One benefit of the current infatuation with chatbots is that suddenly everyone believes in objective truth again.
Intelligent people complain that 'AI lied to them'. Since these people are the ones running the software, really they are lying to themselves. An algorithm cannot invent lies, although it can string together words which are false in combination. But no one says 'that might be true for you, but not for me'. They expect the chatbot to reject subjectivism, even before they consciously reject it themselves.
That may be difficult for a chatbot to do.
Today's large language models (LLMs) work by pattern-matching the user's input to a massive amount of pre-digested texts, and calculating what continuation the user likely wants the chatbot to produce. Thus both subjectivism and relativism are baked-in to the algorithm.
Subjectivism enters the equation because the only criteria directing the response are what the user probably wants to see (and what earns revenue for the programmer). There is no database of objective truths that the response must conform to (although there is a database of responses the chatbot is blocked from making), and there is no formal logic ensuring that the response is internally consistent (which would not always even be possible according to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems).
On a deeper level, LLMs are predicated on a relativist view of the world. All the training texts used to create their probabilistic models were written humans (or other chatbots), and there is a strong bias toward recently-written texts. The algorithm looks for patterns, frequencies, and associations, with the foremost criteria being numerical superiority. Thus it assumes the only standard of truth is what is most commonly said today. A different historical basis or a different language input would result in a different answer. This is the definition of relativism.
The next time you don't like a AI's response, don't throw away your phone. Consider leaving the physical world with its annoying objective truths, and submerging yourself in the digital world, where truth can be whatever they say. Oh wait - it's actually all zeros and ones down there.
