Ai and the Grand Inquisitor

• Citation: Vol. 48 No. 2 Pg. 14
• Year: 2025
• Pages: 14

AI and the Grand Inquisitor No. Vol. 48 No. 2 Pg. 14 Wyoming Bar Journal April, 2025

In 30 years of university teaching at Berkeley, I have read thousands of undergraduate essays, but until recently, I don't think any of my students had ever used the word "delve." As I read their compositions on The Brothers Karamazov this past fall, however, I saw that things had changed.

• This essay delves into the theme of masculinity by focusing on two central figures, Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov;

• Dostoevsky delves into the destructiveness of obsessive passions;

• David McDuff's translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov delves into the moral and existential crises of 19th-century Russia;

• This novel is more than a family saga; it delves into the existential and societal crises of 19th-century Russia;

• In The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky delves into the theme of economic insecurity, illustrating its profound impact on the human psyche and societal dynamics.

There were other suddenly prominent words. Dostoevsky is an intricate and complex writer, certainly, but I never knew he was so multifaceted.

The villain, of course, was Chat-GPT, an easy-to-access AI system re-leased in 2022. Of 36 students taking my upper-level class on Dostoevsky, eight made such extensive use of the technology that it was easy to spot. You don't need an AI detection program. As Justice Potter Stewart of the United States Supreme Court said about something else, "I know it when I see it." Vladimir Nabokov defined that something else— pornography—as "the copulation of cliches," which gets ChatGPTs approach to literature about right.

ChatGPT papers now rarely make factual errors, as they did the previous semester, when War and Peaces Petya, miraculously protected from a Frenchman's bullet, could be found marrying his poor relation Sonya, and where Sonya, no longer sullen and resentful, devoted herself to Natasha's children. Now, while they rarely muddle the details of a plot, and while they continue to be grammatically perfect, these papers still say almost nothing. In many cases the key word in the title—i.e. hysteria, masculinity or time—could be replaced by any other. And there are certain giveaway vocabulary items that prove irresistible. An insult to Penelope and even Madame Defarge, ChatGPT weaves and unravels a lot of fabrics, it loves to talk about complexities, intricacies and intricate webs. At least in essays about Dostoevsky, it has made the word existential extraordinarily promiscuous; in one six-page composition, this adjective was obscenely and exhaustingly forced by ChatGPT to mate with 14 different nouns. ChatGPT loves to talk about novels being "set against a backdrop" of X. It is infatuated with multifaceted and nuts about nuanced. It...