“When we trust AI to tell us the truth, we are setting ourselves up to hand over something deeply human to a machine that does not have our best interests at heart.” — Steven Rosenbaum

Truth, Steven Rosenbaum cheerfully admits, is a shitty word. It has two ontological realities — one objective, the other subjective — but most of us use the word without much thought. Maybe it’s like pornography. It might be hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Or perhaps you know it, when you don’t see it.
His new book, The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality, with a foreword by Nobel laureate Maria Ressa, takes a cast of tech futurists — Douglas Rushkoff, Larry Lessig, Gary Marcus, Esther Dyson, David Chalmers — and asks what happens to truth in our AI age.
AI is, at its core, Rosenbaum’s tech mavens report, a spectacularly good liar. It tells us exactly what we want to hear. And even when it knows it’s wrong, he says, it lies. Rather than a bug, lying is a core, perhaps the core feature of AI.
I’m not so sure. Humans have always been spectacularly good liars too. Stories are a kind of untruth. Cinema is, by definition, an untruth. Television had ads. Every medium has been corrupted by commercial interest. But, for Rosenbaum, AI is different. Truth then has no future in our AI age. Except, of course, in books like The Future of Truth.

Five Takeaways
• AI Is a Spectacularly Good Liar. Tells you what you want to hear. Even when it’s wrong, it lies. Not a bug — the DNA.
• Truth Is a Shitty Word. Objective and subjective couldn’t be more different. Kellyanne Conway. Truth Social. We use the word casually.
• Courts Require Facts. AI Will Filter Justice. Lessig fears AI will process evidence with biases built in and reshape the court system.
• ChatGPT Said Sora Was Dangerous. Two-hour “interview” with the algorithm. Weeks later, OpenAI shut it down. They knew.
• Chalmers vs. Plato. AI stages a debate between the living and the dead. Chalmers found it entertaining. Plato didn’t comment.

About the Guest
Steven Rosenbaum is a journalist and co-founder of the Sustainable Media Center at NYU. The Future of Truth is out now.
References
The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality by Steven Rosenbaum

About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.
Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Chapters:
00:00:31 Introduction: Doctor Truth from the Upper West Side
00:02:25 Truth is a shitty word: objective vs. subjective
00:05:12 Kellyanne Conway and the moment it all came out from hiding
00:06:56 The Sustainable Media Center and the perennial problem
00:07:57 If we don’t care about truth, we might let it vanish
00:11:09 AI is a spectacularly good liar
00:13:09 Aren’t stories a kind of lying?
00:14:22 Trump called his social network Truth Social. That wasn’t an accident.
00:18:04 When you ask AI a question, it has no plans to tell you the truth
00:19:05 Larry Lessig: courts require facts, and AI will filter justice
00:21:19 Should we trust AI with truth? Yes — and put a period at the end
00:24:14 The 15-year-old who fell in love with a Character AI
00:29:12 The Sora deepfake: profoundly disturbing testimonials
00:33:29 Obama: truth is the cornerstone of democracy
00:36:05 ChatGPT told Rosenbaum that Sora was dangerous weeks before it was shut down
00:42:20 David Chalmers vs. Plato: a staged debate between the living and