On the one hand available sources are less and less reliable, as you pointed out. On the other, we're contending both with a) traditional filters appearing more and more biased (as you also highlight) and torn by huge conflicts of interest, hence producing their own inaccurate and misleading outcomes, and b) most people being less and less trained in serious reflection, rigorous critical thinking, and patient truth-seeking practices.
Both a) and b) point to us as being the major culprits, not the chatbots.
And even the sad state of accuracy displayed by the chatbots, as you rightly write, has its roots in human intentional or unintentional sloppiness; technology just feeds back into the mess and amplifies it.
It's a cliche to point out that this is the old problem discussed in Metal Gear Solid 2's ending, but that path has been decided all the same. The choice of unfiltered information where people select their own truths or AIs filtering the Internet to shape the world.
Though it seems like with our current AIs that we may have the worst of both worlds for accessible information. That is our AIs creating their (weird, sometimes biased truths) truths through often contradictory, biased, incomplete, and incoherent information, and those truths then gets slapped to the top of every search engine to the shape the consensus of the future. Neither steered nor unfiltered, history will be constructed by the accumulated errors of the past.
On the one hand available sources are less and less reliable, as you pointed out. On the other, we're contending both with a) traditional filters appearing more and more biased (as you also highlight) and torn by huge conflicts of interest, hence producing their own inaccurate and misleading outcomes, and b) most people being less and less trained in serious reflection, rigorous critical thinking, and patient truth-seeking practices.
Both a) and b) point to us as being the major culprits, not the chatbots.
And even the sad state of accuracy displayed by the chatbots, as you rightly write, has its roots in human intentional or unintentional sloppiness; technology just feeds back into the mess and amplifies it.
It's a cliche to point out that this is the old problem discussed in Metal Gear Solid 2's ending, but that path has been decided all the same. The choice of unfiltered information where people select their own truths or AIs filtering the Internet to shape the world.
Though it seems like with our current AIs that we may have the worst of both worlds for accessible information. That is our AIs creating their (weird, sometimes biased truths) truths through often contradictory, biased, incomplete, and incoherent information, and those truths then gets slapped to the top of every search engine to the shape the consensus of the future. Neither steered nor unfiltered, history will be constructed by the accumulated errors of the past.