Lichtenberg: AI backlash echoes Euripides 2,700 years ago

The article traces the AI-writing anxiety to a much older argument. Plato's Phaedrus tells of the god Theuth offering writing to King Thamus as a remedy for memory; Thamus refused, warning it would produce forgetting and the appearance of wisdom without understanding. Jacques Derrida returned to that passage in his 1968 essay Plato's Pharmacy, arguing that the pharmakon cannot be fixed as either cure or poison — the same dual nature the article applies to generative AI.

The article then follows the parallel into the theater. The deus ex machina was a crane — the mēchanē — that lowered a god onto the stage to resolve what no character could. Aeschylus introduced it, Euripides made it a signature, and Aristotle objected in the Poetics that outside intervention cheapens a plot humans should have resolved. Lichtenberg inverts the image for AI: the machine is the god, not just the crane. He also reads Euripides the way technology executives read Nietzsche's Übermensch — as a figure blamed for ending a golden age yet later seen as the most modern of the tragedians.

The stakes, as Lichtenberg frames them, hinge on who wields the tool and how the loss is calculated. He notes the chicken-and-egg problem that surrounded Euripides — whether art damaged society or society's decline produced the art — and says the same ambiguity now surrounds AI, leaving open whether it is a sign of decline or a symptom of it. For the editors, analysts and researchers weighing AI assistance, the article's final point is that there is no passage without loss; the only question is which loss can be survived.