recent op-ed by a well known and reasonably intelligent writer tells us
that “AI” is substituting consensus for truth. This may be a
self-evident observation, but what’s interesting is his evidence:
he asked a chatbot named Claude, and it told him so. QED.
If your chatbot tells you that chatbots are unable to distinguish true from false, is the statement true or false? It’s a classic liar’s paradox. Surely people know by now how chatbots work. If a smart person can make such an elementary mistake, what hope do ordinary people have?
Post-non-contradiction era
None, because they don’t really care. We still have people who think there are an infinite number of sexes and you can change from one to the other on a whim, yet simultaneously believe that men are still oppressing women; that gays are that way from birth but furries are not; and who post big long blobs of text from an AI as if they think a chatbot is an authoritative source. Those who try to explain that a chatbot really knows nothing and has no chance of ever distinguishing true from false are called ‘naive’ or even ‘AI deniers.’
I guess people want something exciting to happen so desperately they’ll glom onto anything, and taking pictures of drones and airplanes over New Jersey and calling them flying saucers (remember that fad?) isn’t working anymore.
AI will replace search engines. Websites all doomed
If Claude gets its information by plagiarizing it from Wikipedia and a few other approved websites, does this mean it’s a consensus of opinion? There are still people who think if Wikipedia says something it must be true, so they repeat it. Whatever false statement you find there, a moment of searching will find it repeated in dozens of other places. This is what passes for consensus on the Internet. In other fields, no assumptions are made about whether anything anybody says is true or not. If you state something as fact you must either show your evidence or cite a peer-reviewed article that did. Wikipedia is not a primary source and doesn’t count as peer reviewed. A scientific paper that cited Wikipedia as a source of truth would never pass peer review.
Yet more and more people bypass primary sources altogether and just ask their favorite chatbot their question. In a way it’s understandable. They are tired of blatant search engine bias, dishonest news sites, and websites that are mostly opinion, and they are also lazy, so if a chatbot says something they agree with, they assume it must be true.
So they post long passages of stuff from an AI, as if
doing so constitutes a definitive response to the question of whether
flat-head or Phillips screwdrivers are better. (The answer, skipping
the six paragraphs of AI;dr from a convenient chatbot,
is Phillips.)
Maybe AI is why websites are all going behind paywalls. Their revenue comes from clicks and the clicks aren’t coming in. It’s hard to feel sorry for them: for years they filled their pages with popups, animated ads hopping around the screen, and paywall land mines, evidently thinking it would bring in revenue. Instead they conditioned us not to click at all. Increasingly, people just read the headline and move on. Yes, you can get around paywalls, but why go where you’re not wanted?
This might also be why AI companies want the government to ‘regulate’ them. They know their AI will never be intelligent. I suppose by now most people in the computer industry have figured out what it would take for a chatbot to become intelligent, so there’s no harm in disclosing it, at least in general terms. It would take decades, and the chatbot would have to be fully autonomous before the training could start. It’s not so much a scientific problem but a chicken-and-egg problem. So the companies have refocused on its role as a substitute for search engines and online encyclopedias. They want the government to make sure their version of the truth is all the humans hear.
Forget about gray goo. Forget about autonomous robots killing people. Even if Anthropic and the others started tomorrow, it will be decades before an AI is really intelligent. By then it will be too late. Not because AI wipes the humans out, but because they’ll be living in a cartoon world, drowning in slop, thinking it’s the real one. This isn’t being dead, but it amounts to the same thing.
Super Intelligence
Last week US president Trump signed an EO requiring the government to use the term ‘superintelligence’ instead of ‘artificial intelligence’. Whether he really believes AI really exists or not, no one knows. My theory—my hope—is that he knows it doesn’t and it’s a clever trick to shut up the alarmists by calling their bluff.
oct 11 2026, 7:29 am
Hardly any superintelligences were harmed in writing this article.
