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.
The gadflAI Podcast
Disrupting Bull$#!t with the AI Stance
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In an era saturated with AI-generated content, a familiar cultural anxiety has resurfaced: the fear that imitation will be mistaken for understanding. Critics describe much of AI's output as "slop" or, in the more philosophical terms of Harry Frankfurt, "bullshit"—discourse produced without any concern for truth. Episode 4 of The Gadfly challenges this moral panic by arguing that our contemporary resistance to AI recapitulates ancient philosophical errors. This episode disrupts the simplistic, wholesale rejection of AI by proposing a new framework for critical engagement, drawing a direct line from Plato's critique of sophistry to a novel epistemological tool: The AI Stance. Rather than treating AI as a corrupting quasi-agent, the episode reframes it as a powerful tool whose value is determined not by its origin, but by the rigor and judgment of its human user.
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Further Reading:
- Dennett, Daniel C. The Intentional Stance. MIT Press, 1987.
- ---. “The Problem with Counterfeit People.” The Atlantic, 16 May 2023.
- Frankfurt, Harry G. On Bullshit. Princeton University Press, 2005.
- Orfanos, Spyros. “Socrates and Artificial Intelligence.” Freud Museum London, 2024.
- Pinner, Richard. “If Socrates Feared Writing, What Would He Say About AI?” Blog post, 23 May 2025.
- Plato. Euthydemus. Translated by Benjamin Jowett, in Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, Hackett, 1997.
- ---. Ion. Translated by Paul Woodruff, in Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, Hackett, 1997.
- ---. Phaedrus. Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, in Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, Hackett, 1997.
- Strasser, Andreas, and Mark Wilby. “The AI-Stance: Crossing the Terra Incognita of Human–Machine Interactions?” PhilArchive, preprint.
- Véliz, Carissa. “Socrates Would Have Hated AI.” Time, 1 Aug. 2023.
Episode Credits
- Producer and Editor: Dr. Christopher C. Kirby
- This work is made possible by the Jeffers W. Chertok Memorial Endowment at Eastern Washington University.
**The views expressed in this program are not necessarily those of Eastern Washington University
