When government prints unlimited money, money loses value. AI prints unlimited persuasion. Every opinion or argument now has billions of dollars of reasoning behind it. When persuasion becomes infinite, persuasion becomes worthless.
Truth will disappear, fragmented into competing camps, and be gone
For thousands of years, power belonged to those who produced convincing arguments. AI makes convincing arguments abundant. A scarce resource becomes reality itself. We are entering the post-opinion age. It turns out that people usually never disagreed because of missing information. They disagreed because they had different values and judgements. AI exposes something that was mostly hidden before. That’s what our Sages say about our times:
מאי ״ותהי האמת נעדרת״? אמרי דבי רב: מלמד שנעשית עדרים עדרים והולכת לה
Why does the verse say, ‘Truth will vanish’? The school of Rav said: This teaches that truth becomes divided into flocks and flocks, and departs (Sanhedrin 97a). Truth will disappear, fragmented into competing camps, and be gone (Isaiah 59:15).
Authority based on AI technology eventually collapses, while true legitimacy comes from truth, תורה wisdom, and God—not from information scarcity. The new generation will be asking the question, who gave anyone the authority to decide?
R. Shalom Landau compares the modern explosion of artificial intelligence (e.g., LLMs) to the hyperinflation of currency. When a government can print unlimited money, each unit of currency loses value. AI, he argues, is now doing something analogous with persuasion: it can generate an effectively unlimited supply of polished arguments, explanations, evidence, and counterarguments for almost any position.
What once required education, reflection, research, evidence, and sustained reasoning over considerable time can now be produced almost instantaneously. The result is an inflation of argument. The mere existence of an impressive, apparently well-reasoned case no longer tells us very much.
The problem goes beyond an abundance of words. Generative AI can produce a compelling case for proposition P and, seconds later, an equally compelling case for not-P. It can supply plausible evidence, citations, analogies, and chains of reasoning on either side.
As such material becomes increasingly easy to manufacture—and increasingly difficult to distinguish from careful human scholarship and judgement—the evidential value of a polished argument is itself diminished. AI therefore does not make truth scarce; rather, it makes reliable access to truth, trustworthy evidence, sound judgment, and legitimate authority more difficult to identify.
The new generation will be asking the question: Who gave anyone the authority to decide?
The search for truth requires mastery of the relevant disciplines, hard work, and training the mind to use evidence and reason. AI lets people subcontract their thinking to a machine that effortlessly produces the appearance of knowledge.
First, AI can generate a polished case for almost any proposition—and its opposite.
Second, this erodes authority based on knowledge, evidence, and reason. No hard work or mastery of disciplines needed.
The young will suffer most from this malaise. They will then ask: Who gave anyone the authority to decide?
If truth and values are relative, and every position can be given an impressive AI-generated justification, why should your conclusion bind me? Why should your values rule? Without objective truth, values, and duties, a person is free to construct an imaginary world untethered from reality.
Articles on Generative AI
- LLMs: The Illusion of Thinking
- Frontier LLMs fail to maintain and Internal Model
- Model Collapse without Human Intelligence
- Questions Deserve Answers
