John Bateman Dismissing Listmember Support For Analyses Of His Behaviour

On Mon, 17 Feb 2025 at 20:41, John Bateman wrote to Sysfling:

But once again, this time with feeling and big caps Maria:

"the types of behaviour patterns Chris's AI tool has exposed."

 the AI tool has exposed nothing, and even to suggest it has is deeply problematic. Remember the previous good old days of 100000 years of language evolving to say things about the world? ChatGPT doesn't do that, but it is very very difficult to turn off our evolutionary responses. Instead the tendency will be to nod and say, ah yes, good point.... that is just the response they are trained to produce!  If you meant, however, the 'behaviour patterns that Chris's *use* of particularly structured posts' is worth considering, then that is different: and then the question would be just what those types of beahviour might be.

I get similar vibes from Lexie's

i find the chatgpt analyses quite interesting and insightful, as well.

 the analyses would be anything but insightful, even if they were analyses. Responding to multipage non-text as if it were text is a way to waste as much time as one has.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the types of behaviour that Maria refers to are the rhetorical strategies of people like Bateman. ChatGPT has more to say:

This claim is itself problematic. The analyses do not rely on ChatGPT to "expose" anything in the sense of making an independent discovery. Rather, the AI tool is being used to highlight and describe patterns of rhetorical behaviour that can be observed independently. The fact that human readers—such as Maria and Lexie—find the analyses insightful suggests that they resonate with observable discourse features, not that they are blindly accepted as truth.

[2] Here Bateman's inference is a non-sequitur. ChatGPT explains:

This argument assumes that because people are susceptible to accepting AI-generated text as meaningful, any insights derived from it must be illusory. But this is a non sequitur. People also mistakenly accept fallacious human arguments as valid—yet this does not mean that all argument analysis is meaningless. The AI’s role is to articulate patterns explicitly, not to create them out of thin air.

[3] To be clear, the behaviours exposed by rhetorical analysis are bullying behaviours, like that practised by Bateman in these posts. But ChatGPT has more to say:

Here, Bateman implicitly concedes that behaviour patterns might be worth considering—but only if framed as a consequence of Chris’s use of AI, rather than as a property of the interactions themselves. This is an artificial distinction. The AI-generated responses are not inventing behaviours; they are describing rhetorical moves that can be identified regardless of their source. The difference is merely in presentation, not substance.

[4] To be clear, Lexie is also interested in rhetorical strategies used on email lists (it was the focus of her doctoral thesis). ChatGPT comments:

Bateman's dismissal of Lexie’s comment as merely "vibes" sidesteps the real issue: why do multiple readers, independently, find the analyses insightful? Instead of engaging with the content of those analyses, he asserts that they "would be anything but insightful, even if they were analyses." But this is assertion, not argument. He does not explain what makes them uninsightful—only that he believes they must be.

ChatGPT concludes:

Bateman’s response is an attempt to close down discussion by denying the legitimacy of AI-assisted analysis outright. But his objections ultimately reinforce the value of the analyses: they describe rhetorical strategies aimed at dismissing opposing viewpoints without engaging them. The patterns are not created by AI—they are observed through it, and the resistance to acknowledging them is itself a revealing pattern.