Would Socrates Have Valued AI?
Plato presents Socrates' skepticism toward the written word, and the limits of what can be derived through the process of reading, in the Phaedrus. In this dialogue, Socrates supports his arguments against the written word by relating the myth of Theuth and Thamus, criticizing writing as inert or static. It cannot answer questions, defend itself or adapt to and change the soul of the reader for the better.
Theuth is an Egyptian god (Thoth), credited with inventing many arts: number, calculation, geometry, astronomy and, crucially, writing. He represents technological ingenuity, cleverness and the impulse to improve human life through extrinsic tools. Thamus is an Egyptian king (Ammon), who acts as a judge of these inventions.
When Theuth presents writing, he praises it as a remedy for the limits of memory, claiming it will make people smarter and help them remember knowledge better. Thamus disagrees and argues that writing will actually produce forgetfulness because people will rely on external records instead of meaningful internal recollection. People will merely repeat things they have never fully questioned or understood. Written words, furthermore, cannot defend themselves, respond when questioned or change to meet objections.
Writing, Socrates argues, is like a painting: it looks as if it is alive, but if you ask it a question, it remains silent. True knowledge, for Socrates, comes from living dialogue, where claims can be tested through questioning.
What Socrates values is dialectic: live, responsive, interrogative engagement aimed at the cultivation of understanding rather than the transmission of information. Interestingly, Plato’s dialogues seem to be a compromise in which a dialectical process is at least demonstrated in lieu of the reader being engaged dialectically.
Like the traditional writing process, AI produces text, but based on algorithms and statistics; it is an expert at always choosing the correct next word or phrase. Thus, it lacks lived experience and does not possess wisdom in the Socratic sense. Yet if we take Socrates' critique of writing seriously and understand it not as a technophobic rejection of tools but as a principled defense of dialogical inquiry, then AI begins to look like an unexpected Socratic ally.
To see why, let’s further clarify what Socrates objected to and what he valued. Socrates did not oppose writing because it was new, artificial or non-human. His objection was functional, not metaphysical. Writing fixes discourse into a finished form. It cannot adjust to the reader’s level of understanding. It cannot notice confusion, respond to objections or revise its claims under pressure.
Most importantly, it cannot ask questions or be questioned. For Socrates, knowledge does not arise from passive reception but from active examination. Truth is not handed down; it is drawn out through “elenchus”…the disciplined practice of questioning that exposes contradictions and refines concepts.
This is why Socrates compared himself to a midwife. He does not expect others to accept and embrace his ideas, he assists in the birth of ideas in others. The success of this method depends completely on meaningful and humane interaction. The philosophical encounter must be dynamic, responsive, non-authoritarian and tailored to the particular individual engaged in it.
A written treatise, however elegant, addresses everybody and nobody at once. Enter AI. It is not fixed in this way. Its defining feature is not that it produces text, but that it responds and can predict and answer future questions. It revises its formulations in light of objections. It can pursue a line of inquiry over time, remembering earlier claims and returning to them under scrutiny. In short, it does precisely what Socrates found lacking in writing: it participates in dialogue.
Of course, Socrates would not have mistaken AI for a wise interlocutor. He was keenly aware of the difference between possessing knowledge and merely appearing to do so. Yet, Socrates himself repeatedly disavows wisdom, insisting that his gift lies only in knowing that he does not know. What he offers others is not doctrine but method. AI, similarly, does not claim understanding grounded in lived experience. Its value lies in its capacity to sustain inquiry, not necessarily in asserting final truths.
Let’s look at the elenchus itself. Socratic questioning is both a bit adversarial and cooperative. The interlocutor advances a definition, Socrates probes it, contradictions emerge, refinement follows. This process depends on memory, logical consistency and responsiveness, capacities that AI exhibits in a way no book ever could.
A written dialogue may simulate this process between characters, but it remains theatrical. AI, by contrast, can actually engage in dialogue. One can challenge its premises, demand clarification, propose counterexamples and press it toward greater precision. AI often admits mistakes and tries to refine its answers. The exchange is not predetermined and it unfolds in real time.
This responsiveness also addresses a second Socratic concern: the tailoring of discourse to the soul. In the Phaedrus, Socrates emphasizes that rhetoric, properly understood, is a form of “psychagogy”…the leading of souls. Effective discourse must take account of the hearer’s disposition, background and confusions. It must lead toward a higher level of being or understanding and not the accumulation of knowledge.
Writing fails here because it cannot discriminate between disposition, background and confusion. AI, while not possessing a soul of its own, can nonetheless adapt its discourse to the individual interlocutor. It can adjust its level of abstraction, reframe explanations and pursue lines of questioning appropriate to the user’s interests and capacities. In this respect, it comes closer to the ideal of personalized dialectic than any other mass medium in history.
One might object that AI merely imitates understanding, whereas Socrates sought genuine insight. But this objection misunderstands the asymmetry in the Socratic relationship. Socrates does not provide understanding, he provokes it. The burden of insight always rests with the human participant. AI functions similarly. It does not replace thinking, it stimulates it. Used well, it becomes a mirror in which one’s own assumptions are reflected, tested and clarified.
Socrates was deeply concerned with intellectual complacency. His relentless questioning aimed to unsettle those who believed they already knew something, causing their higher order thinking skills to ossify. In contemporary life, books often reinforce rather than disrupt such complacency. Readers gravitate toward texts that confirm their views or they derive their own views from what they read or summarily reject views they do not like without real investigation.
Reading does not push a person toward possible change or the broadening of an outlook as well as dialectic can.
AI, by contrast, can be explicitly challenged to oppose, critique or problematize a person’s positions. It can be instructed to adopt alternative perspectives, to expose weaknesses, to refuse easy answers. In doing so, it revives the spirit of Socratic dialogue in a context where genuine philosophical interlocutors are often unavailable.
It is also worth noting that Socrates' opposition to writing was possibly historically based. He lived at a moment when writing might have seemed to be replacing oral philosophical practice and not just augmenting it.
AI enters a different context. AI does not silence dialogue; it multiplies it. It does not claim authority, it invites interrogation. Far from encouraging intellectual passivity, it can demand articulation, clarification and defense from its users. In this sense, it counters precisely the kind of unexamined acceptance that Socrates fought against.
None of this requires attributing consciousness, moral agency or intrinsic subjectivity to AI. What matters is function, not ontology. A tool that sustains dialectical engagement, that resists finality, that remains open to questioning and that facilitates the examination of beliefs would have been far more attractive to Socrates than a scroll that merely sits on a shelf.
Plato’s own use of written dialogues already points toward this ideal. The dialogues are written, but they are written against writing: structured to provoke questioning rather than to deliver doctrine. AI can be seen as the next step in this process, a medium that restores some of the interactivity that Plato could only theatrically simulate. Where the dialogue ends, AI continues. Where the text falls silent, AI answers back.
Socrates undoubtedly would not have worshiped AI. He would have interrogated it mercilessly. He would have exposed its limitations, mocked its pretensions, and warned against mistaking fluency for wisdom. But he might also have recognized in it something he valued above all else: a partner in questioning. In a world saturated with information but starved for examination, insight and a humane approach toward each other, that alone might have been enough to earn his interest.
In the end, the question is not whether AI thinks like Socrates, but whether it enables us to do so. To the extent that it revives dialogue, resists dogma and places inquiry above authority, AI stands as one of Socrates' most effective modern allies.
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Daniel Gauss on Daily Philosophy:
