Many people are out here on these streets are making the extraordinary claim that adding glorified chatbots (literal "automated bullshit generators" using the philosophical definition of bullshit *) to every random product, app, website, object, organisation, process, and more will help people better understand the world, know things, and therefore take efficient and effective actions.
While we can assume there is a heavy dose of marketing insincerity and follow-the-crowd-leadership behind most of these claims, like with any grifter-driven hype cycle, at least some people do sincerely seem to believe glorified chatbots are really going to help their victims to access knowledge.
For this last group, I have to wonder if people are aware of and have considered the philosophical definition of what "knowledge" is? Knowledge is a justified true belief, with all three elements being crucial. [🧵 1/2]
Philosopher Harry Frankfurt, in his classic text On Bullshit, explains that the bullshitter “does not reject the authority of truth, as the liar does […] He pays no attention to it at all.”
With a chatbot, if you are credulous enough, you can certainly create beliefs based on the text they vomit up.
If you are lucky, the statements and beliefs you take from your chatbot may even be true - they are true at least some of the time, maybe even slightly more than 50% of the time depending on which self-serving metric is used. Not nearly enough of the time for my comfort, but others seem to not care as much about the built-in error / randomness rate.
What you can never have from a chatbot is the "justified" part - a "GenAI" chatbot is randomly mixing up a large (but still very limited) set of inputs of dubious provenance into a structure that looks enough like the shape of language (or art or whatever output type you've chosen) to fool enough human to make money for the owner.
This process by definition removes any connection to the (stolen) sources, and thus the justifications and evidences, for whether we can consider the "knowledge" generated as "true", and thus whether it makes sense to have a belief.
This short video is a good intro to this philosophy 101 concept that the whole tech industry seems to be obtusely 🙊🙉🙈 pretending doesn't matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXhJ3hHK9hQ
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