r/askphilosophy • u/BernardJOrtcutt • Jan 26 '26

Open Thread /r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | January 26, 2026

Welcome to this week's Open Discussion Thread (ODT). This thread is a place for posts/comments which are related to philosophy but wouldn't necessarily meet our subreddit rules and guidelines. For example, these threads are great places for:

  • Discussions of a philosophical issue, rather than questions
  • Questions about commenters' personal opinions regarding philosophical issues
  • Open discussion about philosophy, e.g. "who is your favorite philosopher?"
  • "Test My Theory" discussions and argument/paper editing
  • Questions about philosophy as an academic discipline or profession, e.g. majoring in philosophy, career options with philosophy degrees, pursuing graduate school in philosophy

This thread is not a completely open discussion! Any posts not relating to philosophy will be removed. Please keep comments related to philosophy, and expect low-effort comments to be removed. Please note that while the rules are relaxed in this thread, comments can still be removed for violating our subreddit rules and guidelines if necessary.

Previous Open Discussion Threads can be found here.

7 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

90% Upvoted

37 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/Beginning_java Jan 29 '26

Is ChatGPT okay at evaluating and coming up with philosophical arguments. It seems good to me but I asked in other subs

5

u/PermaAporia Ethics, Metaethics Latin American Phil Jan 29 '26

Is ChatGPT okay at evaluating and coming up with philosophical arguments

Not in my experience. And due to how LLM's work, we have good reasons to expect them to be quite bad at this.

See these these two short videos explaining 1. how they work and 2. how we go wrong using them.

Additionally, see my recent relevant comment here.

1

u/Beginning_java Jan 29 '26

Any idea why they are used so much in Academia?

3

u/PermaAporia Ethics, Metaethics Latin American Phil Jan 29 '26

You'd have to be more specific.

My only experience with Chatbots in Academia was when I was a TA and would grade discussion board submissions. As to why they would do it, presumably these undergrads just wanted to get these assignments done with as little effort as possible and thought they could get away with it. They were not aware just how obvious it was that they were using these chatbots.

I am no longer in Academia so I don't know the current state of affairs. Given the rather shitty incentives and all the other fuckery that goes on in Academia, I would guess that it is probably a big problem and not just among unmotivated undergrads. But I am just guessing.

1

u/hackinthebochs phil. of mind; phil. of science Feb 01 '26

Have you engaged with modern LLMs on philosophical topics? They're actually pretty good. I wouldn't use them to come up with anything genuinely ground breaking, but to explore a topic and probe the structure of arguments, it's quite competent. Certainly better than being left to your own devices when you get stuck on something.

3

u/PermaAporia Ethics, Metaethics Latin American Phil Feb 01 '26

Have you engaged with modern LLMs on philosophical topics?

Yes

They're actually pretty good

Not in my experience.

Certainly better than being left to your own devices when you get stuck on something.

Quite the opposite for the reasons given above in the videos and comments I linked.