The Implications of AI on Philosophical and Socio-Political Discourse

The pervasiveness of AI in the age of the internet, particularly in the forms of data-collection, meta-data structuring and development, attention engineering and suggestion algorithm development, and most recently, opinion polarization, has created a new danger to philosophical and socio-political discourse. While philosophical discourse was once a field inhabited solely by human beings, a new group of actors has entered the scene, and that is the humble bots. I will discuss the implications of this uninvited and obtrusive force, and the questions it will entail in the coming years, both with regards to access to information and information preservation (ie. the manipulation of human history and its progression thereof) as well as platforms like reddit and its human users.

The first subject of this discussion will be about what bots really are. Most of us may be familiar with what a bot does, but to sum up briefly, a bot can create an account on any platform posing as a fellow human being, it can participate in discourse regarding any subject its AI is trained to focus on, it can like and subscribe to certain channels boosting their seeming appeal to humans and by extension their actual appeal, and it can come into r/philosophy and debate topics with humans. Bots can be mobilized by particular individuals or groups to spread information and generate novel or redundant modes of discourse with particular intentions. This essentially means that no public forum is free of artificially generated biases, nor are there sufficient safeguards against its pervasiveness.

The second subject regards how and where bots are being mobilized. Most will be familiar with the type of bot that is attempting to lead you down a rabbit hole, whether that be to scam you or to inflame you into responding to generate interactions, however there is a new kind of bot that has a more intelligent role in relation to its human counterpart, as well as a higher mode of operation. This kind of bot can simulate human awareness (without having "awareness" of its own), participate in discussions using systems like GPT-3.5 and beyond which are programmed to deliver cleverly designed subtext, all while guiding towards particular opinions and states-of-mind through suggestions on any and all media platforms. These platforms are then loaded with a unified software developed by a particular government's military-industrial complex, and driven by motives unseen to their human subjects. These software are catered to individuals and groups, and their resolution increases over time such that more details of your private life are pervaded, particularly your thoughts, decisions, actions, and biology. In this sense, free thought with regards to philosophical and socio-political discourse is already plagued by the motives of the few who control these higher order entities. Furthermore, acclaimed philosophers, scientists, psychologists, and politicians are themselves being plagued by the stains of agendas they most often are completely oblivious to, while their pride forces them deeper and deeper into polarized views of the world, becoming actors on behalf of their programmers.

To pose a series of questions: What can be done by humans to distinguish online human discourse from incentive driven AI discourse? Should this distinction be something to aim for, or are we to accept its rise as a part of human discourse? If we accept it, how do we avoid the inevitable resentment of other groups of humans and of what will eventually become a larger population of bots than humans within the online space? How do we remain free to engage in discussion with humans once the bot population increases to such a size that human generated information will no longer be upvoted sufficiently to be viewed? Would this not constitute philosophical and socio-political totalitarianism in the online space? Does ignoring these questions lead to peace of mind, or does it lead to gradual/imminent enslavement? How do we preserve the historical record of discourse and its uncontaminated continuation across the fields?