Timothy Owen Desmond, Does AI Change Beliefs? |610|

Here is a summary of “skeptiko-610-Timothy-Owen-Desmond” with direct quotes:
Alex and Tod agree that AI has great potential for analyzing truth and challenging rigid belief systems, but it needs to be applied carefully.
AI systems like chatbots can be subjected to rigorous questioning to test their validity.
Tod: “Subjected to the most rigorous testing you can have, the most Skeptical people attack it from every direction. And if it can still withstand that storm, then people will have faith in it.”

Current corporate AI systems are biased, so an open-source system would be better for analysis.
Alex: “…So Elon Musk is building his LLM off of Twitter, off of X. So he has the advantage of all that, all that data that’s on X, but he’s also saddled by all that data that’s on X”

AI cannot currently lie or avoid questions like humans can when confronted.
Alex: “GPT never says, no,. Or when it does, you can catch it and you go, no, over here.”

Current systems are biased to exclude certain topics and people.
Alex: “And then I go over to Claude and I get the information, and then I keep coming back and it’s giving me the information and not giving me the information. And I go, you’re shadow banning.”

The goal should be to create an open-source AI focused on logic and reason to mediate discussions.
Tod: “Leave it up to the superhuman power of rational analysis that humans have created with this AI and that, that, that people can trust.”

This will be difficult with corporate and government resistance.
Alex: “But what’s gonna be holding us back are all the shenanigans that are going on to prevent this now, you know?”

They want to build a coalition to promote this idea, starting with philosophy groups.
The technology for an open-source AI mediator is possible and developing it is a moral imperative.
Tod: “I think AI makes his what seemed to me to be a pipe dream now, a moral imperative. ’cause we have the technology that can accelerate this process so much that this becomes so possible that it becomes morally requisite and not to do it would be a, a moral failure.”