Plato, ChatGPT, and the Future of Writing

Long before ChatGPT, Plato was already asking what new technologies might do to us.

In the Phaedrus, Socrates warns that writing would not make us wiser, but merely give us the appearance of wisdom. Why? Because written words cannot answer back. They are fixed, vulnerable to misunderstanding, and indifferent to their reader, a form of “dead speech.”

It is difficult not to hear an echo of our own moment.

Today, AI promises to help us think, write, and know more. Yet the anxiety it provokes is strikingly familiar: what if the very tools that seem to enhance intelligence gradually weaken the faculties they imitate?

And yet there is an irony at the heart of Plato’s warning: we know Socrates’ critique of writing only because Plato wrote it down.

Perhaps, then, the lesson is not that we should reject new technologies of thought. It is that we must respond to them by redefining the practice itself.

In the age of AI, the question is no longer whether machines can write.

When machines can produce language effortlessly, writing ceases to be evidence. The real question is no longer who can write. But who can still think?