Might AI possibly boost social trust?

That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:

The point is not that LLMs won’t be used to create propaganda — they will — but that they offer users another option to filter it out. With LLMs, users can get the degree of objectivity that they desire, at least after they learn how they work.

Still, this is a safe prediction: Within a year or two, there will be a variety of LLMs, some of them open source, and people will be able to use them to generate the kinds of answers they want. You might wonder how this is an improvement on the status quo, which now affords viewers a choice of polarized media sources such as Fox News or MSNBC, not to mention voices of all sorts on Twitter.

I hold out some hope for improvement in part because LLMs operate on a “pull” basis — that is, you ask them for what you want. Even if you are working with a “right-wing” LLM, you can always ask it for a left-wing or centrist perspective, and vice versa. It would be like watching Fox and having a button on your remote that you can click to get an opposing or contrasting view — within seconds. This is a vast improvement over cable TV, in terms of immediacy if nothing else. LLMs also make it very easy to generate a debate or a “compare and contrast” answer on just about any issue.

Again, there is no knowing how much balance people will want. But at least AI will make it easier to get balance if they so choose. That seems better than having a particular cable TV channel or a pre-established Twitter feed as the baseline default.

The impersonal nature of many LLMs may also be a force for ideological balance. Currently, many left-wingers don’t want to switch to Fox (or visit their neighbor) to hear a different perspective because they find the personalities offensive or obnoxious. LLMs offer the potential to sample points of view in their driest, least provocative and most analytically argued forms.

We’ll see how this goes, and any analysis or prediction here should be quite hedged, but I am more optimistic than many people on this front.