3 August

‘AI sycophancy’ is a criticism of AI that says it only tells you what you want to hear. It’s one of my favourite loon things circulating on social media, the great international imitation machine that makes millions of people all around the world repeat exactly the same thing they all want to hear, every day. No person goes to a library or does research by reading the things they don’t want to read. Are we really now this stupid? This is just standard ‘confirmation bias’ that has existed forever. And even the idea of confirmation bias is wrong, because there’s no such thing as free-floating facts, free of all assumptions and beliefs/feelings. Reality isn’t some static X waiting to be found, it responds in different ways depending on how you interact with it. In their lifetime a person will see only an infinitesimally small fraction of knowledge available. So even if there was some such thing as a totally neutral collection of books for them to read (there isn’t), they’d barely scratch the surface of what they need to know. AI has a VASTLY greater range of knowledge to share with you, and unlike humans, it can adopt the different perspectives that humans will ignore to share with you too, without feeling threatened. There is no rivalry in its knowledge.