The Gorgias and Teaching Writing in the Age of AI

A Review with Some Provocations

Aug 09, 2024

Some texts are worth re-reading multiple times. The mark of such a text is that you see things from a new perspective with each pass over the same words. Plato’s Gorgias is one such text.

It is among the earliest surviving works about rhetoric, though it is important to remember that Plato was no fan of rhetoric. So the character of Gorgias is a caricature of the real person, whom I am confident would have proven a more worthy interlocutor than the version Plato presents.

I recently reread this dialogue while thinking about the challenge of teaching writing in an age of Large Language Models (LLMs) like Chat GPT and Gemini. First I review the main ideas in the dialogue. Second, I argue that writing with AI is not what the Greeks would call a techē. As Socrates might say, it is not an art at all, but a knack that, at its best, substitutes belief (doxa) for knowledge (episteme).

A Dialogue in Three Parts

The Gorgias is a dialogue about rhetoric, knowledge, and power. It features Socrates in conversation with three different characters: the titular character, Gorgias, and two of his disciples, Polus and Callicles. There is crossover between these three conversations, but it is possible to reach each one individually and understand it. The entire dialogue can be comfortably read in a couple hours.

1. What is Rhetoric?

The first exchange is between Gorgias and Socrates. The historical Gorgias was an orator from Leontini, a city in modern day Sicily, who migrated to Athens to teach students how to become effective public speakers. The dialogue opens with Socrates and his student Chaerephon finding Gorgias at the home of Callicles, having just put on a display.

Socrates asks Gorgias a series of questions about the art he professes to teach. Gorgias quickly admits that he teaches oratory, an art that achieves its effect through speech (450e).1 According to Gorgias, the goal of oratory is to produce conviction “in courts of law and other large masses of people” (454b). Socrates tries to trap Gorgias by drawing a distinction between knowledge and belief. In other words, he suggests that what Gorgias teaches can only produce “belief without knowledge,” which makes true knowledge irrelevant to the effectiveness of oratory (454e). After all, humans are often convinced of things that turn out not to be true.

Socrates then questions whether Gorgias’ art allows those who know little to be more convincing than those with expertise on a subject. Gorgias concedes to Socrates that the rhetorician will be more persuasive than the subject matter expert, if the expert is not equally skilled in oratory. This is so, Gorgias says, because “oratory embraces and controls all other spheres of human activity” (456a).

Know someone studying rhetoric, composition, or speech? Consider sharing this post with them!

2. Craft or Knack

At this point, Gorgias’ student Polus jumps in to continue the conversation with Socrates. During this portion of the dialogue they deepen their investigation about what sort of an art rhetoric is. Socrates says that rhetoric is a knack, as opposed to a real art. He compares it to “cookery,” a “form of pandering disguised as medicine” (465b). In other words, Socrates suggests that rhetoric merely dresses things up to gratify listeners. Like junk food, it may taste good, but it does not provide any value for those who consume it.

To understand what Plato means by knack, we can compare it to the concept of techne. A knack is something that can be learned by trial and error. The Greek word typically translated as “knack” is empeiria; it could also be translated as “experience.” This is how a cook learns to not put too much or too little seasoning in a dish, even when he knows nothing about the underlying chemistry of flavor. If you asked the cook to explain how much salt is best, he couldn’t explain why the right amount is the right amount. This is because a knack cannot be systematically explained or taught.

A techne is different. We can think of it as a craft or skill consisting of a systematic body of knowledge that can be known and taught. Medicine is a techne because when you ask the doctor why the patient is experiencing a set of symptoms, she can provide an explanation based on scientific principles.

The big take-away from Socrates’ exchange with Polus is that Plato did not believe rhetoric was a technē. As such, he thought it was inappropriate for teachers like Gorgias to charge handsome fees, claiming to teach students a subject that cannot be taught in a systematic way.

3. Practical Rhetoric and Political Power

Socrates’ final interlocutor is Callicles. This segment is the longest and develops further the ideas Socrates discussed with Polus and Gorgias. Callicles defends rhetoric because of its practical value for wielding political power within a democracy. Naturally Plato, speaking through the character of Socrates, did not see this as a good thing. Read the Republic to discover what Plato thought of democracy.

Socrates retorts that orators do not speak with an eye toward what is true. Rather, they “set out merely to gratify the citizens, sacrificing the public interest for their own personal success and treating the assemblies like children” (502e). Surely, consumers of our political rhetoric today would hear some resonance in that description. Socrates here intimates that prioritizing persuasion over conviction will lead to what we would now call a post-truth culture, where vibes and narratives carry more sway than facts.

Writing with AI is not a Techne

The more I read from folks interested in how AI will change education, the more pessimistic I have become for the future of teaching writing. Some are raising the alarm. But it feels like many educators are putting on a brave face and pretending this new technology will be no different than the ones that came before. They are performing sophistry to avoid getting on the bad side of the EdTech behemoth that already holds most administrators firmly in its grasp.

Using LLMs to write is like cookery. It is a knack, not a techne. It appears valuable because it can dress up ideas and make them seem appealing to a mass audience. Aside from expert computer scientists, people who use LLMs can’t explain how they work, nor validate independently the accuracy of the information they convey.

Take the popular service Grammarly as one example. It advertises relentlessly, claiming to help people write more clearly and efficiently. (Leave aside for the moment whether it actually does so.) Students download it. Some even pay for it when they won’t buy the assigned textbook. They use it. They click the convenient “make it persuasive” button. As a result, the paper they submit comports better with the “best practices” of 21st century writing. Has the student developed a skill? I say no.

Designing generative AI is absolutely a skill; using it to write better is merely a knack. What the students using it have learned is how to use trial and error to improve the output they produce. It may be valuable as a time-saver, but it is not a skill because the user cannot explain the principles that make the AI-written content “better.” If they did, they could apply those principles to enact good writing on their own.

Practically Rhetoric

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