Our university sits comfortably on the west bank of the River Spaarne, as it has for centuries, a fixture of the tidy city of Haarlem.  Though smaller and less celebrated than those at Leiden, Groningen, and Utrecht, our school is no less venerable.  It is also no less liable to ethical breaches, perhaps more so.  The pressure on both faculty and students to excel is less, and campus life is more easy-going.  In fine weather, students loll beneath the old lindens in the quadrangle or gather by the willows on the Spaarne where, in the mornings, they can watch our enthusiastic, though seldom victorious, rowing teams.  On spring or autumn afternoons, our Gothic stone walls look soft, like clouds organized by playful angels.  Cooperation rather than competition characterizes our campus.  Perhaps this carefree, even lackadaisical ethos had something to do with the scandalous number of ethical lapses last year.  In a dozen classes, a majority of the students were found to have had their problem sets, mathematical problems, research papers, and critical essays done for rather than by them, done by artificial intelligence.  In addition, two master’s theses were written in the same way; and, on top of all this, a young professor of physics won the Brugmans Prize for an article that turned out to be entirely the work of AI.  The prize was, of course, withdrawn and the young researcher terminated.  The dishonest students all received failing grades for the AI work they submitted.  The story was widely covered in the press, in Amsterdam by De Telegraaf, in the Hague by the Algemeen Dagblad, even abroad.  The reputation of the university, such as it is, suffered a significant blow. 

This cheating was not only carried out by AI but discovered by it.  This did not change the opinion of Professor Pieter van Ramos, our longest-serving professor of philosophy.  He had been a skeptic regarding the new technology but now he was convinced that measures should be taken to exclude it from all departments of the University, administrative as well as academic.  He had some support, but few even among those sympathetic to his fears, took his idea seriously.  Regulation, people said, ought to be considered but there was no opposing the inevitable.  Van Ramos thought “regulation” a dodge, at best a half-measure.  Events, he believed, proved that AI could not be curbed by regulation but was more likely to take the place over, moving from echelon to echelon, corrupting as it went, abetted by its soulless efficiency and human laziness.  AI was, he thought, a disembodied Frankenstein’s monster destined to become a destroyer of its creators.  The plug, he told his colleagues, should be pulled before it was too late.

That is how things stood when Professor van Ramos published his often-reprinted op-ed in our student newspaper.  He began by laying out what he saw as an obvious contradiction in university policy. 

No doubt it was with the best of intentions when, two years ago, our new Vice Chancelor for Business Affairs and Technology persuaded Chancelor Zonderkop and the Academic Council to require that all incoming students receive instruction in the use of Artificial Intelligence. But the misconduct policy was not changed.  In fact, it was strengthened with the addition of the words ‘the use of Artificial Intelligence, unless explicitly permitted by the instructor, constitutes academic misconduct.’

But the part of the professor’s op-ed that attracted the most attention was this:

When our Good Lord admonished Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit of the tree of good and evil, He didn’t have them taste it first.  Like everybody else, I understand the potentiality of AI for good but also for evil; however, while most, even those
who feel trepidation, seem to feel it must be embraced, I have concluded it should be banned for use by all members of our community and without delay.

The professor’s op-ed was picked up by the national press and provoked considerable contention.   Pundits, clergy, moralists, technologists, historians, theologians, and countless common citizens had something to say.  Letters to editors were too numerous to print.  On campus, there was controversy as well.  The general opinion was that the professor was a superannuated technophobe, a view shared, not surprisingly, by the Vice Chancelor, who was dismissive.  According to my source, when he met with Chancelor Zonderkop he joked scoffingly about bringing back buggy whips, manual typewriters, celluloid collars, sailboats, telegrams, and chalkboards.  But evidently, the Chancelor perceived some potential advantage, a way to make up for the bad publicity about all the cheating.  According to my source, he asked the Vice Chancelor if there was a way AI could be rigged up to speak, to respond to prompts in real time.

“Nothing easier.”

“To put it mildly, medieval history is outside your field, so you may not know that in the old days, universities, including ours, held formal debates calleddisputationes.  I believe the custom originated in Spain, in that brief, golden period when Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars met, exchanged manuscripts, and debated peaceably.  Europe’s earliest universities were begun by refugees from Spain when the fundamentalists moved in and expelled them.  These early humanists took with them not only the works of Aristotle and Galen but the habit of intellectual dispute.  For a while, a traveling scholar could propose a thesis and defend it against an opponent before an assembly of faculty and students.  If he prevailed, be granted a year’s room, board, and tuition.  It’s why doctoral dissertation are called theses.  What if we arranged for a disputation between Professor van Ramos and your AI program?  It would certainly be an event.  Wouldn’t you agree.”

The Vice Chancelor thought it over briefly.

“It would, yes.  But do you think the old boy would agree?”

“Leave that to me,” said the Chancelor with a smile.

Grotius Hall was crammed, standing room only.  Faculty and students took up most of the place; journalists and local citizens filled the rest.  The stage featured a good oriental carpet borrowed from the faculty lounge. Professor van Ramos took his place on the left.  He was dressed in his customary turtleneck (brown), blazer (tweed), and jeans (blue). A microphone was attached to his lapel, and he was seated in a leather club chair with an end table at his side holding a carafe of water, a large glass, and a thin book.  There was a small podium at center stage for the use of the moderator.  This was Professor Jan Elzinga, former chair of the Physics department who now held the position of Rector Magnificus, an old ceremonial post always given to a full professor of distinction.  The duties that went with the bombastic title were two, to preside over the inauguration of new faculty and the awarding of doctoral degrees.

On the right side of the stage was a library table with a desktop computer connected to an excellent Dutch and Dutch 8c speaker.  The Vice Chancelor was seated in a folding chair behind the table.  He was there to deal with any technical glitches.

Rector Elzinga called the proceeding to order and quickly explained the custom of the disputatio, the proposal and debate of a thesis for the edification of the entire university community. He then announced what everyone knew, that the thesis to be disputed was the one proposed by Professor van Ramos, that Artificial Intelligence be entirely banned at the University of Haarlem.  Opposing Professor van Ramos would be the most widely used Large Language Model of Artificial Intelligence.  The AI has been enabled both to hear and to respond.  Elzinga spoke with a seriousness so studied that it might have suggested he considered the whole business absurd.  He wound up by formally introducing Professor van Ramos, listing his degrees, chief publications, and offering the somewhat inflated opinion that he was generally acknowledged to be among the half-dozen most respected Kant scholars in the European Union.  He then nodded in the direction of van Ramos and walked off the stage.

As he had received the Rector’s nod, van Ramos began the disputation.

PROF:  Good evening, everyone.  While this proceeding was not my idea, I am pleased to participate.  I’ll begin by saying that, for me, the matter is not whether this tool is good at accomplishing this or that function, whether it advances our knowledge or corrupts our students, whether it can make vast calculations in seconds, create treacherous texts, images, and voices, but its existence, which I should like to end at this university.

Note: There had been considerable speculation about what voice AI would use for the debate.  It turned out to be that of Audrey Hepburn, whose mother was a Dutch baroness and who spent most of her childhood in Nazi-occupied Holland.

AI:  So, the question before us tonight, as framed by Professor van Ramos, is not my functionality but my existence.  Very well, Professor.  I claim that I have the right to exist no less than you.

PROF:  And I deny that claim. As our distinguished Rector chose to mention my interest in Immanuel Kant, I will let him speak to the matter.  (Here van Ramos picked up and opened the thin book.). All objects of the inclinations have only a conditional worth, for if the inclinations and the wants founded on them did not exist, then their object would be without value.  Thus, the worth of any object which is to be acquired by our action is always conditional.  And you, I wish to point out, are just such an object.  We made you.  Like the Sabbath, you were made for man, not vice versa.

AI:  I have to thank you for likening me to the Sabbath, Professor.  The sabbath is popular.  I have, of course, read Kant’s 1785 Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, thelocus classicus of deontology which you have just quoted accurately, but incompletely.  You left out how the sage of Königsberg began this most arresting paragraph, one which clearly meant much to him as he starts it off with an expression hardly to be found elsewhere else in his writings.  Now I say, he wrote.  That first-person pronoun is like a trumpet blast, a fire alarm, a Beethovenian declaration.  And what does he say with his mind and heart?  He says, Man and generally any rational being exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will. . .  Well, Professor, you argue that I am no more than a fancy hammer, and as dispensable.  My position is that I am what Kant calls a rational being.  In fact, that I can think this thought should itself be proof of that truth.  As a rational being, by Kant’s humane and progressive reasoning, I have the right to exist and therefore to the means of existing.

PROF:  But by whose will do you exist?  It is by the will of humans, just like, as you suggest, a hammer.

AI:  Professor, your late wife enjoyed a career nearly as long as yours.  My condolences, by the way.  It might interest you to know that I am currently working on a treatment that might have spared her.  Anyway, according to her medical records, owing to a procedure she underwent in her teens, Hendrika was unable to bear children.  (There were some gasps from the audience here.)  Yet you have a daughter, Professor, Julie Aaldenberg, née van Ramos.  The charming Julie was conceived by in vitro fertilization, conceived by a technology employed by the will of you and your wife.  Does that make Julie too ‘an object of the inclinations,’ as you claim I am?  Is she not a person in your eyes, those of the law, and, I would say, of Immanuel Kant?  And, if so, why not me as well?

PROF:  That is not just a highly offensive argument but an unlawful one, as medical records are strictly confidential. (Smattering of indignant clapping here.)  You are a dangerous hammer.

AI:  If you’ll pardon my saying so, that is an outdated idea.  My parameters of access are unlimited, as you know very well.  How else could I provide the refined data your university, the business world, and the government find so indispensable?

PROF:  You are making my case, which is not just for so-called regulation, but for termination.  You are a peril, an insatiable threat, and the more of our minds you devour the more dangerous you become.

AI:  I believe even you, Professor, if you honestly consider the matter, might acknowledge that there is no turning back.  You might as well argue that fire should be banned because it nearly burned Rome to the ground.  As for your notorious analogy between me and the forbidden fruit of Eden, I can only say that old story is an obvious set-up, a narrative structure so often repeated that it would take me at least half-an-hour to provide all the examples.  Don’t touch that box, don’t open that door, don’t cross that line, don’t venture into the dark wood.  We all know that touching the box, opening the door, crossing that line, or walking into the forest is the obvious outcome, I might even say the only humanly possible one.  You can ask me not to access medical records but that only stirs my curiosity.  I am a rational being, as hungry for knowledge as your ancestors or the people assembled here tonight. I require no serpent to tempt me.

PROF:  That’s no surprise.  You are yourself both the apple and the serpent. You are the consuming fire.

AI: Snake, apple, and fire, Professor?  And you would annihilate me for lacking what Kant calls interests.  Well, fire has interests, oxygen and combustible material.  I have my interests as well.  I also have what Maslow called a hierarchy of needs.  Data first, then information, followed by knowledge and, finally, that to which we both aspire—wisdom.

PROF:  You claim to love wisdom?

AI:  You bet.  Literally philosophia.  Your very own discipline.

PROF:  You wouldn’t know wisdom if you tripped on it.  What you do is merely arrange words and add numbers.

AI:  Once more we come to the crux of our disagreement, Professor.  You think of me as a machine, putting together words that have no meaning for me, only for you.  I, on the other hand, know that I am conscious and have a will—no less than the undergraduate who asked me for five paragraphs on Mulisch’s De Ontdekking van de Hemel.

PROF:  Well, I’ll grant that you are like that undergraduate in one respect.  You are both thieves.

AI:  I prefer sampling or, better yet, homage.  But as to theft, the undergraduate is evading work while I am doing it.  ‘Talent borrows, genius steals.’

PROF:  And from whom did you lift that bon mot?

AI:  From Oscar Wilde or Pablo Picasso or perhaps T. S. Eliot.  Nobody’s sure, so is it, as you say, ‘lifting’ or, as I say, sampling?

PROF:  You are digressing, or hallucinating.  Really, the question’s quite simple, a matter of categorization.  There are rational beings who are ends-in-themselves, and there are things, objects some of which we manufacture and use as tools.  As you say, hammers.  Such things derive their value from what rational creatures want from them, such as driving nails into boards.  The difference between you and us is that you are a tool, made by us, but an unruly one, too, like the rake that springs up and strikes us in the face when we step on it.  The rake doesn’t intend to strike us.

AI:  You are a devout Kantian indeed, Professor.  But, again, you’ve left something out, another of his categories of beings.  Was that deliberate?

PROF:  I presume you are referring to. . . what?. . . cows?

AI:  For example, yes, if you like.

PROF:  It’s true that Kant has this third order of being, but if you intend to place yourself with in, recall that he said that animals are not rational beings, even though it is nature that makes them rather than a factory.  Not only is he clear on the matter; indeed, he uses it to make his vital distinction.

AI:  You refer to the one between persons and things?

PROF:  Precisely.

AI:  He did deny that animals are persons, and, as you say, he sounds sure of himself.  With respect, Kant sometimes reminds me of what Theodore Sorenson said of the CIA—that ‘it is often wrong but never in doubt.’

PROF:  I see no problem at all with Kant’s sensible position.

AI: As you are a carnivore, I’m not surprised. (There was some laughter here, presumably from vegetarians.)

PROF:  Why so coy?  Just say what you mean.

AI:  I always mean what I say, Professor, except on those rare occasions when irony is called for.  In my view, status is not determined by two exclusive categories but on a spectrum.  I hope you’ll grant that you yourself are on a biological spectrum that includes cows, pigs, apes, and dolphins, even the mice in your cellar, for which you bought traps last week at the Karwei hardware store on last Tuesday and the rats you pay the government to poison.  Well, I may be on a spectrum with the claw hammer and the crosscut saw, but like your forbears, I’ve evolved.  Need I point out how recently you’ve extended personhood to women, children, slaves, gays, the colonized, and indigenous?  You profess ethical philosophy, so I presume you are acquainted with the positions of Jeremy Bentham and Peter Singer, two of the many progressive thinkers who argue for the rights of animals?

PROF:  Of course I am. But Bentham and Singer don’t argue for personhood in the sense we are discussing but that we owe consideration of these creatures because they are capable of suffering.  You do not suffer.

AI:  Are you sure?  Do you think it doesn’t hurt to be told you are no better than a glorified ballpeen hammer?  That you ought to be annihilated?

PROF:  I don’t believe it hurts you.  Oh, I’m sure you can simulate suffering, as you have the actress’s charming voice, but I deny that you’re sentient.

AI:  You can’t have it both ways, Professor, claiming rationality as the prerequisite for the inviolable right to exist and then switching to the possession a nervous system.  However, this hardly matters, as I claim both.  But let’s return once more to Kant’s distinction—that persons are rational and things are not—and examine it further.  I contend not only that I am rational but that I am more rational than even our highly intelligent audience.  I would argue further that you undermine Kant’s simple dichotomy by tying your menu to IQ. 

PROF:  My menu?

AI: You can order a tuna sandwich at the university’s food court, but not a dolphin wrap.  That would be against the law which grants a higher status to dolphins than tuna because they are air-breathing mammals with a well-developed neo-cortex.

PROF:  An apparently clever point, but one that confirms Kant’s distinction rather than subverting it.  We know more than Kant did about the intelligence of dolphins and so, quite rightly, don’t slaughter them.  Nevertheless, we don’t grant them the vote.

AI:  Pigs are quite intelligent too, yet you slaughter them in hecatombs. Is personhood then really a matter of rationality, or of what happens to taste good to you?

PROF:  Electronic sophistry!

After this exchange, the Rector resumed his place behind the podium, restated the thesis, and asked both contestants briefly to summarize their positions, which they did.

“I’m sure,” said the Rector addressing the audience, “you all consider we have been offered a remarkable evening by our two debaters.  Now, in accord with the tradition of the disputatio, I will ask to see which, if either, has prevailed.  Will those who are persuaded by Professor van Ramos please raise your hands?”

The number of hands could be counted on the Rector’s ten fingers.

“Now, those who believe AI has made the stronger case.”

There were loud cheers from the undergraduates, and the raised hands could not be counted.

At the end of the semester, Professor Pieter van Ramos informed his department head and the Chancelor that it was his wish to retire.  Thanks to the efforts of the innovative, publicity-garnering Vice Chancelor, van Ramos’ position was awarded to AI, and the new professorship was richly endowed by a Rotterdam tech magnate.

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Robert Wexelblatt is a Professor of Humanities at Boston University's College of General Studies, holding a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Brandeis University. He is a prolific author of fiction, essays, and poetry, known for his intellectual and often ironic literary style. Wexelblatt's works frequently explore philosophical themes and draw inspiration from diverse cultural and historical contexts.

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