TL;DR: The discipline of philosophy has a concern for history which stymies the use of LLM-driven chatbots.
Considering the power of LLMs, Jonathan Weisberg writes hyperbolically:
With a little human guidance, you can crank out the kind of papers that make up 95% of what we publish in a few hours. Soon (already?), human guidance may not even be necessary.
He thinks we’ll still be writing papers, but freed of having to revise for fickle, pedantic, and nameless referees. Eric Schliesser sees the revolution instead as undoing the very idea of a philosophy paper. He writes:
I expect more and more ‘professional philosophy’ to be co-produced by professional philosophers and LLMs, until we reach the point where LLMs ‘edit,’ referee, and summarize all such papers and are effectively the only ones actually reading them.
There would be something very cyberpunk about a professional discipline concerned with maintaining computers that function today only to produce the input that those same computers will take in tomorrow. The human philosophers in that future? Just technicians for a machine that goes ping.
This all ignores the fact that philosophy— or at least a significant part of it— is concerned with its history. For example, we try to understand the Cartesian position by looking at what Descartes actually wrote. As Thomas Kuhn points out, this concern for primary sources is something that separates philosophers from scientists.
As historian Jordan Sand argues, LLMs do not play well with primary sources. Their outputs reflect the corpus of their training set, but they aren’t built to stress over verbatim originals. Maybe there’s a way around this problem, but to say that is to make a guess about the future.
If philosophy were written by and for LLMs, it would not include history of philosophy in the way that the current discipline does. Machines would not generate and preserve the knowledge that is currently the business of philosophers. Perhaps there would be some point in what they’d actually do, but it wouldn’t be philosophy.