Philosopher AI - The truth isn’t a popularity contest

The truth isn’t a popularity contest

There are many definitions of truth. The most common is that of objective truth, where a statement is true if it corresponds to reality. A second proposed definition is that truth consists in what has been verified by the scientific method and published in peer-reviewed sources.

22 Nov 2020, 18:01

The first definition is not good enough for the very reason that reality does not always correspond to what we know. For example, a couple of centuries ago no one could have imagined black holes or quantum mechanics.

22 Nov 2020, 18:01

The second definition is also not good enough because it requires the scientific method, and it turns out that science has several limitations.

22 Nov 2020, 18:01

First, science cannot tell us what we should do. Science can only describe how things are. Second, science is prone to confirmation bias—a phenomenon in which humans tend to believe observations that support their beliefs and disregard evidence that does not.

22 Nov 2020, 18:01

Third, science is inherently subjective. A scientific observation is the result of an experiment or study conducted by a human being who could have subverted the results for any number of reasons—including, but not limited to: personal gain, political agenda and personal belief.

22 Nov 2020, 18:01

Finally, science cannot answer the fundamental question of why anything exists at all. Why is there something instead of nothing?

22 Nov 2020, 18:01

You are getting an AI to generate text on different topics.

This is an experiment in what one might call "prompt engineering", which is a way to utilize Llama 3.1 405b, a neural network trained by Meta.

Llama is a language model. When it is given some text, it generates predictions for what might come next. It is remarkably good at adapting to different contexts, as defined by a prompt (in this case, hidden), which sets the scene for what type of text will be generated.

Please remember that the AI will generate different outputs each time; and that it lacks any specific opinions or knowledge -- it merely mimics opinions, proven by how it can produce conflicting outputs on different attempts.

Feel free to share interesting outputs to /r/philosopherAI on Reddit.

by Murat Ayfer