Cicero in the Age of AI
Peter Ramsay ThomasAbstract
The language of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly omnipresent in human discourse. Many point out that a growing reliance on AI for communication is intellectually and socially deleterious, but its consequences for our moral lives and identities are even deeper than those that contemporary critique is sometimes capable of recognizing. To illuminate these consequences, I turn to the Roman orator, philosopher, and statesman Cicero, whose rhetorical and ethical theory of decorum shows how, by diminishing our eloquence, AI also diminishes our virtue at a time when rhetoric has become increasingly suspect as inimical to civic virtue and civility itself.