“The fact that you, an expert human, generated the text is evidence that the view is worth thinking about—more so than if the text were generated by an LLM.” That’s Eric Schwitzgebel (UCR), writing at The Splintered Mind about why he doesn’t want to receive AI-written emails about philosophy, and why philosophy journals should reject AI-written submissions. Here’s more context: I’m talking about evidence about evidence: meta-epistemology. Your email or your article presents evidence for a particular philosophical view (alternatively, evidence that you support a particular philosophical view). In a simple world, I could evaluate this evidence entirely on its face: How good is the proposed view? But in the actual, complex world, it helps to have evidence about the quality of the evidence. The fact that you, an expert human, generated the text is evidence that the view is worth thinking about—more so than if the text were generated by an LLM. This holds even if the text is exactly the same, which of course it wouldn’t be. An increasingly large part of the function of journals is to provide evidence about evidence—the value of their imprimatur. The fact that an article appears in Nous or Ethics is evidence that it has been through rigorous review and was judged worthy by several expert humans applying unusually demanding standards of quality and importance. Its appearance in those journals is thus evidence (imperfect of course!) that the reasoning is of high quality and the arguments worth taking seriously. Similarly, if I know that an email or an article was written by a respected colleague, reflecting their positive creative exertion in trying to choose the right words, guided by their intuitive expertise in how to phrase things, I have better reason to take it seriously than if I know that it was generated by an LLM and reflects only their passive after-the-fact assent. Philosophers sometimes suggest that we shouldn’t care if an argument was human-generated or AI-generated—that insisting on human-generated prose is fetishizing personal human interaction rather than facts and argument quality. In a way, that’s true: A sound argument is a sound argument. Similarly, we shouldn’t care if an article was written by David Chalmers and published in Philosophical Review or whether it was written by..

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