Yuval Noah Harari

I think that there is a chance, it's not a certainty, but there is a chance because in the training of AI, there is a very high cost to disregarding truth.

So maybe to take a concrete example, let's say that you're Russia and you're trying to develop your own Russian AI and you give it access to enormous amount of data and information, otherwise you can't train your AI.

When somebody asks in Russia or outside Russia, is Russia a democracy?

Is there freedom of speech in Russia?

You want the AI to say, yes, of course, Russian constitution guarantees freedom of speech and Russia is a democracy.

This will mean that you need to explain to the AI why it needs to lie.

And how do you train an AI to lie only in certain cases and not in all cases?

That's a very difficult engineering challenge, which people did not have with the social media algorithms.

Exactly.

Like if you tell the AI, you are the government of Uganda, and you think that there are no gay people in Uganda, all the gay people in Uganda, they are brainwashed by Western propaganda, and you want the AI to give this answer, the AI will need to ignore a lot of scientific research on human sexuality and on what causes people to have this or that sexual orientation.

Now, how do you explain to the AI that you need to ignore articles appearing in scientific literature in this case, but you can trust them in other cases?

It's a very difficult engineering problem.

And if this is the top priority of the regime,

Like you are Saudi Arabia and you have billions and billions of dollars and you want to make sure that the AI will not criticize MBS, you can do that if that's your top priority.

But you can do that only with a few cases.

If you try to do it with too many things, you will get a very crappy AI.

Information does two very different things in the universe.

Sometimes you try to analyze information to discover something about the world.

Like you want to discover the laws of physics.

You want to understand what is the cause of some disease.