Janie B. Cheaney: Truth and technology

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Wednesday, July 9th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast. WORLD Commentator Janie B. Cheaney says it's right to be concerned about artificial intelligence but some of the rhetoric is likely overstated.

JANIE B. CHEANEY: Since the debut of Open Source’s ChatGPT in 2023, Large Language Models have made themselves at home everywhere, perhaps most concerningly in education. A New Yorker headline blared last spring: “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way through College.” AI cheating is almost impossible to detect, since a Large Language Model can write plausible-sounding papers in any style, including that of a reasonably bright freshman. Even AI defenders have concerns. Are we merely outsourcing menial tasks, or outsourcing thought itself?

On May 15th, The Free Press hosted a formal debate on a similar question: “Will the truth survive Artificial Intelligence?” Barry Weiss moderated the debate:

WEISS: Artificial Intelligence is already completely transforming our world practitioners and experts alike have compared AI to the advent of electricity and of fire itself…

Arguing for the affirmative were Aravind Srinivas, CEO of the Large Language Model Perplexity, and Dr. Fei-Fei Li, regarded as “the godmother of AI” for her work in computer image recognition. In opposition were computer scientist Jaron Lanier and tech journalist Nicolas Carr.

Early in the evening 68% of the tech-friendly audience registered in the affirmative that truth would survive AI. Then the debate began.

Surprisingly, the core arguments on both sides were built not on costs vs. benefits, but on faith. Faith in humanity. The affirmative team argued that humans are truth-seekers; technology helps us search for answers. It’s a helper, not a master. Dr. Li concluded her opening remarks this way.

LI: There is no independent machine values. Machine values are human values. So what AI does to truth is up to us, not AI.

But Jaron Lanier countered that’s the problem. Computer science is currently obsessed with passing the Turing test—making machines that imitate humans so well we can’t tell the difference. He insisted “we’re fooling ourselves.”

LANIER: Why should we put money and time into trying to fool people? People are easy to fool?

The Silicon-Valley business model is built on third parties paying developers to capture the attention of users and fool them, too.

Nicholas Carr worried about AI’s effect on education. If we want to know what Large Language Models are doing to truth-seekers, look at your average college student feeding a detailed prompt to ChatGPT and cranking out a B+ essay. Synthesizing information is an automatic function, but it isn’t real knowledge. “By automating learning,” he insisted, “we lose learning.”

CARR: So you get this illusion of thinking you know something without going through the hard work of actually learning it…

Srinivas replied that he’d anticipated all the opposing arguments. How? By asking Perplexity. What’s more, since debate isn’t his strong suit, Perplexity had supplied effective responses for him.

SRINIVAS: This is actually my first ever proper debate so I have no position to be even sitting here… but with the help of AI, I can… you know?

A ripple of startled laughter brought him up short. Perhaps in that moment Srinivas realized he’d just proved the opposition’s point. And possibly lost the debate—by evening’s end, 23% of the audience had shifted to the negative.

Meanwhile, tech marches on. Biological science is all atwitter over another kind of Turing test: the possibility of “Bodyoids,” or human bodies grown from stem cells. They would have only enough brain function to keep their organs alive, as an “ethically sourced,” never-ending supply of spare parts.

If a thing can be done, it will be done, always with unintended consequences. Yet here’s a spoiler alert: Truth will survive Artificial Intelligence. So will love, because Truth and Love exist outside the human realm. If scary times are ahead, we can hold firmly to Truth, hope in Love, rest our faith outside ourselves, and allow no machine to think for us.

I’m Janie B. Cheaney.

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