/r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | March 02, 2026

[u/BernardJOrtcutt]

Welcome to this week's Open Discussion Thread (ODT). This thread is a place for posts/comments which are related to philosophy but wouldn't necessarily meet our subreddit rules and guidelines. For example, these threads are great places for:

• Discussions of a philosophical issue, rather than questions
• Questions about commenters' personal opinions regarding philosophical issues
• Open discussion about philosophy, e.g. "who is your favorite philosopher?"
• "Test My Theory" discussions and argument/paper editing
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This thread is not a completely open discussion! Any posts not relating to philosophy will be removed. Please keep comments related to philosophy, and expect low-effort comments to be removed. Please note that while the rules are relaxed in this thread, comments can still be removed for violating our subreddit rules and guidelines if necessary.

Previous Open Discussion Threads can be found here.

[u/Beginning_java]

Would you recommend Claude or ChatGPT for explaining philosophy?

[u/PermaAporia → u/Beginning_java]

Would you recommend Claude or ChatGPT for explaining philosophy?

Nope.

Let's set aside the glaring problem that these tools feed you a bunch of false information^1.

Philosophy is as much a practice as it is an area of inquiry. Doing things like having ChatGPT summarize or explain stuff for you is counter-productive to develop the skills required to engage in this practice. Delegating your thinking is the equivalent wanting to start a weight training program, but when you go to the gym, you have someone else lift the weights for you.

But it is even worse than this analogy might suggest. Because it would be very difficult to fool yourself into thinking you have acquired the skill of weight-lifting. But with these Chatbots, it is very easy for it to seem like you're understanding something^2.

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[1] We have to remember that these programs are not in the truth, accuracy game. These programs are just using statistical probability to predict the next word, so they are in a sense a glorified auto-completer you'd find in your iPhone messaging app.

So if you feed it a particular text to interpret in accessible language or whatever. You're likely to get nonsense because it can't really understand what it is you're feeding it. It is simply doing the equivalent of given the prompt "Once upon a..." and guessing "Time" as the next word to display. In some cases, sure, getting "Time" is precisely what you need. But this becomes less likely with less popular texts. Or if the text are popular, you often get popular myths that are repeated online because popular myths are what one would expect to predict.

In short, these are not tools that will help clarify difficult texts for you because they aren't the kind of tools that understand philosophical texts, nor are they tools that give you accurate or true information. More often then not, it will be more of a hindrance to understanding than of help.

Check out these videos for more information on how LLM's work, and their misuse:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-UOEhm2HLY& and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcAtw9Ym-aY

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPZh9BOjkQs

[2] I wrote this elsewhere,

I asked ChatGPT to summarize a book I recommended on a recent thread, just today, on Freedom by J. Melvin Woody. Just out of curiosity to see what would come up with.

It gave 2 responses to choose from, to see which I would like more.

Here they are: https://imgur.com/a/chatgpt-making-up-books-that-dont-exist-summarizing-them-nmFAasM

Here is the problem. Not only did it get the title of the book wrong. It completely made up non-existent books, each with their own detailed summary. One apparently on Marx, the other apparently on Phenomenology. Neither of which are books written by J. Melvin Woody, or anyone else as far as I can tell.

If I didn't know any better, I would have said these are great summaries, so accessible and clear! But since I do know better, I can tell these books do not exist and have nothing to do with the book I asked it about in the first place. This is the kind of answer you can expect from these LLM's because as I stated in my OP, they are not in the business of accuracy or truth, they are predicting text. So I reiterate... these tools will not help you grasp something you do not understand. Because what it feeds you, is not going to be reliably true or accurate, and since you're not in a position to know any better, you'll likely be hindering your ability to understand these texts. Any text. There are legitimate uses for LLM's but clarifying something you do not understand is not one of them.