Brian Roberg's Blog

How AI Broke Aristotle

It's hard to describe abstract ideas like the fragility of society's understanding of personhood. But in an attempt to do so, I'd like to invite you on a thought experiment with me.

Imagine you had a time machine and could go back in time to another era of human history. In this case, you need to go all the way back to… 2017. That's far enough to reach a time before the first large language models (LLMs) were introduced.

Having traveled back to that far-distant time, now imagine yourself walking around your neighborhood. As you walk, you happen upon a snippet of writing. It could be on a slip of paper on the ground, it could be a random tweet on your phone, it could be any medium at all. Even without knowing any context or background of the writing you found, if that writing contains a coherent thought expressed in language then you know something incredibly significant: it was written by a person.

Throughout human history until the introduction of the LLM, verbal communication had been the exclusive domain of persons: either human persons, or higher-order persons such as angels or God Himself. But today, that assumption no longer holds. The advent of large language models means that it is now possible to carry on coherent and sophisticated verbal communication with a non-person.

At least, that's how those of us who anchor our understanding of personhood in Scripture would say it. For us, the boundaries of personhood are not subject to revision. That's why, as cultural confusion about AI has grown over the past few years, so many Bible-believing Christians have been saying, "But computers aren't people!" That we sometimes say this with a tone of exasperation shows that we expect this truth to settle the confusion.

The problem is that many of our neighbors do not share our confidence in the Scriptural foundation for personhood. For them, the test for personhood has to be something other than being made in God's image. The leading alternative, going back at least to Aristotle, has been rationality. A being who displays rationality can be said to be a person. (Aristotle famously described humans as "rational animals.")

But rationality is itself somewhat abstract—you can't see another person's thoughts unless they are expressed in some manner. What form of expression did Aristotle (and many other thinkers after him) use as proof of rationality? You guessed it: verbal communication. The ability to communicate via language has been the principal extra-biblical foundation for distinguishing persons from non-persons for thousands of years.

With this background, we can start to see why the arrival of the LLM is so significant. Prior to that, much of the potential disagreement about personhood between the two conceptual foundations was moot: we all ended up at (mostly) the same conclusion even if we got there by different paths. But now the two paths lead to different conclusions about who/what qualifies as a person.

We do not yet understand the full implications of this change, but we can expect them to be profound. I expect that our culture’s already-tenuous grasp on the concept of personhood is going to be completely broken, replaced by we don’t know what. In the coming years it could radically re-order how people think about relationships, community, and even themselves in relation to the world. This is especially true of young people who are forming their intuitions about the world right now, in the age of the LLM.