SeanWhat Should We Call the “Appeal to Chatbot” in Latin?
Douglas Creek where it flows through PKOLS Park, Saanich. Photo by Sean Manning, March 2026.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. 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 of 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 @[email protected] 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.1
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)
Answers in Reason
