In a recent interview, philosopher Carissa Véliz expressed that artificial intelligence “does not seek the truth”, explaining that AI is “a generator of statistical responses” and, as a consequence, generates “verisimilitude”, that is, something credible, acceptable and even realistic, but without consideration of the truth.
Véliz, Mexican-Spanish and professor at the Institute of AI Ethics at the University of Oxford, stated that AI “is not trained to think nor, therefore, to know its own limits of knowledge”, which causes deep concern because many people accept the information created by AI without worrying about whether it is true or false.
Obviously, in the current context, the creation of fake news and fake images has become so common that, rather than a problem, it is already considered something that is part of everyday life and that we hope will not happen to us when we browse the Internet or social networks, in the same way that we go out to drive despite traffic accidents.
But the uncritical acceptance of plausibility without questioning its truthfulness was not born in the 21st century, although new technologies have taken this attitude to a historically unprecedented level, causing a situation in which “everything is the same, nothing is better,” as the tango Cambalache said, emphasizing that “an ignoramus is the same as a great professor.”
It is true that in our time we always have a screen in front of us telling us what to think and, more importantly, what not to think. But, from a certain perspective, this attachment to the plausible, the illusory, the merely apparent is at least as old as our Western culture, since separating illusion from reality was one of the first tasks to which philosophy dedicated itself a little more than two and a half millennia ago.
Throughout history, there are many examples of the human inability to distinguish between fiction and reality and, simultaneously, to cling to fiction, leaving aside all truth. In fact, Heraclitus already lamented that human beings live “asleep,” without even becoming aware of their own lives.
Another example: when the Lumière brothers presented the short film “The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station” in 1895, some audience members, unaccustomed to seeing realistic moving images, panicked at the thought that the train on the screen would run them over in real life.
And we cannot forget October 30, 1938, when Orson Wells’ dramatization of The War of the Worlds caused, due to its verisimilitude, panic among listeners who really believed that Martians were invading New Jersey.
Ultimately, if AI prefers verisimilitude over truth, it is because AI is our own creation, reflecting very well our growing indifference to “truth,” to the point that we put it in quotation marks to relativize it as part of our hypernarcissism.