Sune Selsbæk-Reitz is a fellow Danish tech philosopher and author of the new book “Promptism: Fluent Machines, Forgotten Questions, and the Fight for Meaning in the Age of AI” which wrestles with questions of how generative AI systems change our relationship with knowledge.
When we interact with chatbots, we expect fluency and well-presented answers with little to no room for interpretation and ambiguity. Yet, reality is rarely so simple and learning and progress tend to reside in confusion, failed attempts, friction and doubt, not in confident-sounding answers to hard problems.
Selsbæk-Reitz describes in Promptism:
“Every era invents the lie it most wants to believe. For ours, it’s the lie that clarity equals truth. I would argue that we’ve grown allergic to complication. All we want is our politics to be simple, our science to be certain, and our morality to be frictionless. Large language models feed that appetite with surgical precision and shape the answers we accept.”
According to Selsbæk-Reitz, it’s vital that we adopt pauses for uninterrupted thinking in daily life, refuse to accept readily available answers as a default, seek out friends we disagree with, and learn to sit with uncomfortable doubt and challenging questions without reaching for the nearest resolution.
The problem of AI’s presentation of a false, but convenient reality is counterintuitive and non-obvious. Frankly, I thought this was a difficult conversation to have, but an important one to open up.
Links:
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