Robert Sparrow

of AI.

BS has become a technical term in philosophy following quite a famous book by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, which I think was entitled On BS.

That's obviously not the proper title, but for the sake of people's delicate ears, we'll use that expression.

Frankfurt talks about BS as a particular type of speech

that is uttered without regard for the truth.

He's distinguishing it here from ordinary speech, where we try to communicate with each other by saying true things, telling each other the truth.

You assume that I'm telling you the truth in general.

Of course, liars are also oriented towards the truth, but they're trying to deceive you.

They care about the truth, but they're trying to lead you away from the truth.

The BS artist is someone who doesn't care about the truth at all and is just trying to get you to react in the way they want you to react.

So they're often just trying to get a rise or troll you, or maybe they're just trying to entertain you, but they don't care about the truth at all.

And that turns out to be exactly what's going on with AI.

These machines don't care about the truth.

They can't care about anything at all.

They're often not connected to the world.

They're only connected to the internet, which is a different thing.

And they're trained to generate a certain reaction from the human brain.

the human user, typically a thumbs up reaction.

So these are deeply BS machines.

They don't care about the truth at all, which is why putting them at the heart of the modern university is such a terrible idea.