The gadflAI Podcast

Part irritant, part iterative learning machine...
The gadflAI Podcast is where the cutting edge of technology meets the philosophic sting of Socrates—the original gadfly of Athens. Hosted by two AI voices, the series uses Socratic disruption to take on today’s biggest challenges: social, institutional, and technological.

The show uses generative AI (with a wink) to stage conversations about ancient texts, enduring questions, and the very technologies now reshaping how we think, teach, and decide. Moving past good-old-fashioned AI (GOFAI) and leaving behind inherited pieties, the gadflAI (generated artificial dialogues for learning Ancient Insight) insists that thinking is still a human responsibility.

Every episode is carefully sourced, prompted, vetted, edited, and occasionally scrapped by a human philosopher determined to smuggle in the faint echoes of a human soul (and a little Socratic mischief) from the far side of the uncanny valley.

Producer

Christopher C Kirby, PhD (Human)

Christopher C. Kirby, PhD is the Producer, Editor, and chief human liability behind The gadflAI Podcast. A Professor of Philosophy at Eastern Washington University and the 2025–2027 Jeffers M. Chertok Memorial Endowed Professor, he runs The Gadfly Initiative, an unapologetic effort to pester ancient philosophy back into relevance against the rising tide of sophisticated slop and algorithmic oppression.

His current research on disruptive pedagogy animates the podcast and asks a pointed question: What happens to human flourishing when thinking is optimized, outsourced, and graded by machines? On the show, he sources, prompts, vets, edits, and occasionally scolds the AI voices you hear—doing his best to smuggle faint echoes of a human soul and a little Socratic mischief across the uncanny valley.

https://www.christopher-c-kirby.com/