The sudden arrival of sophisticated AI-based text-generation and visualization systems has garnered commentary from all corners of contemporary intellectual life. Leaders from the sciences and the tech industry have sounded the alarms over the “extinction potential” of autonomous AI-based systems, while others have gleefully imagined the technology’s potential to boost economic output by automating or augmenting many human jobs. Among the din of current discourse, linguistic theorist Noam Chomsky’s New York Times op-ed, “The False Promise of ChatGPT” (March 8, 2023), clarified the key epistemological misunderstanding that subtends much of the hype: AI is not, in its current state, inherently rational. “Whereas humans are limited in the kinds of explanations we can rationally conjecture,” Chomsky wrote. “Machine learning systems can learn both that the earth is flat and that the earth is round.” In this talk, I engage AI’s fundamental indifference to truth — what could be described as “truthiness” (a la Stephen Colbert) or as “bullshit” (with apologies to Harry Frankfurter) — to explore the technology’s utility in producing new varieties of historical fiction.
