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The ancient Greeks had a word for an object that is a remedy in one hand and poison in the other, depending on how it\u2019s administered: pharmakon<\/em>. Socrates used it in Plato\u2019s Phaedrus<\/em>, more than two millennia before Claude, Perplexity, or the AI-detection tool Pangram existed, to describe writing itself.<\/p>\n Plato recounts an Egyptian myth in which the god Theuth presents writing to King Thamus as a pharmakon<\/em> \u2014 an \u201celixir,\u201d or remedy, for memory (mn\u0113m\u0113<\/em>) and wisdom (sophia<\/em>). Thamus is not persuaded. Writing, he answers, will instead produce forgetfulness: by relying on external marks, people will neglect their own memory. It is, he says, a pharmakon not of mn\u0113m\u0113<\/em> but of hypomn\u0113sis<\/em> \u2014 not memory itself, but only an aid to recollection \u2014 and one that may furnish the appearance of wisdom without genuine understanding.<\/p>\n The French philosopher Jacques Derrida returned to that passage in his 1968 essay Plato\u2019s Pharmacy,<\/em> arguing that pharmakon<\/em> cannot be fixed as either remedy or poison: the same tool that preserves and extends thought can also displace the faculty it is meant to support. That is generative AI\u2019s dilemma, revived. Used by someone with knowledge and judgment, it can help retrieve, organize, test, and revise ideas; used as a substitute for those capacities, it can produce fluent prose without understanding.<\/p>\n The remedy and the poison are one and the same. The debate over AI writing, in other words, is not a 2026 conundrum. It is the oldest argument about writing, wearing a new face.<\/p>\n Greek myth also offers a parable for a threat that can only be managed, not avoided: Circe\u2019s warning to Odysseus to steer between Scylla and Charybdis, a calculus of survivable loss versus total destruction. Together they name, almost too closely, the two live questions in every newsroom\u2019s, law firm\u2019s, and research desk\u2019s relationship to generative AI: how visible the intervention is, and what you\u2019re actually willing to give up to use it responsibly.<\/p>\n Circe\u2019s counsel to Odysseus is among the least comforting pieces of advice in ancient literature, precisely because it is sound. Ahead lies a strait: on one side, Scylla, a six-headed creature that snatches sailors from the deck; on the other, Charybdis, a whirlpool that swallows the entire ship. Steer nearer Scylla, Circe advises \u2014 better to lose six men than all, and the vessel besides.<\/p>\n Media institutions, research desks, law firms, and other entities producing content or ideas are quietly weighing Circe\u2019s counsel: what can be surrendered without diminishing the work itself, or the broader mission of truth it serves. The question is no longer whether to make a sacrifice, but how to calculate the precise formula of survivable loss.<\/p>\n Charybdis is the old economics: insist on the unassisted workflow and risk becoming a \u201cmedia Pharisee,\u201d while a competitor\u2019s earnings note lands an hour sooner, a memo arrives overnight instead of in a week, a research desk publishes at half the cost. The precedents are not hypothetical. The Associated Press made the trade in 2014, automating corporate earnings stories and expanding coverage from roughly 300 companies per quarter to 4,400, on the logic that a formulaic scoreboard story was worth ceding for reporting time that requires judgment and better sourcing. Bloomberg made the same bet around the same time, publishing headlines with the help of machine learning starting in 2015 and using automated technology to assist with roughly a third of its content as far back as 2019, per The New York Times<\/em>.<\/p>\n When investor Stanley Druckenmiller published a Wall Street Journal<\/em> op-ed on the bond market this August, readers running it through the detection tool Pangram got a 100% AI-generated verdict. Druckenmiller confirmed it within hours, without shame. The piece carried no disclosure, and WSJ editorial page editor Paul Gigot defended the silence rather than demand it be broken. More than a decade before \u201cAI writing\u201d became a newsroom-wide reckoning, it had already redefined much of the job \u2014 for people willing to look honestly. Noteworthy figures in business and technology consistently insist on and defend the use of the tool.<\/p>\n Scylla is the toll those efficiencies exact: the byline\u2019s claim to have thought the thought, the analyst\u2019s to have read the filing, the student\u2019s to have made the argument \u2014 each quietly severed from the work that once made it theirs. It is the Odyssean bargain: accept a sufferable loss in pursuit of a larger goal, but know exactly what you are giving up.<\/p>\n If the AI-writing crisis is older than most people know, the face it\u2019s wearing is older still\u2014borrowed from the Greek stage. The deus ex machina<\/em> was a device where an actor playing a god was lowered to the stage by crane to solve what no character in the narrative could. The crane itself had a name: the m\u0113chan\u0113<\/em>, the actual piece of stage technology that delivered the deus \u2014 and it was introduced by the great playwright Aeschylus before becoming the signature of Euripides, particularly at the end of Medea<\/em>, when a dragon-drawn chariot from Helios lifts the murderous heroine out of a plot that had run out of road.<\/p>\n Just as with today\u2019s innovation, the m\u0113chan\u0113<\/em> drew criticism. Aristotle was unimpressed, arguing in his Poetics<\/em> that a resolution imported from outside the story\u2019s own causal logic might satisfy an audience, but cheapens the tale it claims to finish. A deus ex machina<\/em>, as it came to be called in Latin, is defensible for events \u201coutside the play,\u201d Aristotle allowed \u2014 past events beyond human knowledge, or future ones only a god could foresee \u2014 but not for solving a plot a human character should have solved.<\/p>\n According to Drew Lichtenberg, the Yale-trained dramaturg and artistic producer at Washington, DC\u2019s Shakespeare Theatre Company (and the twin brother of one of the authors), the critique was both more and less fitting for the age of AI than people think. \u201cAristotle was speaking specifically about Euripides,\u201d Lichtenberg told Fortune<\/em>. \u201cHe had a problem with [Euripides] cheapening or corrupting the poetics.\u201d Aristotle was describing writers in the late part of the 5th century who started to \u201cabuse this device\u201d of the deus ex machina<\/em> \u2014 particularly how Euripides pushed past its limits by having \u201cthe gods come down and interfere\u201d in plots that, in Aristotle\u2019s view, should have resolved themselves through human action alone.<\/p>\n In chapter 15 of the Poetics<\/em>, Aristotle writes that \u201cThe supernatural should be used only in connection with events that lie outside the play itself, things that have happened long ago beyond the knowledge of men, or future events which need to be foretold and revealed, for we attribute to the gods the power of seeing all things.\u201d<\/p>\n Lichtenberg said he saw a parallel \u2014 though one that inverts the ancient device in a telling way. \u201cAI is the deus<\/em> coming out of the machina<\/em>, more than the machina<\/em>,\u201d he said \u2014 because in AI writing and AI creating, it is taking on an active role in a play that was formerly reserved for human characters. \u201cThat\u2019s where it\u2019s a really suggestive comparison,\u201d he said. Film critics today sometimes accuse a lame act III of having a deus ex machina<\/em> problem, and it names the crisis at the heart of AI writing: a machine wedged between a person\u2019s idea and its expression, blurring how much of the finished piece is the person\u2019s and how much the machine\u2019s.<\/p>\n Lichtenberg calls Euripides \u201can unorthodox and experimental writer who was interested in new forms and sensations,\u201d fascinated with the idea of the witch character Medea becoming a deus. More broadly, he was \u201cfascinated with people becoming gods,\u201d a fascination \u201cwhich people found creepy and scary, the way people do with AI.\u201d (It appeared again in Euripides\u2019 later work, The Bacchae<\/em>.) At the same time, Lichtenberg says, he went on to become \u201cvery influential on the generation that came after\u201d \u2014 a writer blamed, even then, \u201cfor ending the golden age, for his excesses.\u201d<\/p>\n Euripides\u2019 late career overlapped with, in Lichtenberg\u2019s words, \u201cthe decline and fall of self-rule\u201d in Athens \u2014 the Peloponnesian War, the oligarchic coup of 411 B.C., and the slow exhaustion of Athenian democracy in which his final plays were written. What followed compounded the shift in dramatic taste. After Euripides, he explained, Alexander the Great came to power and changed culture: \u201cAlexander goes around the ancient world and builds all these massive theaters,\u201d Lichtenberg says, and \u201cthe style of theaters becomes more bombastic\u201d in the Hellenistic period that followed \u2014 venues built to seat 10,000 or more, architecture and performance scaling up in grandeur even as the tightly self-governing city-state that had produced Sophocles receded into memory. \u201cWhen we talk about the fear of AI,\u201d Lichtenberg argues, \u201cwe are talking about this Euripidean decline and fall.\u201d<\/p>\n At the same time, Lichtenberg allows, \u201cnow we read [Euripides] and he seems to be the most modern\u201d of the three tragedians, with characters that are \u201cthe most complex.\u201d What once got Euripides docked points with his judges is exactly what unsettled his contemporaries: \u201cthe irregularity of his dramaturgy,\u201d Lichtenberg says, made his plays seem \u201cdisunified or incomplete, distorted,\u201d producing what he calls \u201cgrotesque variations\u201d on the form Aeschylus and Sophocles had established.<\/p>\n No critic made a harsher case against Euripides \u2014 and perhaps his modern counterparts in the AI media crisis \u2014 than Friedrich Nietzsche, who devoted much of The Birth of Tragedy<\/em> to the argument that Euripides had killed the art form. \u201cTragedy died,\u201d in Nietzsche\u2019s argument, \u201cbecause the Dionysian rites, the ritual origin of tragedy, was lost,\u201d Lichtenberg says, \u201creplaced by a more psychological, scientific, questioning mode.\u201d Nietzsche argued that \u201ctragedy should be about mysteries and ritual essences,\u201d not the interrogative, rationalizing sensibility that Euripides brought to the stage.<\/p>\n Addressing \u201csacrilegious Euripides\u201d in Chapter 10 of\u00a0The Birth of Tragedy<\/em>, Nietzsche levels an accusation about tragedy: \u201cIt died under your violent hands \u2026 you plundered all the gardens of music, you still managed only copied, masked music. And because you had abandoned Dionysus, Apollo abandoned you: rouse all the passions from their resting places and conjure them into your circle, sharpen and whet a sophistical dialectic for the speeches of your heroes\u2013your heroes, too, have only copied, masked passions and speak only copied, masked speeches.\u201d<\/p>\n Ancient critics could never quite agree on the direction of causality between Euripides\u2019 formal excesses and the political decay of Athens around him \u2014 and Lichtenberg thinks that same ambiguity now surrounds AI. \u201cThere\u2019s an interesting chicken-or-the-egg problem with Euripides, he says: \u201cIs he writing this way because society is falling apart? Or is society falling apart because artists are doing these damaging things?\u201d Indeed, in Chapter 11 of The Birth of Tragedy<\/em>, Nietzsche argued that \u201cEuripides brought the\u00a0spectator\u00a0<\/em>onto the stage\u201d and \u201cmade the New Comedy possible.\u201d As a result, \u201cCivic mediocrity, on which Euripides built all his poetical hopes, was now given a voice.\u201d The AI question, to Lichtenberg, conjures similar questions to the ones Aristotle and Nietzsche asked: \u201cIs AI a sign of decline, or a symptom of disease?\u201d he asked rhetorically. \u201cHave we opened Pandora\u2019s box?\u201d<\/p>\n Nietzsche is not just a long-dead German philosopher: tech titans and AI thought leaders still use his language to describe their creation. Nietzsche\u2019s concept of the \u00dcbermensch, or \u201csuperman,\u201d is one that tech boosters have repeatedly reached for to describe AI\u2019s potential. Mark Zuckerberg calls his own AI lab Superintelligence, and released a 6,000-plus-word essay on his dreams of achieving \u201cpersonal superintelligence.\u201d SoftBank\u2019s Masayoshi Son told shareholders in 2023 that ChatGPT had brought him to tears over the meaning of life before he committed his company to \u201cdesign the future of humanity\u201d; by June 2026, Son was telling CNBC that AI models were approaching \u201csuperintelligence\u2026 exponentially smarter than all of us,\u201d language lifted almost directly from Nietzsche\u2019s own vision of a being that \u201covercomes\u201d ordinary human limits.<\/p>\n Lichtenberg argued that Nietzsche meant something different in preaching about the superman: he was the latest apparition of the Dionysian, not a triumph of engineered reason. To Nietzsche, Lichtenberg explained, Dionysus was a \u201cmask\u201d or \u201cmetaphor\u201d for something profound in human nature \u2014 an argument that \u201cwe should embrace the things that make us like beasts, seeing through the illusory nature of existence and exerting selfhood.\u201d<\/p>\n That, in Lichtenberg\u2019s telling, is the deeper misreading built into AI hype: not just that executives have seized on the \u00dcbermensch<\/em> as a marketing metaphor, but that they\u2019ve located the god in the wrong place. \u201cAI could be the deus ex machina<\/em>, but who\u2019s the person who\u2019s wielding it?\u201d he asked. The artist used to be society\u2019s transgressor; now \u201cpoliticians and the tech overlords are the real transgressors\u201d \u2014 casting their machines as gods to obscure their own hand on the lever. Modern society may have lost the Apollonian and the Dionysian altogether, leaving only the rationalizing, \u201cEuripidean\u201d half of human experience\u2014just as a new machine intelligence arrives to do the questioning for us.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat tradition does AI actually fall into?\u201d Lichtenberg asks. \u201cWhat\u2019s so anxiety-producing, maybe, is there\u2019s no clear precedent. It combines all these forms in a new and somewhat frightening way.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat tradition does AI actually fall into?\u201d Lichtenberg asks. \u201cWhat\u2019s so anxiety-producing, maybe, is there\u2019s no clear precedent. It combines all these forms in a new and somewhat frightening way.\u201d<\/p>\n Writing was offered as remedy; Thamus called it poison; the pharmakon<\/em> refuses to resolve. The same tool that extends thought can displace it; the same machine that speeds the work can sever the author from it. All Circe\u2019s counsel makes clear is that there is no passage without loss; only the question of which loss you can survive.<\/p>\n The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of <\/em> Fortune.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n #writing #debate #eerily #similar #rocked #ancient #Greece #years<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The ancient Greeks had a word … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4309,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[6039,1302,7249,3199,1614,7250,4105,7106,84],"class_list":["post-4308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-ancient","tag-debate","tag-eerily","tag-greece","tag-psychology","tag-rocked","tag-similar","tag-writing","tag-years"],"yoast_head":"\n\nThe strait every desk now faces<\/strong><\/h2>\n
The god from the machine<\/strong><\/h2>\n
The Nietzsche question<\/h2>\n