Andrei Marmor (Cornell University Law School) has posted AI and the Loss of Hermeneutics on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Our digital world is getting increasingly flooded with elegant summaries and interpretations, powered by artificial intelligence tools, of almost anything one might be interested in. Chatbots and AI powered search engines would offer to tell you, in a matter of seconds, what to think of the news they report, the things you might want to buy, places you might want to go to, books you might have had to read, and just about anything that comes to mind. Of course you can still read and think for yourself, if you want, but why bother if a Chatbot can get you to the point much faster; it’s all very quick, elegant, and efficient. But what this means, the paper argues, is that our engagement with interpretations and, generally, hermeneutic aspects of our lives, are being fast replaced by AI generated contents. We are racing into a world fostering intellectual impatience, rendering curiosity, healthy skepticism, and respect for difference too costly, squeezing it out of civil society. My purpose in this essay is to try to expose what would be lost if we let ourselves be content with AI generated interpretations dominating our information era. The essay explores what interpretation is, where does it find its roles in our personal and social lives, and why it is so important. The main argument here aims to show how interpretation is thoroughly value laden, and therefore one of the main values of interpretative engagements is to confront evaluative differences, pluralism and epistemic tolerance. The more we let AI do the interpretations for us, the more impoverished, superficial, and intolerant our world becomes.
Highly recommended!
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