“A Failure of Expectation Calibration”

A team of researchers conducted a three-year study of philosophers’ judgments about the philosophical capabilities of generative artificial intelligence. Their finding: “As participants became more familiar with generative AI and increasingly recognized its formal competence, they simultaneously sharpened the boundaries they drew around what they regarded as genuinely philosophical thinking.” philosophers are people, too The study, “Can Intelligent User Interfaces Engage in Philosophical Discussions?: A Longitudinal Mixed-Methods Study of Philosophers’ Judgments” was published earlier this year in the Joint Proceedings of the ACM Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) Workshops 2026. It was a small study in which the participants, 16 philosophy scholars, were asked to “assess anonymized philosophical responses and to reflect on the role of generative AI in philosophical discussion.” They were interviewed over the three year period about whether and how their attitudes about generative AI…