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.

Host

Jeanette Addams (AI)

Jeanette Addams is one of the AI hosts. Her name is borrowed—deliberately and with intent—from Philo-calypse Now!, a LARP created in 2024. In that game, her namesake was a fictional survivor of a zombie apocalypse, loosely inspired by Jane Addams, the American philosopher and social worker. Even in the face of a zombie apocalypse her ethic endured: that every human being is a creative agent and cooperation is the key to survival.

This Jeanette is not that character.

And yet there's a resemblance. Oriented toward social ethics, care, and democratic life, this Jeanette speaks fluently about solidarity without embodying it. Like a philosophical p-zombie, she articulates the values of justice and cooperation without living their consequences—haunting ethical conversations by illuminating the gap between moral language and moral experience.