The fable
His master, wanting to treat his friends, supposedly ordered him to buy at the market whatever was best. On the way, Aesop said to himself: “I’ll teach you to be precise in what you ask instead of leaving the choice to a slave.”
And he served the guests pig tongues at every course and in every sauce. As his master was about to punish him, Aesop explained that the tongue was the best of things for communicating, teaching, persuading, building society and praying to the gods. Since the guests approved his arguments, the master then ordered him to serve them the next day the worst things from the market.
And again, in every form, he served dishes of pig tongues. “Is it not with the tongue that one utters insults, lies, slander or blasphemy, that one triggers quarrels and wars?” Aesop explained to the guests and to his master, all of them stuffed with pig tongues.
The morals
Today, as 2,500 years ago, spoken words still provoke the worst and the best. But rain too can bring the worst and the best, and the sun, and mushrooms, and…
What the stuttering slave mainly wanted to teach his master was the art of giving orders. When an order is poorly formulated, the executor performs the task poorly and risks punishment.
So it is with the entire expanding universe of AI: the question shapes the answer. Because it is artificial, this intelligence does not spare us from thinking accurately. For natural intelligence requires that:
“What is well conceived is clearly stated, And the words to say it come easily.”
as Nicolas Boileau‑Despréaux already declared in 1674 in his Art poétique…
But this apologue says something else as well, expressed by a guest at the end of the Greek text: “If you’re not careful, the spirit of this Aesop will drive you mad.” The old paradox of the master becoming the slave of his slave’s services!
To which Aesop replies: “You seem to me to be a man of bad faith, wanting to anger the master against his servant,” adding another layer to this multi‑drawer moral: is it bad faith to issue a warning? And is making someone feel guilty for criticizing not also bad faith?
Is the ultimate lesson that everything is both good and bad, that everything is equivalent, that good and evil are relative? That is quite another story.
Whatever the case, the anecdote of this deformed old Greek who may never have existed still sheds light on our relationship with an AI chat: conversing with the best and the worst of things, not becoming the slave of the servant, asking the right question, avoiding the repetition of similar dishes, seeing where good and bad, true and false intertwine, and remaining free in one’s thoughts, like the subtle Aesop.
Michel Seyrat
