No, those aren’t the words from the song, but they are the words of our times. Part of my book project is on the issue of parrhēsia as I’ve been discussing here. Parrhēsia is speaking truth to power but also saying everything (that needs to be said?). While gen ai cannot say everything it can say so much that it creates a phase transition in rhetorical practices and all the naturalcultural world that operates on those practices. Phase transition: think water coming to a boil.

How you feeling now froggy boy?

This is one of the ways of framing the concerns around hallucination and it is also curiously a concern framed in terms of future anteriority. That is: of all the things that AIs will have said, which will be signals, which noise, and which hallucinations. But here’s the weird bit because signal/truth is all mixed up in our bodies and finitude. Part of parrhēsia of speaking truth is risk-taking. AI’s don’t take risks. They have nothing to lose. So they say everything but not in a parrhesiastic way (I think that’s the word). Inasmuch as they can speak “truth” they do it without taking a risk.

But it’s more complicated than that of course (which is why it’s a book and not a blog post). We can write a genealogy of the reduction of parrhēsia from the individuated risk of Socrates through the risk mitigation and distribution of empiricism and scientific method and on to AI where the attenuation of risk becomes so intensified that BOOM! Frog soup. Or becoming anyway.

What happens after? Or do we not quite get there?