I agree that the likely future of this is that everyone gets their own "reality". After all, whats the harm in letting a little girl from harlem believe someone like her could have been a medieval european monarch? It's beneficial to make people feel good about themselves and history is just dead people right?
I think this argument actually resonates with a lot of people--if the truth makes people feel bad or excluded or marginalized, why not just change the truth? You see it in lots of almost trivial ways nowadays, things so small that it feels ridiculous to even mention. Some examples: Half the medieval warriors that come with a castle lego set nowadays are female. Viking legos too. And remember when they were trying to tell us Abraham Lincoln was gay?
> After all, whats the harm in letting a little girl from harlem believe someone like her could have been a medieval european monarch? It's beneficial to make people feel good about themselves and history is just dead people right?
The harm is that it's not true. When more and more people believe things that are fundamentally not true about the world, about history, we get further from the ability to move civilization forward in positive directions. History isn't just dead people, it's a record, to the best of our ability, of what actually happened to get us here. Any sort of improvement process always starts from where you are, but if you don't know where you are and the context that got you there, you can't improve.
There's definitely a lot more people these days that completely reject the very concept of objective truth and reality, and they are perfectly happy for us to spread that farther within society, but those concepts aren't just an idea, they're something tangible. The truth actually matters, it's foundational to being able to do things like science and engineering. Why many of us got into computers in the first place is because we felt comfort in the fact computers couldn't lie and could only do what they were told to do, if the computer did something unexpected it was because you had made a mistake, not because the system was non-rational or non-deterministic. LLMs, hallucinations, and filter bubbles create a world in which nobody has the comfort of truth anymore, we're all just suffering through some sort of delusion, mass or individual.
> I think this argument actually resonates with a lot of people--if the truth makes people feel bad or excluded or marginalized, why not just change the truth?
This is the essence of the so-called noble lie. Much has been said about it since the Greeks, but in short, the noble lie deprives individuals of meaningful agency to direct their lives. It traps them into believing myths that result in their subjugation today, and some potential irreversible harm in the future regardless of the perceived short-term benefits that come from self-delusion. That is unless humanity as a whole begins living in indestructible underground pods as drug-addled vegetables.
If we ignore this scenario, and assume people will still interact with each other on some level, the results won't be one where people a long lasting voluntary association on the basis of live and let live. After all, when has that ever happened? Instead, the outcome is another battlefront for competing solipsisms. It's not enough to be as equally wrong as everyone else. Consciously or unconsciously, one comes to uphold a contradiction: you must be the "right" kind of wrong to avoid becoming a scapegoat or target.
The critical examination and acceptance of reality are important learned skills. They allows us to dispel such irrationalities. A mere absence of overt conflict between others or between oneself and the laws of nature is not a defense against harm, perceived or real.
Truth isn't what breeds conflict, as the truth doesn't change. Conflict is the negative reaction to an observation, thought, or sensation. It's a product of the human mind. And human beings as a collective are fickle animals.
Alternatively, why should toys make the person playing with it feel bad? Toys are intentionally escapist, it’s the point? Feels like a weird argument.
I think the better comparison is what the other commenters brought up - maps. These are tools, and we turn to them for a purpose. And yet even geography is not ahem set in stone. We need our tools to be useful to the user, and that means different things to different people. There’s dispute in all facts. Just ask the people living in Taiwan, or Gaza or Ukraine…
That one AI calls it taiwan and another calls it china's extra cool eastern china island doesn't seem very interesting to me. There have always been and always will be land disputes. What is more interesting is, suppose you trained an AI with the objective of minimizing "harm" (in the sense of hurting people's feelings that everyone uses now) rather than minimizing error with the truth?
Is it harmful to tell the user that Taiwan is the independent nation of Taiwan? It’s “not true” (depending on who you ask) and could “hurt the feelings” of many people. I bet if you went to mainland china and went to Taipei and talked about this, you could offend people with your version of “minimizing error”. There is no way to please both parties at once, one side will get hurt, and there is no “truth”.
That “little girl from Harlem” will never be a mid-evil princess, but neither will literally anyone alive today, because princesses and castles are a thing of the past. Seems like an example meant to straw man a cultural-war viewpoint. That little girl may factually become a doctor. Should the AI show pictures of (grown up versions of) little black girls from Harlem when asked to generate a picture of a doctor?
The culture war outrage over contrived examples in the name of “maximal truth” always misses that the attempts to showcase minorities and counter bias is adding truth to the output. Just because a bias is being artificially suppressed doesn’t mean that the bias was truthful. Sometimes it makes mistakes, but that would still be true if no “corrective” action was applied.
At a certain point we do need to go back into the basics of why we are having discussion in the first place.
Taiwan de jure might be ambiguous, but de facto it more or less is a country. If you were working out a trade deal, booking a holiday, immigrating, etc, if you actually needed to know then treating Taiwan as part of China would run into so many inconsistencies it would be impossible to function.
I think this argument actually resonates with a lot of people--if the truth makes people feel bad or excluded or marginalized, why not just change the truth? You see it in lots of almost trivial ways nowadays, things so small that it feels ridiculous to even mention. Some examples: Half the medieval warriors that come with a castle lego set nowadays are female. Viking legos too. And remember when they were trying to tell us Abraham Lincoln was gay?