(Originally published March 25, 2025 at TechnoMythos. This is the second article in a five-part series. If you have not done so already, this will make more sense if you read Part 1 first.)
Part 1 traced the transformative shift from oral to literate culture in ancient Greece, showing how writing redefined memory, authority, and civic life. Drawing on examples from Socrates' distrust of writing to Plato's fusion of mythos and logos, it examined how literacy introduced new forms of abstraction and access to knowledge while disrupting established hierarchies embedded in oral performance. The transition altered not only how information was stored and transmitted but also the cultural ideals shaping truth, wisdom, and democratic participation.
This historical frame sets the stage for Part 2, which traces the tension between mythos and logos from ancient Greece to modern politics, showing how oral traditions valued adaptability, audience awareness, and embodied authority. It explains how concepts like prepon (fittingness) and kairos (timeliness) shaped communication, illustrated by examples from Homer, Milton, Lincoln, and Obama, and how oral performance relied on variation and audience engagement rather than fixed texts. The final sections contrast this human adaptability with AI slop, noting that AI lacks the physical presence that has historically shaped credibility, a gap made visible in examples like the KennedyNixon debates.
The Poet As Vessel For Divine Truth
This tension between mythos and logos was a conflict between a narrative worldview rooted in tradition and divine authority and a rational worldview that emphasized reason, analysis, and the secular. It compounded other tensions already present within Athenian society. In Homeric Greece, oral poets were more than entertainers; they were seers, teachers, religious and political figures. Homer and Hesiod were regarded as custodians of sacred knowledge, frequently invoking the Muses, the goddesses of inspiration, to speak through them.
This idea continued through the emergence of English literature. In the epic Paradise Lost (1667 CE), John Milton famously invokes the "Heavenly Muse" and positions himself as a Christian poet-prophet, claiming divine inspiration to justify his poem and echoing this ancient Homeric concept. This invocation is not metaphorical; it reflects a widespread belief that the poet serves as a vessel for divine truth. Epics carry not only myth but also law, medicine, morals, politics and civic instruction. Authority flows from verbal mastery.
Milton's invocation of the muse is a carryover from oral culture, when poetry was not fixed on a page but was dynamic and tailored to the audience, with names and places changed to address the listener's circumstances. If the mayor of a town was named Fido, the epic's hero might bear the same name and look like a Jack Russell Terrier. Additionally, the parks would be populated with fire hydrants. The Aristotelian concept of ethos generally refers to the credibility of a speaker as defined through choices in speech, but it also carries a communal context through its reliance on adaptability to audiences.
Audience Adaptation
In Book III of Rhetoric, Aristotle develops the terms prepon and Kairos as essential components of effective rhetoric. Prepon or what is fitting is the art of matching a speech's tone, content, and style to the audience and occasion. Kairos (sometimes translated as timeliness or exigence) refers to the right or critical moment for speaking, recognizing and seizing an opportunity that may not return. As Aristotle puts it, in Book_III of Rhetoric, the opportune moment involves the right timing and due measure, a decisive factor for successful persuasion.
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address exemplifies both principles in action. Delivered at the Soldiers' National Cemetery dedication in November 1863 (just four months after the decisive and costly battle there), Lincoln's brief, solemn remarks were tailor-made for that audience and moment. By framing the Civil War as a test of a nation conceived in Liberty, he invoked shared values (the prepon) in the most fitting form. His sense of timing or Kairos perfectly matched a public who was emotionally and politically primed for a message of healing and a call to unity and shared purpose. (An excellent treatment of the subject is Garry Wills' Lincoln at Gettysburg, 2006)
In The Singer of Tales (1960), Albert Lord studied epic singers in the Balkans to understand how poets like Homer composed and transmitted long narrative poems. The Balkan singers claimed they told their stories the same way each time, but voice recordings revealed significant variation in each telling. Lord argued that they were not memorizing a fixed text, as literate people might assume. Instead, they were working from a repertoire of stock phrases, formulaic expressions, tropes, turns of speech, rhythmic patterns and other narrative devices. They recombined and remixed things in real time to produce a new version of the story with each performance.
The practices of prepon and sensitivity to kairos persist today. In 2008, Barack Obama campaigned consistently on a core message of hope, change, and unity, but he modified portions of the speech to address specific concerns in each community. In Detroit, he emphasized job creation and support for the auto industry to connect with working-class voters. In rural Iowa, he shifted focus to agricultural policy and healthcare. When speaking in South Carolina to predominantly Black audiences, he incorporated themes of civil rights and systemic injustice. He adjusted specific details indexing local awareness while maintaining a consistent overall message.
Do AI Chatbots Exhibit prepon and kairos?
AI chatbots approximate some aspects of Aristotle's concepts of prepon and kairos by tailoring their language, tone, and content to match the user's context while also recognizing and responding at opportune moments. Prepon appears when a chatbot adjusts formality, depth, and examples to fit the user, for example, when switching from technical jargon for an expert to plain language for a layperson, or when translating text to a different language. Kairos emerges when the chatbot identifies a critical conversational moment by detecting a cue in the prompt. Prompts can sometimes evoke the user's emotional state, including sadness, anxiety, contempt, or joy. These responses depend on algorithms and cue detection rather than human intuition or a "sixth sense." How well chatbots perform this role remains uncertain, though the growth of AI companionship suggests that, for some, they are effective enough.
Chatbots and Rhetorical Technique
In oral traditions, there is no authoritative, fixed "text." Authority resides in the storyteller, not the text. Each telling is the text, making the act of storytelling itself a dynamic, creative process rather than the reproduction of a static, written work. Mnemonic devices of parallelism, rhythm, rhyme, the rule of threes and other devices aid in memory and retention for people who must communicate messages across long distances. When a live speaker or writer uses them, they are celebrated for skill. When they pop up in AI generated text, critics call it AI Slop: low-quality, clich-ridden, "mic-drop" mass produced. A curated (though not exclusive) list of frequent AI devices includes:
Parallel Sentence Structures ("It's not hype. It's being real. And you do that. ")
Ad copy sensibility (this earththis sky this England)
Exaggerated and sycophant responses (Your insight about purple hamsters is brilliant; "You're not alone.")
Strange similes and analogies (In life, sometimes you are the hero; other times you are just like the surface of the ocean)
Gratuitous use of boldface and outlines
Overuse of journo-speak (teleprompter-like tight short phrasing, heavily punctuated with gravitas)
Overuse of EM-dash (the pizza fresh, tasty, delicious fell onto the floor)
Repetition (giving you more information than you need and repeating stuff)
Empty cliches uttered with a flourish (You did the work. They ate it.)
Rule of 3s (see 7)
Embodied Rhetoric
In-person speaking is embodied A live speaker may use rhetorical devices, but not after every phrase. Through gesture, tone, stance, facial expression, and animation, the physical presence of the storyteller projects authoritativeness. People are generally more comfortable imitating other people than abstract principles.
A skilled speaker reads the audience and knows when to repeat a point figuratively and when to hold back, but a chatbot cannot do this without access to facial expressions or other embodied cues. At present, chatbots like ChatGPT lack bodies, though this may change if they are integrated into robotic forms, or at the very least read user's facial expressions through the camera on your device.
What makes them distinctive is their ability to simulate spontaneous and synchronous speech through what scholars of computer-mediated communication call the cues-reduced medium of electronic writing. It is increasingly difficult to know whether the reply to an email about an overdue medical bill comes from a human or a chatbot. Yet many couples who built digital intimacy through email and messaging in the late 1990s through the 2010s would affirm that text alone can be enough to establish deep trust.
It is also worth noting that since the first televised presidential debate in 1960 (between Kennedy and Nixon), Americans have learned to evaluate credibility based on tele-present signals. Television broadcasts images of the candidates faces, hands, and bodies across the country. Nixon, hunched over, sweated, grunted and generally and appeared anxious. A fly also landed on his face. Kennedy remained poised and confidently expressed his plans for the country. Kennedy knew how to master the medium, knew how to index tele-corporeal credibility . Nixon did not.
Takeaways
In oral culture, authority lived in the embodied poet who adapted stories to the audience; Homer and Hesiod modeled this sacred role, and Milton carried it forward with his Heavenly Muse, while epics mixed myth with civic instruction.
Effective persuasion turns on prepon and kairos: fitting the style to the audience and seizing the right moment, seen in Homeric recomposition, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and Obama's locally tuned campaign speeches.
Many devices praised in live speech become suspect in machine writing, fueling complaints about AI slop, and because chatbots lack bodies they cannot project the credibility cues that television made central from the KennedyNixon debates onward.
Looking Ahead
The trajectory from oral traditions to broadcast media highlights how each technological medium redefines the conditions of credibility and persuasion. Yet the shift does not stop with television or digital messaging. Just as the move from voice to text altered authority, and from print to screen reshaped political presence, the printing press itself once redirected social organization on a global scale. Part 3 turns to this pivotal development, showing how print reordered authority, bound distant peoples into imagined communities, and laid the groundwork for the rise of the modern nation-state.
Some Links
Albert Lord. The Singer of Tales.
Gary Wills. Lincoln at Gettysburg.