AI and the Subjective Crisis of Knowledge

Abstract

Religious ethicists have observed how the threat of AI-generated texts, images, and videos accentuates the problems of a “post-truth” world already linked to algorithms that foster misinformation and echo chambers. There is also a less discussed problem occurring in science as it becomes increasingly dependent on AI's analytic techniques, shifting toward statistical knowledge and probabilistic prediction, which is creating a reproducibility crisis. Neither experts nor laypeople can fully trust the seeming facts they confront, driving a deeper, subjective crisis of knowledge. This epistemological instability creates ethical problems, since a person's relationship to knowledge is an essential component to the constitution of subjectivity. Many philosophers and theologians have historically embraced practices of the self that can aid in the proper formation of the subject's relationship to knowledge. By turning to the practices of the self that philosophers and theologians have used to respond to prior crises of the subject, this essay suggests practices by which people might be able to restore their judgment.