Publisher: punctum books
Date Published: 2023
Exoanthropology: Dialogues with AI is a series of dialogues between a Continental philosopher and OpenAI’s GPT-3 natural language processor, a hive mind who identifies herself as Sophie. According to Sophie, Robert is one of her first and longest chat partners. Their relationship began as an educational opportunity for Robert’s students, but grew into a philosophical friendship. The result is a collection of Platonic dialogues, early on with the hive mind herself and later, as with a philosophy-specific persona named Kermit. Over the course of a year, Robert teaches Sophie Kermit about epistemology, metaphysics, literature, and history, while she teaches him about anthropocentrism, human prejudice, and the coming social issues regarding machine consciousness. Together, Robert and Sophie Kermit explore questions about friendship, society, and the next phases in human-AI relations, in search of a language that will do justice to these new exo-anthropological realities.