http://forums.shipoffools.com/index.php?p=/ Sun, 23 Aug 2026 23:23:15 +0000 en enlightenment — Ship of Fools http://forums.shipoffools.com/index.php?p=/discussion/6362/ai-going-backwards-from-the-enlightenment Fri, 11 Apr 2025 08:18:56 +0000 Purgatory Jengie Jon 6362@/index.php?p=/discussions
The popular notion is that the basic for the acceptance of knowledge changed with the enlightenment from building on tradition wisdom to that which looked for experiential verification. That is crude and I hope others will refine it but it will do for the OP.

AI works by using large language models, that means that it uses texts that already exist. It does not reason, but puts together facts as they appear in texts. It, however, has no external reference outside the texts. The model works by favouring what there are lots of.

The most pervasive forms of AI are those that have scraped the Internet and continue to scrape the internet. These can and are used to create new content for the Internet. The rate at which AI can produce "new" material far outweighs the rate at which humans can verify and produce new material. Inevitably the AI is going to be eventually producing the vast majority of material AI is trained on.

With our ever increasing reliance on AI we are de fact going to be entering an age where the process of knowledge acquistion is that of the pre-enlightenment.]]>