On August 25, we published an interview, conducted by our author Paul Stephan, with the AI tool Chat GPT (link). In it, he asked the software, among other things, to write him an essay on the question of this year's Kingfisher Award: “Where are the barbarians of the 21st century? “(link). As an experiment, we presented the text to the five-person jury of the award, consisting of Lukas Meisner, Hans-Martin Schönherr-Mann, Theodor Schild, Natalie Schulte and Paul Stephan himself — and it was surprisingly well received: In the preliminary round, it achieved fourth place on points and would therefore have made it into the shortlist by a hair. Only Natalie Schulte had drawn suspicion and presented the text to an AI checker, which, however, did not recognize it. — Would you have thought the text was human?

The essays from this year's winners will be published in the coming weeks. Did they do it better than AI, as we believe?

We deliberately refrained from editing the text, but published it exactly as the program spit it out for us. The article image is also from it.

As a part of this experiment, the subsequent translation has also been done by ChatGPT itself and we publish it without any alterations.

A year ago, our author Paul Stephan conducted a small “dialogue” on the 124th anniversary of Nietzsche's death with ChatGPT to see to what extent the much-hyped program is suitable for discussing complex philosophical questions (link). Paul Stephan now fed it, for the 125th, with some of the same, partly changed questions. Has it improved? Judge for yourself.

What follows, is a very abbreviated excerpt of the conversation. The full commented “dialogue” can be found here [link].

The article image was created by ChatGPT itself when asked to generate a picture of this chat. The other pictures were created again by the software DeepAI based on the prompt: “A picture of Friedrich Nietzsche with a quote by him.”

Read also our author's philosophical commentary on this “talk” (Link).

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Note: A lot of the weirdness of this encounter is lost in the subsequent automated translation. Thus, it's also a part of this experiment on the “philosophical capabilities” of AI. Check the original if you want to get everything.

To commemorate the 124th anniversary of Nietzsche’s death, Paul Stephan conversed with a rather particular kind of Nietzsche expert—the now near ubiquitous ChatGPT. Their discussion circled around questions of why Nietzsche matters today and his concept of authenticity. During the course of the conversation, Stephan switched from asking to fielding questions, and elaborated briefly on how his own doctoral dissertation also focuses on authenticity. As Stephan’s experiment aimed at probing deep into the program’s capabilities, and because brevity is not ChatGPT’s strongest asset, we present here an abridged version of the conversation. Readers of German who wish to delve deeper can view the unabridged and annotated PDF that’s available as a download (link). Watch out for Stephan’s critical reflections on this truly remarkable dialogue within the next few days (link).

The pictures accompanying the interview were created with DeepAI software, which was asked to produce “A picture of Friedrich Nietzsche with a quote by him.”