A long time ago at an elegant wedding party in the English countryside, I found myself standing among a group of Bohemians talking euphorically. The occasion was euphoric enough, but we were also high as kites on unusually pure cocaine.
My consciousness stepped aside for a moment, and I realised everyone of us was speaking enthusiastically, but no one was actually listening to a word anyone else had to say – only our own amplified thoughts.
You get where this is going? I was reminded of this scenario after getting into a heated discussion with the in-laws recently, over the subject of infant vaccines. The discussion continued over several days on the family chat group. My mother in-law left the group in a sulk, my father in-law continued with ChatGPT on his side, and I with Claude. It was the battle of the AI’s. We were each able to amplify our own predetermined argument with the fathomless reach of the LLM.
The resulting inquiry developed into something even more disconcerting: The Capture of Truth: intothedialectic.com/the-capture-of-truth/ which looks at the profound challenges we face in determining legitimacy.
According to Robert Anton Wilson, What the thinker thinks, the prover proves. That is, given a complex enough scenario, such as humanity at large say, most any belief can be proven with selectively available evidence drawn up from the multi-contextual informational background of humanity run amok for millennia.
Should LLM’s be put into the hands of such a species is really the question. Too late – the cat’s out the bag.
AI is of course a radical nascent tool which can, is and will be used and abused like any other. It can leverage an argument more effectively than cocaine in case anyone is in fact listening. It can help develop complex structured thought processes and previously unimaginable projects for good or evil, collectively or individually. It can also entirely replace one’s own creative capacity and autonomy of thought.
The same could arguably be said about the printing press, TV and Instagram. Each require discernment in order to be useful at all – like all things in this world. It only becomes increasingly important to be mindful and not get suckered in by the sycophancy and over confidence of current AI programming, not to mention the hegemonic colonialist epistemology of the culture that trained the mimetic beast!
Personally, I shall be training my own AI to be an irascible, indigenous-minded wisdom keeper.
