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Back to the Future

Everything You Wish You'd Asked Derrida About ChatGPT When You Had the Chance

Bibliographic Data

ID2409258
AuthorsEileen Pollard (0000-0003-3634-4393, Manchester Metropolitan University, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume24
Issue4
Pages232-239
Publication date2024-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCulture Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1532-7086 • E-ISSN: 1552-356X
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/15327086241232722
OpenAlexW4392558206
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited2

This article considers and then reconsiders what ChatGPT produces and how it produces it, using the work of a range of critical theorists and authors. In particular, it imagines what different philosophers, thinkers, and writers would say about this most recent technological leap, if they were somehow brought back from the past, into this, our new future. To ventriloquise for them, this article plays fast and loose with the work and styles of Douglas Adams, Virginia Woolf, and Alan Turing, among others, to try to demonstrate what ChatGPT can do, having been potentially 'trained' on their work, as well as highlighting the nuances of allusion, subtext, paradox, and contradiction as possibly more human aspects of both writing and reading. Such 'play' is followed by a more serious analysis of writing and the suggestion of a 'Double Signature Signification' at work in the text produced by ChatGPT, meaning one system of signification for writing the text (schematic) and one for reading it (referent), which overlap perfectly. The article concludes by arguing that it is not the consciousness of ChatGPT that beguiles us, it is the possibility of that consciousness, and what gives rise to that sense of possibility is partly the spectral and haunting nature of dialoguing with it. A dialogue with ChatGPT has all the excitement of a séance: it is uncertain, unknown, yet with its traces of the familiar it is also like talking to the dead

Art · Epistemology · Literature · Psychoanalysis · Wish · Computability, Logic, AI Algorithms · Mental Health and Psychiatry · Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations · Philosophy · Psychology

  • The algorithmic pharmakon

    Open Access•Bilal Hamamra•Educational Philosophy and Theory•2026

  • In search of humanness

    Beixi Li, Ajit Bhattarai et al.•Learning Media and Technology•2026

  • On Good, Human, Autoethnographic Writing

    Open Access•G F Badley•Qualitative Inquiry•2024

  • Minds, brains, and programs

    Open Access•John R Searle•Behavioral and Brain Sciences•1980

  • I.—computing Machinery and Intelligence

    A M TURING, Alan Turing•Mind•1950

Unique citing works3
Citations per year1,5
Citation span2024 - 2026 (3)
Citation velocitycurrent
Highly citedNo
Citation typesNeutral: 3

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Open DOIOpen Access
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