In Amusing ourselves to death (1985), Neil Postman wrote:
“We are by now well into a second generation of children for whom television has been their first and most accessible teacher and, for many, their most reliable companion and friend. To put it plainly, television is the command center of the new epistemology. There is no audience so young that it is barred from television. There is no poverty so abject that it must forgo television. There is no education so exalted that it is not modified by television. And most important of all, there is no subject of public interest—politics, news, education, religion, science, sports—that does not find its way to television. Which means that all public understanding of these subjects is shaped by the biases of television.“
As more and more of our information (politics, news, education, religion, science, sports) is mediated through the lens of generative AI, will we come to the point where all public understanding of these subjects is shaped by the biases of AI? Will the companies running large language models be the command centres of the new epistemology?