What Should We Call the “Appeal to Chatbot” in Latin?
The Latin language is always expanding. Sometimes this is easy, as when it picked up gladius “sword” from Celtic and sclopetum “arquebus, smoothbore gun” from Italian. Other times it is hard and you have to invent a new word or phrase. Sometimes you even think for a long time and decide that crisare “to shake one’s hips” is good enough substitute for to twerk. Trying to settle an argument by pulling out a dictionary is an argumentum ad dictionarium.1 What should we call trying to settle an argument by quoting a chatbot?
Slop (“fodder for a pig, output from a chatbot”) is clearly pabulum in Latin (Columnella de re rustica 7.9.7 Internet archive). Its not so clear what a Latinate take on words like bot, generative AI, or large language model would be. The obnoxious thing about these programs is that they emit vast amounts of stuff which sometimes seems plausible but should never be trusted. It does not matter how they work when you have to clean up after them. So after some tooing and froing I decided on fountain of lies or deceitful fountain. One good name would be fons mendacitatis. However, Greyor @greyor@goblin.technology pointed out that Plautus has the adjective falsidicum “false-speaking.” The ancients did not have a sophisticated language to talk about lies, fiction, bullshit, and shared games, so I will chose the word that delights me and not worry about parsing different kinds of untrustworthy untruths.2
So a LLM chatbot is a fons falsidicus, and the “appeal to chatbot” is an argumentum ad fontem falsidicum. Botanists might have to wait for someone with enough Latin to name a new species, but bookandswordblog readers get this one straight away!
There are some sad things I could say about why some people feel the need to ask chatbots what is true, and about how the playful language games of New England hacker culture turned into the magical thinking and purposeless self-perfection of Bay Area tech culture (already skewered by Plutarch, Life of Pyrrhus, 14.2-8). But the world does not need more sadness and it is a beautiful spring day in Victoria.
The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction is a great place to explore how robot became bot “diminutive name for a robot” then “automated computer program.” I don’t know of a good successor to the Jargon File since Eric S. Raymond was not a good steward.
PS. Some people call attacking the source of the information an argumentum ad fontem. If you use that, and you want to be clear to young people without Latin who might confuse fons “source of information” and fons “fountain of lies”, you could all the appeal to chatbot an argumentum ad automaton. Greek words were popular in working Latin although pagan writers avoided them in literature. But I think it important that every language have spicy words for the bad and malevolent technology which is American-style generative AI.
(scheduled 23 March 2026)
- Dictionarium comes from our friend John of Garland, nam hic liber in se multos dictiones habet. ↩︎
- I read an article on true, false, and pseudo-true statements for the Cyrus’ Paradise conference in 2012, but lost access to my notes when a ‘free’ service ran out of money. I will edit this post if I ever find the reference again. Memento mori! And never ever trust a ‘free’ service hosted on someone else’s computer. ↩︎
Prior to Grok getting paywalled by Elon (due to Twitter users constantly invoking it to create illegal porn), summoning Grok was an extremely common tactic among the ever-toxic izzat-fueled history slapfights you find among anonymous South Asian Twitter users. I’m assuming the same happens among Balkan users, East Africans, East Asians, etc. in their own toxic Twitter slapfights (which are sometimes accompanied by ridiculous Wojak memes and der Sun Wheel). Anyways, this happened to me once too, I can confirm it’s quite annoying:
Me: (paraphrasing) “Here’s verse 95 from Zafarnama which clearly shows the Gurus were against idolatry”
Someone else: (also paraphrasing) “Hurr durr the idolatry reference is metaphor, anyways here’s this tale about the Guru sending 5 devotees to Varanasi, wonder why???”
I try rebutting all that (I can tell you none of that is true), then he proceeds to summon Grok which happens to “corroborate” his story. No references, no citations, just so happens to repeat what he said but with an air of authority. What do you even do in this situation? Even if I decided to correct him again, he would just summon it again and say “see, you’re wrong!”
Glad that era of Twitter is finally over. Slapfighters are now forced to use their mental faculties in debates, which is how it should be. Sadly, more and more people not only completely outsource their brain to chatbots in general, but proudly advocate for it.
In the old days creationists and the Reality-Based Community or Star Wars fans and Star Trek fans used to have website of standard arguments and counter-arguments, but by learning to make one side’s arguments in your own words, you actually learned something. Unfortunately, if no reporter actually say through the city council meeting and heard and saw what happened, no amount of asking computer what happened will help. I think the same is true if one side cites a religious text and says it is authentic and the other side says it is forged.
Toronto media feels fake to me, and I have been thinking a lot about how on the open web and early in the smartphone age, I let nerdy Americans decide who and what I heard about and paid attention to. There are many horrible people and worthy causes in Canada and Austria and India and Kenya, why should I give one country so much of my attention?