Since late 2022, we’ve seen a steady stream of essays describing writers’ concerns related to AI, from philosophical meditations to brisk opinion pieces, all engaging with questions (and often offering predictions) about the future of writing, thinking, and education. Many of these pieces, seeking historical parallels, feature references to Socrates’ warnings about the advent of writing articulated in Plato’s dialogue the Phaedrus. Reading the written word, Plato’s teacher and central character Socrates asserts, offers people a false sense of learning, not the true learning accessible only through dialectical (premise-testing, conclusion-building) conversation and inquiry, a practice essential to how Socrates describes human thinking in the service of seeking truth. As UC-Irvine philosophy professor Anastasia Berg puts it in her recent New York Times opinion piece, “AI Threatens Our Ability to Understand the World,” “A.I. is hardly the first technology to threaten our cognitive competence. Long before ChatGPT, the smartphone and the calculator, Plato warned against writing itself. Literate human beings, he foresaw, would ‘not use their memories.’ He was not entirely wrong. But few of us would consider this a bad bargain. The written word is, after all, the condition for the survival of these very same Platonic dialogues across two millenniums.” Most of us devoting our careers to the practice and teaching of reading, writing, and research would likely agree, testifying to the value of all the time we’ve spent consuming and producing the written word, first as students and then as scholars and educators. We have judged this a bargain worth accepting.
Historian of science and prolific author James Gleick, in his November 2024 essay “Bad Readers” in the New York Review of Books, does not name Plato or Socrates, though the critiques of rhetoric in the Gorgias and the Phaedrus provide an implicit context (name those enthymemes) for a passage like this, with its pointed assessment of how technology, like the hot new thing rhetoric way back in Athens, does not pursue truth: “The artificial intelligence community has prioritized verisimilitude at the expense of veracity. They didn’t have to do that; it was a choice, perhaps influenced by Alan Turing’s idea that an intelligent machine should be able to impersonate a human. It’s scary how often people find that useful. They get the benefit of quick school reports and news summaries and business letters, and truthfulness is devalued. The result is chatbots that gaslight their customers and pollute the information environment. They are a perfect tool for malefactors who flood social media with disinformation, particularly on the site formerly known as Twitter. The combination of plausible and untrustworthy is exactly the poison we don’t need now.” Plato’s evil speaker exposed in the Gorgias (the conniving amoral oligarch Callicles rather than the dithering Gorgias, reduced to a minor character readily admitting that rhetoric doesn’t pursue truth) becomes Gleick’s malefactor, the digital troll enabled or embodied by tech moguls flooding the digital commons with AI slop; greed and the lust for power, guiding principles for Callicles, bridge the millenia, linking those who use language, whether spoken or written, to destroy truth in order to benefit themselves, whatever the cost to others and whatever the damage to the public commons.
Before proceeding further with contemporary contretemps, let’s dwell on Plato’s original indictment of writing as presented in the Phaedrus, an exercise in close reading made possible by the bargain Berg describes.
Of Gods, Arts, and Letters: In Conversation with the Phaedrus
As the passage begins, Socrates moves away from Q&A into narrative mode: “At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters.” Clearly this “famous old god” kept busy. Note the scope of his inventions, which to this day determine much of the public conversation about the effectiveness of schools, as we see manifested in the regular (generally woeful) reports about student progress in math (arithmetic and calculation and geometry) along with reading and writing (the use of letters). Theuth by this account had great interest in developing symbolic systems, from numbers to letters to the measure and meaning of shapes in the night sky; we can also assign him some responsibility for the popularity of gambling, as “draughts and dice” give way to fantasy sports leagues, online betting apps, and the ongoing relentless Las Vegas-ication of popular culture. Note also that Plato has Socrates speak of the “great discovery” of the use of letters, as this translation connects invention and discovery, as Aristotle does later in the Rhetoric.
“Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To them came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them. He enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them.” Theuth delivers his pitch to Thamus (a high-stakes oral presentation of the inventor god’s applied research), though we don’t get much detail about the back and forth, only that Thamus as king of Egypt has the authority to control which of the inventions presented by Theuth he will make accessible to the Egyptians, acting as a kind of one-god regulatory agency. We have a reference to a Q&A with questions from Thamus, who then makes judgments about the value of the inventions in an epideictic mode that also determines public policy.
“It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. ” I for one would like to read more of the conversation of the two gods, inventor and king, about the benefits of the other arts invented by Theuth, but Plato has Socrates get right to the claims Theuth makes for the benefits of letters. He names them quickly, ascribing to letters the ability to make Egyptians wiser and improve their memories, serving “both for the memory and the wit.” We can read this as an early prototype of advertising copy, with the most recent versions the breathless hype touting generative AI technology, heralding its ability to support learning for students and promote efficiency in the workplace, not to mention its transformative power to create solutions to any problem and cures for illnesses, along the way either making jobs obsolete or freeing workers from drudge work in order to devote their time to “higher-order” work. In response to the hype, the now Doubting Thamus gets to the heart of the matter:
“Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”
Here Plato has Socrates allow Thamus to speak at length, providing a detailed refutation of the claims made by Theuth. Again we can read this as a prototype, in this case for the response to AI hype, challenging both its premises and definitions. Theuth becomes the “tech bros” moving fast and breaking things (also stealing and plundering resources), unable to judge the usefulness of their inventions, led astray by their “love” for their invention (and their desire for great wealth and power, seemingly not part of what Theuth seeks, at least in this version). Thamus discerns that writing will “create forgetfulness” as learners will no longer need to rely on their memories (the fourth canon of rhetoric for Aristotle). Thamus distinguishes valuable memory from its counterpart “reminiscence” (could use more explanation there), going on to state that letters do not offer truth but instead “the semblance of truth.” We can apply the next few claims to both unquestioning readers of letters and to the technology of generative AI itself: AI hears many things (through its training texts) but learns nothing; appears to know everything but knows nothing; and can display or perform a version of knowledge without putting in the work. As teachers we fear that world, with technology incapable of learning anything from its training texts blithely, obliviously pretending to know everything and leading those who use the technology (students, citizens, professionals) to accept facsimiles of truth, knowledge, and wisdom as the real thing.
After concluding the narrative, Socrates goes on to offer his own analogy, comparing writing to painting: “I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence.” This extends the earlier language about the “semblance of truth” that letters provide, adding the descriptive “attitude of life.” Next he compares painting to “speeches,” although in this context we likely need to understand “speeches” as spoken words transcribed into letters, not as real time talk like that dramatized in the dialogues (though as Berg notes we have them to study because of writing). Socrates states, “And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.” Plato has Socrates champion what he commits to writing in the dialogues, with their stream of questions and painstakingly developed answers, their probing and testing of premises before advancing to the next logical step in building shared understanding of truth discovered by dialectical process. We might wonder how Socrates would have responded to his student Plato utilizing him as a character in the written dialogues, what he would have said about the written records of what we now routinely refer to as the “Socratic method.” Would he assert that the written character Socrates cannot “protect or defend” himself against mistreatment or abuse and has no parental protector? Would he believe his student betrayed him?
In considering what we might say to Socrates to respond to these questions, we would want to take into account more than two thousand years of human culture with writing as an increasingly available technology, with people experiencing hundreds of those years as participants in “print culture” and more recently decades as participants in “digital print culture.” We would eventually tell Socrates about the technology of generative AI, its training on billions of words vacuumed up from written documents composed since his lifetime, and the mix of oral conversations (in classes, in conferences) and print conversations (in books, articles, and conference proceedings) provoked by this new invention. We might read to him as well the references to his student Plato’s warnings that contemporary writers make in responding to AI. Finally, we might read to him from two written texts with explicit intentions to appropriate Socrates, turning him into a chatbot. We’ll get to those chatbot versions of Socrates in a while.
School Days
While Berg notes that writing ensured the survival of Plato’s dialogues–as a philosophy professor, she has likely taught those dialogues and many other classical texts preserved by writing and later spread widely by the printing press (and now available online through the Project Gutenberg library)–she doesn’t have space in an op-ed to explore what kinds of conversations we have with the texts that writing provides for study. For that, we can draw on our own school experiences as well as familiar images such as the Burkean parlor (we assume that the speakers there have immersed themselves in written texts before entering the room, and the parlor itself might contain bookshelves) or, more colloquially, the book club (local versions and pop culture monoliths like Oprah’s Book Club). Plato doesn’t have Socrates muse on the potential learning for interlocutors studying written texts together; when the dialogues include references to Socrates and others reading written texts, they tend to move quickly to inquiry through conversation governed by the rules of dialectical reasoning. Necessarily, then, the Phaedrus offers for critique an individual reader who asks questions of a written text unable to respond. For most of us, though, gathering in classrooms to discuss written texts has taken up much of our lives as students and teachers. While we might complain that students “don’t do the reading,” nearly all of those students take for granted that school involves going to class to talk about written texts. They may consider those discussions “nothing important,” as represented by the absent student’s query, “Did I miss anything important?” That student would likely not expect that the missed discussion of a reading qualifies as “important.” That was just talk, after all, not a lecture conveying valuable information that might appear on a test.
I learned a different lesson from one of my revered high school English teachers, Shirlee Citron, when I had to miss a class meeting. When I complained that she required me to write a short essay in response to a reading of my choice to “make up” for the absence, she said, “Marvin, the essay you’ll write doesn’t make up for the absence. Nothing can make up for the absence, as that conversation is irreplaceable, gone forever.” Not her exact words, but I carry with me more than a half-century later the lesson, delivered with her usual solemn (I considered using the adjective “owlish” here) certainty, that classroom conversations have incalculable value. Indulge me while I offer a brief paean to Mrs. Citron, a teacher who embodied kindness and wisdom and most of all a calm and steady yet passionate commitment to reading and writing. I remember her talking to us about her appreciation for the writing of political journalist Norman Cousins as if it were the most natural thing in the world to share such personal tastes with her teenage students. She taught a course in writing the essay (called Advanced Composition, I think), quite unusual in those days in a high school English department focused on literature. Later, I visited her when I could during the summer at her home in Bloomfield Hills, some distance from Oak Park. We talked about school and books and movies. I remember asking her to give Annie Hall another chance when she dismissed the hit movie as a pastiche of old jokes. I just learned online that Mrs. Citron passed in 2019 at the age of 97, thirteen years after her husband Abe. Her memory is a blessing.
I can’t claim that in my own teaching I’ve consistently designed or facilitated classroom conversations that reach the level of value set by Mrs. Citron, finding over the years that I have more faith in writing activities and paired or small group activities focused on specific tasks than in free-ranging conversations about readings (a regular feature of classes I took as a student, along with lectures in larger classes). Some of you may recall a question I often asked pre-pandemic, when I still visited PWR classrooms. If the class had included prolonged discussion of a reading, I asked (yes, I know how annoying I could be), “What did you want your students to remember from that discussion?” And then, just to up the annoyance quotient, “If one of your students sitting at dinner that night has a friend ask what happened in PWR class today, what do you think the student would say in response?” I asked these questions to get to my standard suggestions: each class meeting should involve more focused writing work than free-range discussion; and teachers should have their students write their way into and out of any long in-class discussion, with some kind of documentation of the discussion along the way.
As a young writing teacher myself, I didn’t follow this advice. I talked too much, I over-guided discussions of readings, often with a specific destination in mind, not knowing how to listen intently to students’ comments. I didn’t yet know that students should write in a writing class. In sum, I leaned too heavily on my student experiences and my own writing experiences, specifically that writing was generated in private isolation. Fortunately, Peter Elbow’s Writing with Power came on the scene, making quite a splash in the University of Arizona Composition Program thanks to the pioneering efforts of the “Elbow People,” a group of instructors led by “Head Supervisor” Ruth Gardner, a Tucson incarnation of Shirlee Citron. The book’s pedagogy brought freewriting, invention activities, and revision activities to the writing classes there (more than five hundred sections a year, typical for a large public research university). Not everything changed overnight (entrenched habits don’t get uprooted and swept away easily), but the process revolution ultimately transformed program pedagogy, reducing the default habit of unstructured class discussion and the temptation to fall back on lecture. We all learned how to design class meetings to focus on student-centered active learning, specifically doing things as readers, writers, and speakers.
A related lesson, that one must talk with others about what one reads to understand what one reads, came from my first composition program director and mentor Charles Davis during my time at Arizona. I’ve often mentioned Charles’s influence on me in relation to what I know about rhetoric and WPA work in remarks at September Sessions. The story: in those pre-Internet days I read several positive references to a classical work of literary criticism, On the Sublime, attributed to Longinus and likely put in written form some two thousand years ago (only part of the text survived). I located a print copy to read and found I didn’t understand why writers considered the work with such reverence. In those days I had an office in the composition hallway in the Modern Languages Building across from the director’s office where Charles held court; his office had a reception area where the program assistant acted as gatekeeper to the inner sanctum where Charles sat behind a desk cluttered with stacks of papers and a nameplate that read “Mr. Davis,” a souvenir of his salad days as a high school English teacher.
As my WPA cred and responsibilities accumulated, I earned unfettered access to the inner sanctum, often to check in quickly about an urgent matter but gradually to hang out, generally toward the end of the working day. I’ll state here that nobody in the program associated the concept of “hanging out” with Charles, an imperious figure who looked and sounded like the English actor Charles Laughton–picture Laughton when he played the curmudgeonly barrister in Witness for the Prosecution or perhaps in the signature John Houseman role of law Professor Kingsfield in The Paper Chase, both fitting models as they represent imposing deliverers of forensic rhetoric. As I revise this, I think of The Wizard of Oz as well, with Charles as both the “great and powerful” floating head wreathed in smoke and flames and the man behind the curtain working the levers; though he was no charlatan, he did look something like Frank Morgan, who played the Wizard in the movie. One day I mentioned in passing during one of the quick check-in visits that I didn’t get anything out of On the Sublime. To this day I wonder what would have happened if I’d brought this up during a late afternoon visit, if he would have started asking me questions about the text while we sat in the waning Tucson sunlight coming in the window behind him. I do remember what Charles said as I ducked out of the doorway and we both went about our business: “That’s because you haven’t found someone to talk with about it.”
Paean #2, for Charles: likely nobody reading this, unless they worked in the Arizona Composition Program between 1973 and 1990 or have had to listen to my stories about my years there, knows anything about Charles, a WPA of the generation including Ed Corbett (Ohio State), Janice Lauer (Purdue), William Irmscher (Washington), Ross Winterowd (USC), Anne Ruggles Gere (Michigan), Winifred Horner (Texas Christian), and James Kinneavy (Texas) among others. You may know those names because you’ve encountered their books and articles. Charles did not publish; the only article listed in his vita he wrote for the Arizona English Bulletin, the publication of the state’s K-12 and college writing teachers organization. I still consider him a major figure in the field, a model of erudition and commitment to literacy instruction. He “published” people in lieu of articles and books, literally hundreds of writing instructors trained in his program, many of whom continued on to careers as WPAs and/or as scholars in Writing Studies, literature professors, or fiction writers, essayists, and poets. Little I have done since 1980, from teaching my first college writing class to writing this newsletter article, doesn’t owe a great debt of gratitude to Charles. Bob Seger has a line in the song you know as “Rock and Roll Never Forgets”: “Well, all of Chuck’s children are out there playing his licks.” The original, of course, “Rhetoric Never Forgets,” refers to “all of Chuck’s children are up there sharing his shticks.” Charles never forgave Bob for calling him Chuck or for the Yiddish word–he would have preferred Greek or Latin.
Torah Talk
Which brings us to a short article by Ilene Rosenblum, a “freelance writer and digital media consultant living in Jerusalem,” titled “Chavruta: Learning Torah in Pairs,” subtitled “The Jewish Way to Study.” She begins her tale of transformation this way, representing a young student’s version of what Socrates worried about in relation to writing: “I never liked group learning. In high school and college I preferred to hunker down and go through material myself, being completely responsible for the success or failure on any given assignment, and in my room, the café, or at a walled off desk in the library, my prevailing theory was that I learn best when no one interferes.” What she shares about her pre-conversion self might explain why some students think of group work as busy work, not essential or even supplemental to individual learning. I confess, as I noted earlier, that when I recall my student self, I considered reading, writing, and thinking as primarily individual pursuits.
Note Rosenblum’s highlighting of “success and failure” in her description of her desire to do the work alone. For the learner who values individual work, the classroom might look like an arena for displaying, not seeking or sharing, one’s learning, with peers as a combination of competitors and judges, with the teacher as chief justice. I confessed earlier as well that as a young teacher I carried some of these attitudes with me, too concerned with “right answers,” soliciting interpretations of texts that conformed to mine. Having a gradebook didn’t help, as that positioned me as a judge. Being a graduate student when I began teaching didn’t help either, as I toggled between trying to stand out intellectually among my peers and teaching first-year students how to write in college; only in retrospect do I recognize that displaying or performing intelligence should not dominate the writing classroom. As reported, eventually process pedagogy as dramatized in Elbow’s Writing with Power provided a course correction, guiding me to revise all of my premises about writing, writing instruction, and education more generally.
When Rosenblum began to study Torah, she reports that “I was set up with a chavruta, a learning partner, and attended lectures around a table or was assigned a partner to study with. The Jewish way to learn, I found, is as a group.” Her narrative continues with formal education informed by that concept: “Eventually I found my way to a seminary, where lessons took place in a noisy study hall, around long tables where many people sit together, reading and discussing out loud in pairs. Though it is at times distracting, I found that the ongoing chatter reflects vibrancy, giving life to the material at hand.” When group work goes well in a PWR classroom, the activity might fit Rosenblum’s description of energetic intellectual inquiry. She advocates for this pedagogical practice, sounding something like a Carnegie Deli Socrates when she writes “I become ‘sharper’ through explaining material out loud with a study partner, am more motivated to stay on track and I absorb material better than when passively learning alone. My chavrutas have pushed me to learn both in and out of the study hall, becoming friends and mentors as well.” Again, this might remind us of successful PWR classroom communities, when students share later that they sustained relationships with peers beyond the classroom and the quarter.
“I’ll Give You a Topic. Will AI Affect Torah Study for Good or Ill? Discuss.”
Let’s continue our exploration of Torah study as an endless conversation about written texts, including oral commentaries on texts that have been written down to extend the conversation into future generations.
Rabbi Gil Student, editor of TorahMusings.com and a recent book titled Articles of Faith: Traditional Jewish Belief in the Internet Era, wrote on the topic “Talmud Torah in the Age of AI” for his website in June 2025. He begins with a general acknowledgement that AI is “changing the world,” then funnels to the question of the future of Torah study. He writes “Some anticipate that AI, once it overcomes its current accuracy problems, will transform how we learn: whether replacing the rebbe (teacher) or chavrusa (study mate), reimagining what a text is and looks like, or offering individualized courses of study based on ability and interests. Perhaps more deeply, some think that not just the form of Torah study but the very goal will change also. Do we need to study texts carefully when we can easily obtain all our answers from AI?” We see here a parallel with the concerns of all educators worried that students in all school contexts, secular or parochial, will choose not to engage deeply with texts because AI will provide the “answers” to all questions. Of course that phrasing implies that we read only to extract answers in the form of nuggets of information to supply the “right answers.”
Rabbi Student does not reference Plato or Socrates, or the appearance of writing in Athens, instead putting forward as the key historical context for his analysis the long process of putting the Talmud into a written form for study;
“For centuries, Torah She-Be’al Peh, the Oral Torah, was transmitted exclusively through memory and speech. Students learned by listening, repeating and reviewing constantly. A Torah scholar was, above all, a living library. Mastery meant knowing vast bodies of material by heart and being able to recall them instantly in debate or judgment. When the Talmud was redacted and committed to writing, this world changed. The act was unprecedented and far more revolutionary than AI is today because it fundamentally altered how Torah was accessed and preserved. What had been stored in the minds of sages could now be stored on parchment.”
No more living libraries embodied in sages. No more need to store vast texts in the mind. He goes on to explore the effect of this shift on Torah study in ways that don’t come up in the Phaedrus, describing what scholars did with the brain space released from the high-pressure demands for vast memorization:
“The emphasis of learning also shifted, to a degree, from memorization to textual and abstract analysis. Scholars still value broad knowledge, but the primary skill has become understanding and interpreting texts, rather than holding every line in memory. A good memory is still held in esteem but more as a curiosity than a requirement. The change lessening the value of memorization did not diminish Torah study; it enriched it.”
Here we find familiar terrain, intellectual ground we have traveled in our lives as interpreters of texts. We also find a rationale for accepting AI as the latest technology that has potential to enhance learning rather than undermine learning. Rabbi Student doesn’t worry about cognitive offloading or the end of thinking, laying out the benefits this way: “Just as the written Talmud shifted the center of gravity from memory to analysis, and just as digital search tools made it easier to locate sources, AI will enable certain tasks that previously were unavailable to the average student. It will not, and cannot, change the process of learning itself.” Naive, or a justifiable leap of faith?
Farbrengen! Zoom Parlor! Engage With The Scholars!
Thanks to Emily Polk, I recently learned of the existence of The Institute of Jewish Spirituality and Society (IJSS), located in Philadelphia. Their website states that IJSS “advances scholarship and social transformation, bringing Jewish spiritual knowledge to bear on the toughest challenges of contemporary society.” They host an occasional “farbrengen,” defined by Wikipedia as specific to Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidim and described this way: “Carried out in a relaxed atmosphere, with no rigid schedule, it may consist of edifying discussions, explanations of general Torah subjects, with an emphasis on Hasidic philosophy, relating of Hasidic stories, and lively Hasidic melodies.” Further, the Wikipedia entry notes that the gatherings are “public events open to non-Hasidim as well.” That accounts for how I attended one at Chabad Lubavitch headquarters in Brooklyn (770 Eastern Parkway, to be exact), sometime around 1970, as an obviously non-Hasidic teenager, though I was in the company of two Chabad rabbis who ran an orthodox synagogue in my hometown of Oak Park, doing their best to bring Chabad to suburban Detroit. (In later years my father spent a lot of time at the Chabad House in Ann Arbor; we held his funeral service there in 2006.) I have vivid memories of the farbrengen, later using the memories in a short story titled, fittingly, “Forbrengen” (yes, I’ve been misspelling it for decades), an homage to and reimagining of Bernard Malamud’s “The Magic Barrel.”
IJSS borrows the term “farbrengen” for their online scholarly conversations, a Yiddish version of Burke’s parlor. That’s how I encountered Ziva Hassenfeld, who completed her doctorate in GSE at Stanford before becoming a professor of Jewish Education at Brandeis. This past November 13 she led an IJSS Farbrengen on “The Power of Words: How Reading Shapes What We Believe.” She spoke for a half hour before opening up the session to comments and questions from those in attendance. What she shared stems from her current book project, described this way on her Brandeis homepage:
“Her current book project extends this agenda by offering a bold counter-narrative to dominant frameworks such as the ‘science of reading’ through investigation of religious reading practices. Rather than treating reading as a technical skill to be mastered for utilitarian purposes, Hassenfeld draws on Jewish mystical traditions, as well as broader religious conceptions of language, to articulate an alternative vision of reading as a sacred, transformative act. She argues that religious literacy practices, especially in communities where language is imbued with spiritual and cosmological significance, open up new possibilities for how we understand reading, comprehension, and meaning-making. This work contributes to growing conversations about the limitations of reductive literacy paradigms and the need to reclaim more expansive, interpretive, and relational models of reading. It offers compelling answers to the current reading crisis we are living through where young students struggle to learn how to read, college students struggle to engage in deep reading, and AI is forcing the question: What is reading for?”
In her remarks she emphasized that “Stories are the currency of change” in academic research and culture more generally, continuing on to share narratives highlighting the contrast between reading as “a technical skill to be mastered for utilitarian purposes” and reading as “a sacred, transformative act”; the latter also leads to understanding the practice of reading, like the practice of writing, as integral to epistemic meaning-making. In expanding on the consequences of this contrast for education, she spoke of educational paradigms that encourage educators to teach reading as the “rewiring” of children to do something their brains don’t naturally do; as a counter, she offered the tradition in Torah study of considering reading, the study of written texts (the transcribed oral tradition and written commentaries that followed), as an “unending way of life.” Both the world and the Torah are “meant to be read and interpreted, with new meanings every day.” That’s quite some distance from a model of reading focused on extracting information. I want to highlight in this account of the IJSS farbrengen that participants received written texts in advance; in a sense, then, the farbrengen served as a conversation about what we’d read. Two of the excerpts represent how both religious and secular texts describe reading and writing (what Toni Morrison calls “word work” in the excerpt below) as essential human activities:
(Maggid on Pirkei Avot): 201 Everyone who learns Torah Lishma merits many devarim (words/things)... It means to say that the Torah is without end, and the Torah and the Holy One are one. Therefore the one who studies will merit many words, the depths of Torah, without end, flowing forth like a constant spring.
Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture, 1993 “Word work is sublime, she thinks, because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference–the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our life.”
Morrison refers to “word work” as “sublime,” the doing of which separates human beings from other life forms and certainly from large language models, however chatty they might be when programmed to function that way. When I recently read “The Claims of Close Reading” by Reed College English professor Johanna Winant in the Boston Review, I thought of Morrison as well as my high school English teacher Shirlee Citron and her colleagues at Oak Park High, Barbara Goldsmith, Thelma Rosenbaum, Bud Kulka, and Joe Gamache, all of whom taught literature, all of whom trained me in close reading. That led me to major in English; for a time I believed I wanted to teach literature, though my experience with Charles Davis and teaching writing led me to another region of “word work,” where I still reside. Winant describes her teaching of Renaissance poetry to students at her previous school, West Virginia University, where she spent nine years before moving to Reed. Her essay sounds many elegiac notes as she mourns what she considers destructive cost-cutting measures at West Virginia that treated the university as “a site of extraction, a public good that had been plundered by the wealthy and left as a shell.” The essay also voices an ode of praise, describing the classroom community and the “word work” she and her students do:
“Nothing there was missing: my classes were full in every way. Where everything else everywhere felt exhausted, the classroom was overflowing, plentiful. It was a space for analytic thinking, longform attention, clear expression, cooperative conversation–democratic society and a richer life. All we needed was a poem, a few hours each week, and trust in what we could do, in what we did do, together.”
Winant goes on to share her close reading pedagogy, at one point distinguishing the questions she asks from “prompts,” though before chatbots she might have been comfortable referring to her method as prompting students to read more closely. She asks students to take the class to something small in the text of the poem, something “small enough to fit under your finger.” She admits that students at first didn’t understand the question, as “they very much wanted to get the answer right. They pointed to themes, identified genres and symbols, and gestured toward historical contexts,” responding as well-trained students rather than readers. Winant persists with the questions, repeating her request that the students point to something small in the text until, she reports, “a transformation that seemed like magic” happens when students start to speak of what spoke to them in the poem, switching to first person “I noticed” in place of third-person labeling of “what the poem does.” From there, Winant writes, she helps students build close readings into arguments about the poem’s language and ultimately the poem’s meaning, all stemming from that personal connection.
After noting the recent publication of several books focused on close reading (including an anthology she edited with Dan Sinykin), she addresses why close reading gets this attention now: “The renewed focus on our fundamental methodology must be connected to the austerity that has been inflicted on the humanities since the 2008 financial crisis led universities to freeze hiring, with conditions only continuing to erode since then with still more retrenchment and some institutions’ destructive embrace of AI.” Not satisfied with that bird’s-eye view, she adds “I try to think about things the other way around, rooted in my experiences with undergraduates at WVU. I learned about close reading when I asked them to take their own thinking seriously–to take themselves seriously… Trying to describe how teaching can feel magical always deflates into cliche. But for a long time, I reached for that word, magic, to describe what my students and I conjured together… My classroom felt like it was base-isolated, unshakable. The light always felt bright coming through its windows.”
Winant goes on to describe efforts by her students, her colleagues, and herself to ward off the budget cuts at West Virginia, highlighting how the habits of mind, reading, and writing cultivated by close reading scales into argument beyond the classroom into political and professional spheres. She concedes that they lost that particular battle, resulting in her departure for Reed, but she concludes with a last assertion of belief in close reading: “And to clarify my stakes: the way that close reading is powerful is that it lays claim to power.” That’s some good magic.
Back to the Future with Socrates: AI’s Excellent Adventure
I wrote in “PWR’s Excellent Adventure” in September about the Socratic Questioner described by Ray Schroeder in one of his Inside Higher Education columns heralding the transformative possibilities of generative AI. He provided the link in his article: The Socratic Questioner The prompt he shared stayed with me, representing how educational designers attracted to technology would approach the challenge of integrating AI with traditional teaching strategies (Schroeder, now retired, had a long career in academic technology innovation). No surprise, then, that other thoughtful pedagogues invested in academic technology would engage with the Socratic Method to bring the venerable interactive mainstay into the AI age.
On June 9, 2025, Ted Kaout published “Sophistry or Socrates: Two Faces of GenAI. My Experience Building and Dialoguing with a Socratic Chatbot.” He describes the development of writing and the response from Socrates and Plato this way:
“The historian Eric Havelock suggests that the cultural impact of Homer’s the Iliad and the Odyssey being committed to writing sometime between 700 and 550 BC ‘was something like a thunder-clap in human history, which our bias of familiarity has converted into the rustle of papers on a desk.’ Some time later, the philosopher Socrates, who spent his life arguing against the Sophists (paid teachers who he perceived as valuing persuasive rhetoric over truth), looked at what by then was an explosion of written words and was deeply worried. Depicted by his student Plato in the dialogue the Phaedrus, Socrates warns that writing is a pharmakon, a word of beautiful and unsettling ambiguity that means both ‘remedy’ and ‘poison.’”
Kaout paraphrases the specific worries about the loss of trained memory, false wisdom, and the absence of human engagement through dialogue with the summative assertion “You can’t debate a scroll.” While acknowledging the sophistry of chatbots, in the sense that they aim to convince the users of the in-the-moment practical usefulness of the response rather than help the user patiently pursue truth, Kaout strives to illustrate the potential of chatbots to guide the user toward truth by engaging in “a dialogue of inquiry.” He continues,
“There is an important feature that distinguishes generative AI from the written scroll. Our AI can talk back. This interactivity, at first glance, seems to make the ‘poison’ even more dangerous, given the possibility that it may further influence what and how we think, by flattering us and dulling our critical faculties, increasingly doing more and more of our thinking for us. But what if this very feature–the thing that makes AI so different from a mute scroll–is also its potential to operate with us in a Socratic dialogue of inquiry? What if we are thinking about the AI all wrong?”
Kaout goes on to offer an alternative to thinking about AI as a tool; instead, he suggests, we should approach AI as a “mirror.” Approached this way, “The responses we get are not just outputs; they are the reflections of the questions we ask, the curiosity we bring, and the intellectual virtue we embody.” This claim defines “prompt engineering” as a manifestation of our best selves. Paraphrasing a famous aphorism attributed to Socrates, Kaout states “An unexamined prompt, like an unexamined life, may not be worth sending. If we approach the mirror seeking shortcuts, it will reflect that emptiness back to us. But if we approach it with genuine inquiry, it can reflect a path toward deeper understanding.”
Kaout then creates (and puckishly names) SocraGPTes, training it to respond in the persona of the Socrates conjured by Plato in the dialogues. He reports some initial strangeness in the interaction followed by some successful engagement with the mirror: “Every statement I made was ultimately met with a question designed to probe the assumptions beneath my words. It didn’t tell me what to think; it forced me to examine how I was thinking, helping me deepen my own understanding.” After asking the chatbot to help him explore the “nature of writing itself,” Kaout reports that the chatbot “quickly took me into the deep end of the philosophical pool.” He doesn’t end the article with a full-throated endorsement of AI as a teacher, but he does make a proposal, “not that AI should be our teacher, but that it can be a unique tool for self-interrogation. Its value lies not in its own wisdom, but in its ability to provoke ours.” He returns to the ambiguity of the technology, stating that “The AI, then, remains a pharmakon. Its power to generate the ‘poison’ of eloquent nonsense is undeniable. But its interactivity also offers a strange new ‘remedy’--of a sort.” One cheer for generative AI.
Running for (Bluebook) Cover
Many articles surveying the fraught terrain of higher education besieged by AI mention how instructors have turned to bluebook exams and/or oral examinations to replace out-of-class essay assignments, having lost faith that students will write the essays themselves, instead relying on AI to generate texts to submit for assessment. Such moves likely blur the distinction between writing to learn and writing to demonstrate learning along with speaking to learn and speaking to demonstrate learning. I haven’t encountered, though I certainly may have missed some pedagogy articles about designing bluebook and oral exams, any instructors explicitly describing their approach to using such exams as learning opportunities, something beyond testing. Let’s consider what we know about these exams and the obstacles to reinventing them as learning moments in both the writing and speaking contexts.
What of the bluebook exam? Does such timed writing with its attendant pressures lead students to the default “brain dump” strategy of frantically demonstrating that they remember material from lecture and readings? Or can we develop bluebooks exams to prompt students to “show their work,” the work of thinking, in written form, particularly for courses with lots of reading and lots of complex concepts; in those situations bluebook exam questions might focus on analytical close reading, comparative close reading, applying or comparing theories, or relating concepts to each other. Put another way, does timed writing have the potential to create a space for writing to learn? Think back to your experience with timed bluebook exams. To what extent did you focus on demonstrating what you remembered, from lectures and readings (and perhaps class discussions)? To what extent did you “think on the page,” learning something through the writing or even surprising yourself with new insights and new connections? We know from hearing about AP exam prep courses that high school students often learn a set form or formula to rely on in timed-writing situations, often some version of the five-paragraph template; in PWR 1 we often see that strategy applied to the Rhetorical Analysis draft. If we turn to bluebook exams, what does the format offer that supports the learning outcomes pursued in a college-level course?
On the surface, at least, the oral exam seems more promising in relation to learning, with its connection back to Socratic dialogue aiming to show the drama of minds at work in speech, sparking each other. Again, think back to your experience taking oral exams as a student. How did the pressures of those situations compare to the pressures of timed writing? How did you feel before, during, and after the experiences in relation to their value to your learning? From both the teacher’s and student’s perspective, to what degree does an oral exam focus on demonstrating that the speaker knows the facts, the dates, the names, the theories, the causes and the effects? Does an oral exam leave any room for speaking to learn, asking students, through speech, to engage with and explore the material, asking questions instead of or along with answering them? (Would most teachers presiding over an oral exam feel surprise more than anything else if the student asked questions in an attempt to engage in a conversation, bringing the classroom dynamic into the exam space?) In other words, does the return to oral exams signal a return to memory, something Socrates might approve of, though he might recommend some hybrid form of drawing from memory in order to ask questions, examine assumptions, and test various answers. Rather than the AP timed writing format, in the speaking context we might consider as a cautionary model the adversarial debate format we remember from high school, with note cards to remind us of facts and keywords related to argument and refutation. My own memories of middle school debate activities still embarrass me for how little the speeches had to do with learning and how fully they had to do with display. As with bluebooks, how can we reinvent the oral exam to support learning in college?
Powerful Lords, Powerful Tools
So, Plato’s warnings about writing, voiced by Socrates, come up consistently in what people write about our AI moment. In contrast, Gorgias’ description of the vast power of speech, which I analyzed in “Chatbot Confidential” back in 2023, doesn’t merit mention, likely because Gorgias in the Encomium on Helen describes only the spoken word, arguing that speech is a “powerful lord” equal to fate, the will of the gods, love, and physical force. Defenders of and advocates for AI in education often describe the technology as a valuable aid to study, a tutor available 24/7, and a speedy if sometimes flawed research assistant and editor. The skeptics, though, make predictions adjacent to what Gorgias says about the dangers of speech wielded by people with bad intentions. If speech remains a “powerful lord,” how should we understand the implications of relying on technology to wield language across so many modalities and contexts? Can we tease out of the voluminous commentaries on AI how AI functions like fate, the will of the gods, love, and even physical force?
Martha Lincoln, professor of cultural and medical anthropology at San Francisco State, in her Inside Higher Education article “It’s Time to Pull the Plug on ChatGPT at Cal State,” aims to defend students from the snares of ChatGPT, a powerful tech lord invited into their lives by their university. I may stretch a bit here in casting this as an echo of how Gorgias defends Helen, exonerating her from any blame for causing the Trojan War. Rather than persuasive spoken words, likely including declarations of love eternal from the wily Paris, ChatGPT wields the written word in the form of a congenial conversation partner, though the friendly words can compel self-destructive actions by students subject to its relentless helpfulness. Lincoln describes lawsuits filed by the Social Media Victims Law Center and the Tech Justice Law Project against OpenAI, producer of ChatGPT; she asserts that the suits “raise questions about basic human qualities—our susceptibility to influence, our ability to project humanity on machines, and our deep need for love and companionship.” Those questions, aside from the projection of human qualities onto machines (unless Paris turns out to be a Terminator disguised as a Lothario), demonstrate that humans today share much with Helen in terms of desires and needs, which in turn lead to susceptibility to language.
Lincoln expresses her doubts about the Cal State system’s commitment to an “AI-empowered university,” which has the system paying OpenAI many millions of dollars to provide accounts for faculty, staff, and nearly a half million students enrolled across twenty-three campuses. Berg wrote of the bargain humanity accepted when moving from orality to writing. What kind of bargain does Cal State accept now in moving to AI? Lincoln, for one, wants no part of this, citing New York Times investigative reporting on “LLM psychosis,” detailing that “Individuals have slipped into grandiose delusions, developed conspiratorial preoccupations, and, in at least two separate tragic cases, become homicidal as a result of these beliefs.” Returning to the analogies offered by Gorgias, we can liken these to the effects of a drug or even an addiction. Cal State administrators may believe that AI represents an unavoidable, let’s say fated, future, exonerating themselves from blame for accepting the bargain. Lincoln argues for agency, concluding that “our university must devote its resources to providing safer, more accountable and more human forms of care,” much like Socrates advocating for human interaction in speech rather than engagement with words on a scroll (or page, or screen). Those written words, estranged from the human being using language to connect to others, respond with silence when asked questions; chatbots always have more words, bolstering the appearance of “wisdom” via an abundance of inexhaustible output.
Selling AI
The character Gorgias in Plato’s Gorgias describes rhetoric as magical, a surefire method for convincing listeners of anything. Socrates in response labels rhetoric as a form of flattery that discards truth in order to cater to the audience, leading them away from truth. Socrates also likens rhetoric to a knack akin to cooking, serving up something appealing to earthly appetite but unconcerned with the health of the soul. I don’t know if Plato knew the Encomium on Helen, though the comparisons wielded by Socrates reduce rhetoric to sophistry, far from how Gorgias describes speech as analogous to fate, the will of the gods, and love. In the current moment, what’s an advertiser to do to sell AI? We’ve seen earlier Schroeder and Kaout’s attempts to “sell” the technology in academic settings as AI-as-Socratic-Questioner and as a mirror guiding users to interrogate their own ideas. Cody Delistraty, writing on technology in the New York Times, writes of “AI’s Anti-AI Marketing Strategy,” how the advertisements for the general public understate how the technology pervades personal life and instead emphasize the technology as an efficient helper making human interactions better.
Delistraty frames this as an expedient response to data, as “Only 17 percent of American adults think A.I.’s impact on the country will be positive in the next two decades, according to a Pew Research Center survey this spring. Less than a quarter think A.I. will benefit them personally. A.I. companies seem to have tacitly acknowledged this skepticism and are changing how they present themselves. Some of the most consumer-facing ones are marketing their flagship products as creativity triggers that are fundamentally human and appreciative of the analog–even as these attributes stand in stark opposition to what A.I. is and does.” Flattery for the AI era?
We can certainly understand the ads in this way. If consumers express anxiety about being replaced by AI, provide them reassurance about human value: “Anthropic brands Claude as a ‘thinking partner’--a complement to creativity rather than a replacement for it. OpenAI has made a similar pivot. Its ads no longer argue that ChatGPT is primarily a cutting-edge, historically significant technology but rather an aid to a quiet, analog aesthetic that seemingly has little to do with A.I. Smaller A.I. firms have followed suit, building products around its supposedly human possibilities.”
This seems reminiscent of the early days of social media and smartphones, touted as bringing people together with technology as a cover for remaking the world. Consider how Delistraty describes the misdirection employed by the ads: “By not actually showing anyone on a digital device or using ChatGPT, the implication is that engaging with A.I. is not only effortless but fundamental to the texture of human experience. It’s not separate from living; it’s part of living. These new advertisements are selling A.I., but they’re pointing to emotional experiences that have little to do with it.” Note the audacity of selling a product as core to “the texture” of social life: “That’s the new sales pitch: Like it or not, trust it or not, want to be seen using it or not, A.I. is and will continue to be a part of society’s very fabric.”
Delistraty evokes Orwell in his rendering of the mental state Big Tech aims to promote: “One solution is to embrace double-think. Become a business that steals from creative professionals while advertising to them. Promote the communal power of a device-free space while trying to saturate the world with your atomizing technology. It’s a strategy that could work; after all, some of the most successful ad campaigns of all time have tied emotions to products that have absolutely nothing to do with each other.” He continues to highlight how AI companies will rely on “manufactured authenticity” in their attempts to portray its products as supporting human beings as a friendly companion, a Swiss army knife of advice, information, instructions, and strategies for fostering human connection. What could go wrong?
That’s All for Now
Thanks for reading this rambling (though I hope interweaving as well) journey in print and memory. I don’t have a formal thesis to argue but rather a set of premises or propositions from which we might proceed in developing our personal, pedagogical, and professional responses to the moment, a moment we can expect to extend through the rest of our careers, with technological advances posing new challenges to our values and identities as lovers of language and teachers of communication arts.
First, I believe that we must reflect on our own experiences with all the technologies of language we’ve lived with, in, and through, from speech and writing to the page and screen. I’ve shared a couple of formative school experiences in this piece while leaving out many more that have also stayed with me through decades, blending together to create my life-defining relationship with language and vocation. We benefit from returning to such formative moments with the perspective that time and experience bring, allowing us to understand what we carry with us and how what we carry shapes who we are and how we act in the world.
Second, we must bring what we face now into conversation with the rich history of human languaging, particularly since the advent of writing and the codification of rhetoric, a history full of earnest and passionate debate about language as a source of deception and conflict as well as of connection and communion. Language contains multitudes. In this regard our personal cultural experiences with language play an essential role in how we understand the wider history and translate our understanding, our processing of centuries of conversation, into action. The sections on Torah study as dependent on conversation and collaboration with study partners in rooms filled with the purposeful buzzing of humans doing sacred word work together provide a model to set along side Socratic dialogues and other paradigms for word work that you can weave into your own world-building (and your students can weave into theirs, drawing from their home literacies and rhetorics).
Third, I believe that our path forward cannot lead with or rely on policy but rather must reclaim and advocate for the value of languaging in all its forms as the foundation of how we learn and how we live in community. As Adam has shared, the AI moment means that students need more of what we offer, not less. We demonstrate the value of human language practice through active engagement with that practice embodied by our pedagogical choices and modeled by our own use of language in every context, from the syllabus to class plans to comments. Through these means we persuade our students and the wider university community to value themselves as language users rather than as conduits for LLMs and their seductive/reductive patterns of words.
Tell your stories. Invite your students to tell you and their peers their stories. Proceed from there. The conversation continues.
Coda: Socratic! Sophistic! Schematic! Simplistic! Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off
A version of the Gershwins’ “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” for the AI era.
Things have come to a pretty pass/Our class time is growing flat
For you like what AI offers/While I don’t approve of that
Goodness knows what the end will be/I know there’s no standing pat
It looks as if the snafu will never be done/Bickering has begun
You say embrace it, and I say erase it.
You say apply it, and I say deny it.
Embrace it, erase it, apply it, deny it.
Let’s call the whole thing off.
You say fulfilling, and I say deskilling.
You say efficient, and I say deficient.
Fulfilling, deskilling, efficient, deficient.
Let’s call the whole thing off.
But oh, if we call the whole thing off
What of liberal arts?
And oh, if it’s the end of liberal arts
That would break my heart
You say fantastic, and I feel foreboding.
You feel ecstatic, and I fear offloading.
Fantastic, foreboding, ecstatic, offloading.
Let’s call the whole thing off.
You say it’s thrilling, and I say it’s chilling.
You say transforming, and I say deforming.
Thrilling, chilling, transforming, deforming
Let’s call the whole thing off.
But oh, if we call the whole thing off
What of liberal arts?
And oh, if it’s the end of liberal arts
That would break my heart
So let’s keep conversing
Enough with the cursing
Keep on revising
Toward some compromising
For we know we
Need each other so we
Better call the calling off off
Let’s call the whole thing off
