You're being programmed (by propaganda) to put your trust in so-called Artificial Intelligence, but why should you?
Having worked with Stable Diffusion, I can say without a doubt that the prompt and model are integral to getting the results I have in mind. The same thing can be said about other AI systems for generating content: human intelligences with pre-conceived concepts control the inputs in order to achieve desired outputs. If the output is not what was expected, the inputs are changed until the desired output is reached.
But this is not how AI is presented in media to the layperson. AI is often presented as though it objectively examined all possible sources of information and that the results are unbiased by human interference. Just remember, AI does not publish its own results to the public. There is always the human element of bias involved before the media-consuming public is exposed to the results, which unsurprisingly will reflect the bias of the publishers.
“Since modern man has no way of knowing what is going on beyond himself, since he cannot know everything, he would become lost in a world as vast and technically complex as ours, if he had really no one to guide him. He no longer relies on priests and philosophers, of course, but he must rely on people nevertheless, more than ever, as a matter of fact.” - Rene Girard, Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky
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"Experts are the ones who help mediate desires, who tell us what is worth wanting and what is not. ...
"We’re model addicts. Right now, the models we prefer are experts.
"That could be because we think of ourselves as more rational than ever—and we are, in many ways. Scientific progress has been swift in the past hundred years. However, we underestimate the strong role that mimesis* plays in the way we choose our experts.
"What is our basis for taking a source as authoritative? Is it because we checked all of the person’s credentials? Is it because the source was fact-checked by Peter Canby’s team at the New Yorker? Or is it because the person has the most followers on social media and a “Verified” sticker next to their name? Authority is more mimetic than we like to believe. The fastest way to become an expert is to convince a few of the right people to call you an expert.
"The cult of saints has become the cult of experts. That doesn’t mean we no longer rely on models to figure out what to want. It means that in a post-Enlightenment world, the preferred models are often those who seem most enlightened: the experts." - Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life
* Rene Girard used the word
mimesis (mi-
mee-sis) to mean sophisticated forms of imitation, from the Greek word
mimesthai (meaning “to imitate”)
"Although the differences in participants’ reliance on the two [AI chess] coaches were not large, that is no win for trustworthy AI. Quite the opposite! It shows the ability of untrustworthy AI to deceive many participants. ... Our results show evidence that participants reduced their reliance on the untrustworthy coach by the last game. However, by that time the damage would have already been done ..."
