The ancient Greeks had a word for an object that is a remedy in one hand and poison in the other, depending on how it’s administered: pharmakon. Socrates used it in Plato’s Phaedrus, more than two millennia before Claude, Perplexity, or the AI-detection tool Pangram existed, to describe writing itself.
Plato recounts an Egyptian myth in which the god Theuth presents writing to King Thamus as a pharmakon — an “elixir,” or remedy, for memory (mnēmē) and wisdom (sophia). Thamus is not persuaded. Writing, he answers, will instead produce forgetfulness: by relying on external marks, people will neglect their own memory. It is, he says, a pharmakon not of mnēmē but of hypomnēsis — not memory itself, but only an aid to recollection — and one that may furnish the appearance of wisdom without genuine understanding.
