Cicero and AI

The five canons of rhetoric are beyond the grasp of genAI

AI Image generated with Claude Sonnet, based on the statue in the Palazzo di Giustizia in Rome.

What would the greatest orator of the ancient world make of a technology that produces fluent, well-structured prose in seconds?

Rhetoric, for Cicero, was not a trick or a decoration, and certainly not a simulacrum. It was the central mode of civic life.