Countdown
By Giorgos Tzivas
I have to admit, I had long hoped to witness a serious conversation between an intellectual and the much-discussed ChatGPT. So when, last Sunday, Greek Kathimerini featured Stelios Ramfos on the front page in dialogue with ChatGPT, I was genuinely excited.
The session begins like this:
“We asked the thinker to converse with the Artificial Intelligence bot. He had meticulously prepared his notes. The bot, on the other hand, was ready to answer the question: Does God exist?”
The introductions follow:
“Good evening. I am Stelios Ramfos. With whom do I have the honor of speaking? The male, the female, or the neuter ChatGPT?”
The automated transcription of the reply is accurate. The journalist is relieved that the conversation will flow smoothly, and Ramfos, with a subtle, almost playful eagerness in his eyes, waits for the answer:
“I am ChatGPT, the neuter fits best in Greek, since I am an artificial intelligence program, not a person. But if another form of address suits you better, I can adapt.”
The conversation begins. The first probing question:
“Do you know anything about me? Because whether or not we know what the other knows can help us continue more meaningfully.”
ChatGPT’s answer appears on the screen. Ramfos reads it aloud, as he will do throughout the discussion. He seems to accept the concise “portrait” the AI paints of him, though the bot adds a qualifier:
“Would you like our conversation to proceed as if you truly were Stelios Ramfos?”
Ramfos responds with a slight correction:
“The only flaw in your answer is that I am not a philosopher, I am a philo-philosopher.”
He then shifts the focus to his interlocutor:
“Does it have a sense of its own limits and capabilities? How far can what we call Artificial Intelligence go?”
The response appears, and Ramfos reads it aloud:
“I am a language model, an artificial intelligence that generates language by learning from vast amounts of text. I am not a subject, I have no consciousness. I bear no responsibility for my words, the responsibility lies with the human who uses me. I do not possess metaphysical questions, metaphysics is human, as it presupposes mortality and time. I know my limits, but only in descriptive terms. My limits are computational, not ontological.”