Notes and image credits for "A Phaedrus Moment"
My talk from Perusall Exchange 2025
Welcome to AI Log!
If you are new here and want to learn more, visit this brief guide to the blog.
These are notes and credits for a talk titled A Phaedrus Moment: If Socrates was wrong, does that make LLMs all right? that explores the striking similarity between Socrates’s concern about preserving the value of oral communication in the face of the “impropriety of writing” and our current moment of concern in the face of generative AI technology with an astonishing capacity to summarize and synthesize cultural data?
The talk is available as part of the online conference Perusall Exchange 2025 from May 19 - May 23. To watch the recording and comment on it, as well as attend live events by folks like John Warner and Maryanne Wolf, register for the conference here. The presentations remain available after the conference on the Perusall Exchange website, so the recording of my talk should still be available under the 2025 program.
I didn’t use AI generators to create images for this talk, and I don’t for any of my talks or blog posts. You can read why here.
The notes and credits below are for the human-produced writing and images I reference in the talk.
References
All quotes from Phaedrus are from 274c-278c in the Nehamas & Woodruff Edition, 1995. Hackett Publishing Company.
List of Images
“Homework Machine” by Shel Silverstein from A Light In The Attic (1981) HarperCollins Publishers.
Socrates (1950) by Warren Vale Casey, located at Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana. Image from Inventories of American Painting and Sculpture, Smithsonian American Art Museum. Link here.
Book cover. Phaedrus by Plato. Nehamas & Woodruff Edition, 1995. Hackett Publishing Company.
Cropped image of a Socrates bust for use in philosophy-related templates, etc. Bust carved by Victor Wager from a model by Paul Montford, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Western Australia. Photograph by Greg O'Beirne. Cropped by Tomisti - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, accessed via Wikimedia Commons.
Photo of World Book Encyclopedias, circa 1970. Image from Amazon.com.
DeepAI Socrates Chatbot. Screenshot 21 April 2025.
Thoth depicted with a book and stylus, by PharaohCrab - Own work, CC0, accessed via Wikimedia Commons.
Illustration of a growing mind by Kuliation.
Hope you enjoy the talk. My review essay about John Warner’s More than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI explores some of the same themes as A Phaedrus Moment.
If you want to read about my experiences with large language models in my teaching, check out AI Log Teaches.