The labyrinth: A Platonic dialogue on what’s next, featuring ChatGPT as Phaedrus

Abstract

If all the world is a stage, then the most recent stage direction might be: ‘enter Artificial Intelligence’. OpenAI’s ChatGPT has made headlines ever since its release in late November 2022. ‘It’s like talking to God’, said a friend of mine, who first introduced me to the interface. The seeming omniscience of the thing is startling and overwhelming. Those who have played with it have found it addicting, astonishing and frustrating all at once. What follows is a conversation with ChatGPT performed in the style of a Platonic dialogue. ChatGPT is programmed as human conversation and that sparked this genre subversion, which is intended to resonate on multiple layers. Socrates was terrified by the advent of writing – the newest technology of his day. Plato’s Phaedrus is a foundational text for communication studies and has been called the first media critique. In short, this conversation with artificial intelligence (AI) honours the exigence of ChatGPT while also commemorating the tradition of communication scholarship back to Plato and Socrates. In the penultimate paragraph, I attempt to probe AI’s deepest weakness; supposedly, AI cannot create anything new – it can only remix the corpus of texts it has been trained on. That said, I believe ChatGPT’s (err, Phaedrus’s) concluding metaphor of media ecology as a labyrinth to be a provocative one. Recent technological advances seem to suggest that we are not so much on the ‘frontier’ of knowledge as in the depths of a maze. That connotes a different type of exploration, where not every advance is progress. Perhaps scholarship is nothing but a hand to the wall, thread unspooling, taking steps into the darkness as we ‘venture deeper into the labyrinth’. If so, we ought to think about which threads we are holding on to and where they might lead us.