I'm Christopher Leiden and this is Open Source in the eerie glow of artificial intelligence

this time. We're humbled. We're also scared by the power of chat bots like GPT-4 to do pretty

much everything that word people have ever done but faster and maybe more to the point. The twist

in this conversation is that our guests are professional humanists, guardians and teachers of the

hard-earned old wisdom of books, not machines. And the double twist that they want to argue is that

the enemy here is not evil AI. It's us who have been feeble the old culture to a vanishing point

in the practice of our politics, our media and most expensive elite universities. Robert Pogue Harrison,

you are our Dante scholar at Stanford, our professional humanist and our West Coast friend in

smart podcasting. Of course we asked chat GPT about you and your voice, Robert. We got the

instant answer that your voice has a certain meloness and introspection that go with your keen

ear for language and ideas. Anna Iriebska, initials AI, your Robert's colleague from Europe

in humanistic studies at Stanford. I'm drawing on a startling conversation that you just published

in that podcast entitled Opinions where you both defended AI as a wake-up call, maybe in the

nick of time to rescue humanity, human stewardship, human culture from its corrupted condition.

You both said you expect your students to use AI and to learn from it. Learn just what Robert?

When I said that it may be coming at the right time in our cultural history, I said that in a

mode of despair, because prior to its advent, the quality of writing among students, the

quality of thinking, the complete fracturing of the consciousness in the general public as a result

of things like the internet, social media, iPhones and so forth, had gotten us to a point that we're

going to have to be rescued by something and why not GPT artificial intelligence programs?

I'm not sure that Anna actually agreed with that, but I'll let her speak for herself.

So somehow every time we have a major advancement in technology, the question is about what it

...