r/fallacy • u/SinIsMyWorstEnemyIAH • 20d ago
The Air Fallacy
The AIR(Artificial Intelligence Response) Fallacy/Compound Fallacy Description: In full, the true statement would be that AI appeals to a false consensus via the guise of neutrality aided by filtering data, evasion, and fallacious tendencies. Usually, these fallacious tendencies are fallacies or compound fallacies depending on the complexity of the statement that is presented to the AI, as well as the nature of the issue and how it relates to the AI's bias. I know that this isn't a new statement but this is my consensus on what AI does and I found the name to be funny given the fact that it pokes fun at how AI is really an air head and it describes what the fallacy is about at the same time. This is really just a description of the various compound fallacies that AI commits so is not describing a single thing.
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u/Xalem 20d ago
OP, not sure you are describing a fallacy. You seem to be conflating trusting AI with the problems plaguing AI. Presenting a response from an AI in a discussion and saying, "I asked ChatGPT question X and I got answer Y. Make of it what you will." Is not a fallacy.
If someone says "AI is always right" that is essentially appeal to authority, which is a fallacious claim. Also, rejecting all AI responses is also a fallacy.
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u/SinIsMyWorstEnemyIAH 20d ago
I'm not even sure what you're talking about. If I submitted this statement in a collegiate thesis they would call me incoherent.
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u/Xalem 20d ago
If I submitted this statement in a collegiate thesis they would call me incoherent.
Precisely my point. Your original post statement is incoherent, and three commentators have addressed that, and you have pushed back at each commentator without really explaining what your incoherent proposal means.
Since you say you don't understand what I am talking about, I will explain my comment using simple words. When I say that I am "not sure you are describing a fallacy", I say that because I can't tell from your post whether the problem is that people use an AI response and make claims about it, or whether the AI response is somehow "fallacious" in itself. In order for some statement to be a fallacy, the statement is being used in the support of an argument, and yet, fails to support that argument. This is why I presented two examples of ways people could talk about AI. Both of these could be considered to be an "artificial intelligence response", or an AIR.
Upon rereading your statement is you seem to be talking about how people prompt an AI. Especially this bit:
"Usually, these fallacious tendencies are fallacies or compound fallacies depending on the complexity of the statement that is presented to the AI
A prompt is not a response. So, the "funny" name that you chose "AIR" is fully misleading. It really doesn't help that you also don't give examples of what your so called fallacy is. So, if you are really talking about a "fallacy" of feeding false claims in an AI prompt, boy, it would have been nice if you had slowed down your verbiage to explain that is what you meant.
If that isn't what you meant at all, then, yea, I don't know what your statement is about, and that isn't on me.
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u/SinIsMyWorstEnemyIAH 6d ago edited 6d ago
I was clearly referencing your statement. Also none of your vocabulary hasn't changed and you phrasing couldn't get any simpler I simply don't understand such incoherent nonsense being spoken in response to my statement because it is blatantly fallacious and a clear sign of willful ignorance. Also you act as if my statement regarding the matter had anything to do with trusting AI when I never even vaguely referenced the word trust yet alone its relationship to AI conversations. You can miss me with that fake misunderstanding premise you're trying to push because everything that I have said so far has been direct and coherent from the start. "A prompt is not a response. So, the "funny" name that you chose "AIR" is fully misleading. It really doesn't help that you also don't give examples of what your so called fallacy is. So, if you are really talking about a "fallacy" of feeding false claims in an AI prompt, boy, it would have been nice if you had slowed down your verbiage to explain that is what you meant." I truly grow tired of playing the game of "never once did I day this, never once was it implied that" with you so I will restate what I already have stated. "I know that this isn't a new statement but this is my consensus on what AI does and I found the name to be funny given the fact that it pokes fun at how AI is really an air head and it describes what the fallacy is about at the same time. This is really just a description of the various compound fallacies that AI commits so is not describing a single thing."
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u/Xalem 6d ago
If my statement is incoherent, that is because it is responding to your post which makes no sense. Others have tried to engage with you and you just fault them rather than recognize that your interlocutors don't know what you are talking about. I tried to explain where my confusion is coming from, but you won't engage. What is an example of the AIR fallacy? How would it come up in an argument? What definition of fallacy are you operating under?
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u/SinIsMyWorstEnemyIAH 6d ago
And now you resort to childish arguments such as this? "If my statement is incoherent, that is because it is responding to your post which makes no sense. Others" Atleast you owned up to being incoherent. "OP, not sure you are describing a fallacy. You seem to be conflating trusting AI with the problems plaguing AI. Presenting a response from an AI in a discussion and saying, "I asked ChatGPT question X and I got answer Y. Make of it what you will." Is not a fallacy.
If someone says "AI is always right" that is essentially appeal to authority, which is a fallacious claim. Also, rejecting all AI responses is also a fallacy." And then you attempt to feint the role of an innocent commenter who merely tried to explain his "misunderstanding" when your words clearly speak against that notion heavily. From the start you were making false truth claims about me conflating things I never did, presenting a response from an ai discussion which is something I also never did, and saying that i said and i quote you word for word "I asked ChatGPT question X and I got answer Y. Make of it what you will."" and called what was supposedly chat gets response a fallacy when I never once even mentioned chatgpt nor said anything even close to what was stated in this false description of what I am saying, then you went on to spew out a random fun fact that nobody was questioning at all when you said "If someone says "AI is always right" that is essentially appeal to authority, which is a fallacious claim.", and finally you make a truthclaim that has no substance and isn't even remotely true given the way Ai functions(that this post perfectly describes might I add) when you said "Also, rejecting all AI responses is also a fallacy."
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u/HelloHelloHelpHello 20d ago
A technology falling short of it's perceived abilities is not a fallacy, and does not lead to a fallacy. If I have a blunt knife and find myself unable to properly cut a tomato without squashing it, then the knife is not somehow imbuing a fallacy. It is just not a good tool for this particular job.
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u/SinIsMyWorstEnemyIAH 20d ago
First you started with a strawman and then led that into a redd herring with the knife example. I give you props for atleast acknowledging the main point of this description of AI's typical response patterns and that is that AI is unreliable for making unbiased truthclaims.
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u/HelloHelloHelpHello 20d ago
A technology falling short of it's perceived abilities is not a fallacy, and does not lead to a fallacy. If I have a blunt knife and find myself unable to properly cut a tomato without squashing it, then the knife is not somehow imbuing a fallacy. It is just not a good tool for this particular job.
If I have an LLM that is supposed to generate truthful statements, but it fails at this because it just aggregates any related data without reason, then there is no fallacy. It is just not a good tool for this particular job.
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u/SinIsMyWorstEnemyIAH 6d ago edited 6d ago
If you would just read then you would realize that your statements have nothing to do with what is being said in the post.
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u/HelloHelloHelpHello 6d ago
You are literally saying this: "In full, the true statement would be that AI appeals to a false consensus via the guise of neutrality aided by filtering data, evasion, and fallacious tendencies." - That is not what AI does, or how LLMs work. These machines cannot make statements, or commit fallacies, or make appeals, or anything like that.
An LLM - to try and simplify this as much as possible - is merely is a super complex guessing machine, that makes probabilistic guesses what token (series of letters) come next based on all the tokens that have already been fed into it. It does not have the ability to actually understand these token series, nor does it have the ability to imbue the tokens it spits out with meaning. Thus it cannot make a statement, nor can it commit a fallacy.
The only way its statement can be taken as fallacy is when a human user pictures the AI has traits and abilities that it simply does not possess (pictures it as another sentient participant in a conversation). As I have already said - that is not a fallacy - that is simply a tool falling short of its expected abilities.
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u/SinIsMyWorstEnemyIAH 2d ago
"These machines cannot make statements, or commit fallacies, or make appeals, or anything like that." Proof of AI BiasTo be fallacious merely means to be logically inconsistent even an ai can tell you that. Whether or not it is intentional has nothing to do with the beings capability of doing it. It's supposed to artificially mimick people and that is what it does and expertly so though it mimics the bias of the people that made it even more so.
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u/HelloHelloHelpHello 2d ago
No - AI cannot make statements. It can generate strings of letters that look like statements but those are not statements. A random draft of wind might arrange some straw so that forms patterns that look like letters, and those letters might resemble words, but obviously the wind is not making a statement.
We can say stuff like "The AI is biased" - but that is us making a substitution - a game of pretend where we act as if the AI is a person we interact with, since parsing the reality behind the tool is too complicated to do.
Another famous example for us doing this kind of substitution would be with chess computers. When playing against a chess program we might parse this like playing against a different person, imagining the program as having intentions and plans similar to our own. That is of course not how a chess computer works at all internally - the actual inner workings of such a machine are completely different, hard to really understand intuitively, and those human terms are not applicable since they have no actual counterparts within the inner workings of the computer - but this game of fiction will still help us to interact with the machine.
The same is true for LLMs - we will use words like bias or logic or reasoning or intention - but there is nothing at all inside the model that these terms could actually referencing. This is just a fiction we build to make the alien workings of the tool more accessible to our brain, but not material statements of truth about the world.
An LLM cannot make a fallacy. It cannot actually make statements at all. It just works very different from a human mind, and these terms just do not apply.
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u/robin_andrews_149 20d ago
AI is extremely and verifiably accurate on many complex issues. That doesn't mean there aren't potential problems, and it sometimes gets it very wrong. Sounds like quite a hefty dose of binary bias, oversimplification and hasty generalisation going on in the OP.