AI is bullshit

Which is why it’s so important

AI is a bullshitter.

It doesn’t lie, necessarily, but it does bullshit.

What’s the difference?

As Harry Frankfurt puts it in his famous essay On Bullshit:

The liar is someone who deliberately promulgates a falsehood. The bullshitter is someone who does not care whether what he says is true or false.

AI does not care whether what is says is true or false, because it lacks meaning. This is ironic, as AI is essentially a meaning machine - it traverses vector space to be able to probabilistically tell whether a word like ‘cool’ refers to someones demeanour or the temperature of an object by reference to the surrounding context.

For now, it is humans alone that have vision, have values, that allow them to transcend above the merely probable (the world of bullshit) and move into realm of the possible (the world of wonders).

I’m listening to the biography of Elon Musk at the moment, and for all the deep flaws he has as an individual, he is undoubtedly an example of this. His vision to make humans a multi-planetary species has transformed industries and led to huge technological change on a scale that for all accounts should be ‘impossible’ (indeed, many believed exactly that throughout his journey, and still do). Whether or not the vision of interplanetary travel is achieved is beside the point - the vision itself was enough to create outcomes that could never have been predicted by an LLM.

The thing is, a lot of what we do and need to navigate in this world is bullshit. It’s not good or bad, it just exists and needs to be dealt with.

I don’t relish posting on LinkedIn, but I have ideas I want to spread and it’s still a valuable tool for professional connection: so I post on LinkedIn. I use AI to automate some of that process, which makes it much more palatable. I don’t want to deal with the bullshit of spending lots of time on the platform, but I do want to pursue my vision of sharing my ideas and expanding my business.

This is true for huge swathes of the work we do. Updating spreadsheets. Adding unit tests. Creating presentations. This is all bullshit, but it’s still important in the service of managing resources responsibly, creating value, and forging alignment.

AI excels at dealing with bullshit, which frees us up to focus on what matters: human connection, human meaning, and human flourishing.

AI is bullshit. And I for one am grateful for it.