it imagines what different philosophers, thinkers, and writers would say about this most recent technological leap, if they were somehow brought back from the past, into this, our new future. To ventriloquise for them, this article plays fast and loose with the work and styles of Douglas Adams, Virginia Woolf, and Alan Turing, among others, to try to demonstrate what ChatGPT can do, having been potentially “trained” on their work, as well as highlighting the nuances of allusion, subtext, paradox, and contradiction as possibly more human aspects of both writing and reading. Such “play” is followed by a more serious analysis of writing and the suggestion of a “Double Signature Signification” at work in the text produced by ChatGPT, meaning one system of signification for writing the text (schematic) and one for reading it (referent), which overlap perfectly. The article concludes by arguing that it is not the consciousness of ChatGPT that beguiles us, it is the possibility of that consciousness, and what gives rise to that sense of possibility is partly the spectral and haunting nature of dialoguing with it. A dialogue with ChatGPT has all the excitement of a séance: it is uncertain, unknown, yet with its traces of the familiar it is also like talking to the dead.