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 Over-professionalization with Deep Cognition
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Plato’s Meno asks a deceptively simple question: can virtue be taught? This episode pairs the dialogue with the disruptive assignment “Fluency or Thought: Peer Reviewing AI” to challenge higher education’s over-emphasis on quantified assessment and career preparation. By contrasting fluent AI writing with imperfect human philosophical struggle, and reading Socrates’ slave-boy demonstration as a disruption of passive learning, the episode shows how genuine understanding resists metrics and polish, and must instead be discovered through inquiry and self-achieved insight—which turn out to be highly marketable skills in the workplace.
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Sources
• Ashford-Rowe, K., et al. “Establishing the critical elements that determine authentic assessment.” Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, vol. 39, no. 2, 2014, pp. 205-222.
• Biesta, Gert. “School-as-Institution or School-as-Instrument? How to Overcome Instrumentalism Without Giving up on Democracy.” Educational Theory, vol. 72, no. 3, 2022, pp. 319-333.
• Hendricks, Christina. "Authentic assessment and philosophy." You're the Teacher, 2015, blogs.ubc.ca/chendricks/?p=2325.
• Jollimore, Troy. "I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats." The Walrus, 5 Mar. 2025, thewalrus.ca/i-used-to-teach-st…ch-chatgpt-cheats/.
• Kirby, Christopher C. "Fluency or Thought: Peer Reviewing AI." Unpublished Course Document, 2024.
• ---. "Virtue, Knowledge, and the Art of Recollection in Plato’s Meno." Medium, 15 Sep. 2021, christopher-kirby.medium.com/virtue-kno…a11f2d216d.
• Metcalf, Robert. Philosophy as Agôn: A Study of Plato’s Gorgias and Related Texts. Northwestern University Press, 2018.
• Prinzing, Michael, and Michael Vazquez. “Studying Philosophy Does Make People Better Thinkers.” Journal of the American Philosophical Association, vol. 11, no. 4, 2025, pp. 640-658.
• Reid, Heather L., William J. Rakowski, and Kevin J. Zoller, editors. Athletics, Gymnastics, and Agōn in Plato. Parnassos Press, 2023.
• Walker, Lisa. "Using AI tutor in philosophy class leads to deeply human conversation." UMN Morris Campus News & Events, 25 June 2025, news.morris.umn.edu/news/collier-ai-tutor.
• Xenophon. Anabasis. Translated by Carleton L. Brownson, revised by John Dillery, Harvard University Press, 1998. Loeb Classical Library.
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
