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title: character.ai example debate

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# character.ai example debate
### A debate with Thomas Jefferson about Marx

This was a rather silly debate about ideas I don't  know that much about. 
* A strategy like this would be very helpful as a study strategy to help students wrap their heads around arguments they aren't fully secure on, rather than a testing assignment. 
* However, I do believe that teachers can and should present sources like this to their students as a great study strategy, especially in beginner level social science  or humanities classes where the goal is for students to practice the methods of constructive debate and understand the general arguements of very important thinkers.
![](https://hackmd.io/_uploads/BkkFZTIEn.png)
* as you can see Thomas started out very adversarial and our debate was very simplistic and even somewhat agressive
![](https://hackmd.io/_uploads/r10tbpIV2.png)
* It is interesting that we can talk to Thomas Jefferson about climate change, but of course it is important to be consciouse that he didn't know about this issue and all of these ideas are pretty made up and not based on his actual words.
![](https://hackmd.io/_uploads/HJKqbTUN3.png)
![](https://hackmd.io/_uploads/S1Zo-TUEh.png)
* In the above slide we can see what could be viewed as historical revisionism as Jefferson agrees that slavery and Native American genocide is evil, and despite his claims against slavery he did own over 600 slaves during his life. 
* Students would have to be actively thoughtful about how these bots take modern info and of course do not exhibit the exact same ideas as the "characters" they impersonate. 
* However, this can be interesting because the bot can use Jeffersonian ideology in modern debates that he couldn't have engaged in.
![](https://hackmd.io/_uploads/rkTj-68Vh.png)
* This was the point at which the debate actually reached a point where I think I was forced to really think and try to deal with these arguments. Nothing here is uniquelly and extremely Jeffersonian, but generally I think the bot does a pretty good job of embodying some of his general ideals in opposition to other ideologies.
![](https://hackmd.io/_uploads/ryrpbTUV2.png)
Thomas and I were able to come to a pretty good understanding by the end, and this debate could of course be continued ad infinitum. Although we didn't get very specifically into Jefferson's ideas I do think this could help a lot of students think through general ideas and practice constructive debating skills.
I took a political philosophy GENED called economic justice which was basically an overview of political philosophy and some political science, and I think tools like this can help beginners in these disciplines with learning how to debate and think through general arguments and counterarguments. 
However, it is paramount that students are well informed on the shortcoming of these tools and how they can misrepresent their "thinkers", especially in terms of modern understandings on issues like race and discrimination. Also, they can never get all that specefic and accurate in arguments, so for higher level classes it might quickly give diminishing returns.
