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Is AI Ramping Up Our Doubts About Everything?
Finding the limits to what we should question
I set out to write an essay about how using generative AI amplifies doubt as an ever-present state of mind, like Spinal Tap turning its amplifier dial all the way up to 11.
But I have a problem: I want to use my favorite AI application to help me research sources to develop my thesis, such as news articles, essays, book excerpts, and research papers.
Yet using AI to inform an essay about a downstream effect of AI makes me doubt my ability to write truthfully and accurately on the topic.
Thus proving my point: AI is driving doubting mindsets through the roof, including mine.
Like the classic ouroboros — the dragon or snake consuming its own tail in perpetuity — I am caught in a loop: questioning the validity of my project, the reliability of my sources, and whether there’s any empirical truth to be found out there, given the way things are headed.
To doubt is to question, and human beings have always done that. Socrates harbored doubts about the true meaning of piety, virtue, and other nice things. Centuries later, Descartes went further, doubting literally everything about what passed for reality around him.
