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For Jeff,
I have a couple of concerns about this review. The first concerns the products of your AI searches, both of which turned up Cicero’s Orations against Cataline. As an academic wrestling with student plagiarism in my declining years, I noted Noam Chomsky’s criticism of ChatGPT in the New York Times as ‘sophisticated plagiarism’ on March 8, 2023. His core point seemed to me to be that though there are some limited exceptions, ChatGPT obtains its material from existing online sources, but without attribution. Is that why your chosen search engines both turned up the same example, though we don’t know from those search engines, or from you, who they were extracting from when they provided you with their reply?
That brings me to my second concern. To my knowledge, there were no recording devices during the life of Cicero, and though Cicero no doubt had a lot of fans in the Roman Senate and courts who followed him closely and tried to catch his every word, they could not. We are not even sure we have every word of Joseph Smith’s King Follett discourse in 1844, even though at least four different people tried to make faithful, close to word-for-word accounts. So what we have of Cicero’s oration against Cataline is likely his edited summary of what he said – which is much like what happens even today when judges (including appellate judges) give ex tempore decisions. They edit even the word-for-word recordings before they allow publication.
Aren’t you being a little tough on this author?
And while I respect your anxiety about exaggerating ‘proof’, in most civil trials in the Anglo-American world, one only has to ‘prove’ a case on the balance of probabilities. Though the standard is much higher in criminal cases where liberty and even life may be at stake, I am not aware that anyone has ever suggested historians and social scientists have to meet the higher criminal law standard. I know meeting the higher standard is better for good Book of Mormon apologists, but when judgment day comes and Moroni bears his witness against those who did not believe his words (eg Moroni 10:27), I don’t think Heavenly Father or Christ are going to use these mortal proof standards.