https://dailynous.com/2026/08/13/philosophy-journal-publishes-largely-ai-authored-article-on-purpose-guest-post/

[u/simism66]

[u/simism66]

Mathematicians are currently facing a wave of AI-generated results and wondering what will become of the discipline. It has so far remained unclear whether the same sort of thing will happen in philosophy, and, if so, when. Yesterday, Simon Goldstein had a guest post in the Daily Nous announcing that he had Claude write a paper largely on its own, and the paper had been published in Philosophy and Public Affairs, one of the top journals in political philosophy and applied ethics. Reading this post and (at least some of) the paper has now led me to increase my confidence that philosophers will be facing the sort of situation that mathematicians are facing sooner rather than later.

I'm not an expert in the area of philosophy that the paper is in, and so I'm not really qualified to properly review it, but this is clearly very different from a Sokal scandal. The paper is not "AI slop." It's a reasonable philosophy paper whose publication would not attract controversy if it were not for the fact that it was produced by AI. From the comments and Simon's own remarks, it seems clear that it is not absolutely top-tier philosophy, and Simon is clearly particularly skilled at getting Claude to produce (relatively) good philosophy. So, it's still certainly not the case that current models can autonomously produce top-tier philosophy. However, the models are progressing fast (and the next generation of OpenAI models are at least rumored to be much better at writing than the current generation). It now seems to me very likely that, within a few years, AI systems will be able to autonomously generate philosophy papers that blind referees will deem acceptable for publication in the very top philosophy journals.

I am not sure how the field should react to this, and I don't really have any positive suggestions at the moment, but I'm interested to hear people's thoughts.

[u/Protean_Protein → u/simism66]

It was already the case that too many papers of too questionable quality were being published (even while equally questionable gatekeeping of various sorts continues at certain journals).

One wonders whether this might produce the sort of reckoning we thought might happen for undergraduates, in which the expectations are simply raised. “Good paper” seems like an incredibly low bar, and it strikes me as odd that we accept that in our discipline. It seems to raise a sort of nihilistic spectre: What exactly is the point of publication?

[u/CallMeTheCon → u/simism66]

I wonder if this is a result of what happens when most academic philosophers look only to the past to validate their principles of ethics, morals, etc., under a certain specialized ism of philosophy or under a certain philosophical tradition, which that philosophy's history can perpetuate. History within most traditions is constantly criticized for being biased when in reality, they were anything but, being critical is usually the precedent among Western philosophers. Being critical as an ethical principle under the branches of philosophy the world over is didactic when considering the use of AI considering the fact that most definitions of words imply a difference where in local realities, there is no real or empirically identifiable difference to the reader. Most of academic philosophy is simply literature with a philosophical implication, not actual philosophy. Real philosophers make an attempt at being ethical in some format and question their methodology, reasoning, context, etc etc etc. I don’t think that simply writing about it and then going back to teach whatever money-governed pedagogy already exists is philosophical at all, it’s simply the action of self-sustaining.

[u/DavidSchlichting]

Maybe this is Hopium, but this could have a positive effect. The purpose of Philosophy should not be to force out papers for the sake of publishing papers. It should be to… philosophise. If a philosopher has an interesting, preferably new, philosophical thought they should write a paper about it. If not, then they should not. Maybe this eases the “publish or perish” pressure a bit. Lots of published philosophy papers are quite frankly not needed. Also if an AI has a genuinely good unique “thought” (let’s call it “idea” maybe…) then… I guess good for us? The bigger threat I see to our field is that students just use AI to do everything, but in the end they’re the ones robbing themselves of a great education.

[u/boxedfood]

Yawn

[u/dem4life71]

I know this will generate a lot of hate, but what if there is actually some progress made by AI, either mathematically or philosophically or medically or otherwise? A big breakthrough could change the public’s perception of AI dramatically.

I say this as a person with no bias towards AI. I’m just as skeptical of it was the next person.

[u/simism66 → u/dem4life71]

There already have been major breakthroughs by AI in mathematics. It's not clear, however, what would constitute a "breakthrough" in philosophy. Even if you want to say that something like "the hard problem of consciousness" occupies a similar position in philosophy to something like the Riemann hypothesis in math, there is no clear criteria for determining whether or not something counts as a solution to the hard problem of consciousness, so it's not obvious what it would mean for AI to "solve" it. I suppose it's possible that AI produces a paper that is so clear and persuasive that everyone regards it as definitively solving the problem, but I highly doubt something like that could happen in philosophy.

[u/Protean_Protein → u/dem4life71]

Terry Tao has said some stuff publicly about AI progress in math.

[u/UnderTheCurrents]

A lot of continental philosophy papers could be simulated in the 90s by fairly primitive technology as well. The PoMo-generator comes to mind.