Disrupting Bull$#!t with the AI Stance

In an era saturated with AI-generated content, a familiar cultural anxiety has resurfaced: the fear that imitation will be mistaken for understanding. Critics describe much of AI's output as "slop" or, in the more philosophical terms of Harry Frankfurt, "bullshit"—discourse produced without any concern for truth. Episode 4 of The Gadfly challenges this moral panic by arguing that our contemporary resistance to AI recapitulates ancient philosophical errors. This episode disrupts the simplistic, wholesale rejection of AI by proposing a new framework for critical engagement, drawing a direct line from Plato's critique of sophistry to a novel epistemological tool: The AI Stance. Rather than treating AI as a corrupting quasi-agent, the episode reframes it as a powerful tool whose value is determined not by its origin, but by the rigor and judgment of its human user._____________________________________________________________________________________Further Reading:Dennett, Daniel C. The Intentional Stance. MIT Press, 1987.---. “The Problem with Counterfeit People.” The Atlantic, 16 May 2023.Frankfurt, Harry G. On Bullshit. Princeton University Press, 2005.Orfanos, Spyros. “Socrates and Artificial Intelligence.” Freud Museum London, 2024.Pinner, Richard. “If Socrates Feared Writing, What Would He Say About AI?” Blog post, 23 May 2025.Plato. Euthydemus. Translated by Benjamin Jowett, in Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, Hackett, 1997.---. Ion. Translated by Paul Woodruff, in Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, Hackett, 1997.---. Phaedrus. Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, in Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, Hackett, 1997.Strasser, Andreas, and Mark Wilby. “The AI-Stance: Crossing the Terra Incognita of Human–Machine Interactions?” PhilArchive, preprint.Véliz, Carissa. “Socrates Would Have Hated AI.” Time, 1 Aug. 2023.Episode CreditsProducer and Editor: Dr. Christopher C. KirbyThis work is made possible by the Jeffers W. Chertok Memorial Endowment at Eastern Washington University.**The views expressed in this program are not necessarily those of Eastern Washington University