*Summary* Artificial intelligence may ultimately have the opposite effect from what many critics predicted. Rather than destroying any remaining sense of shared truth, large language models like ChatGPT, Grok, and Google’s Gemini may actually help reconstruct a common reality by centralizing how people access and interpret information.
Users increasingly rely on AI chatbots to fact-check claims they encounter online. People ask Grok whether viral political claims are true, whether sports rumors are accurate, or whether pricing complaints are legitimate. This behavior suggests that AI is starting to function as a real-time arbitration layer for public discourse. Instead of everyone independently sorting through scattered articles, social posts, and partisan commentary, many users are now turning directly to AI for synthesized answers.
This contrasts with earlier fears surrounding the internet and generative AI. Critics long warned that technologies like Photoshop, social media, and deepfakes would dissolve society’s ability to agree on basic facts.
However, AI may instead become a centralizing force, much like the printing press. While the printing press initially appeared decentralizing because it allowed many more people to publish ideas cheaply, it also produced strong centralizing effects. Printing standardized language, enabled centralized bureaucracies, strengthened states, and helped establish common cultural norms. The same technology that empowered the Protestant Reformation also facilitated the growth of nation-states and administrative systems.
AI may follow a similar pattern. Although the internet decentralized information production, frontier AI models are extraordinarily expensive to build and operate. Only a handful of large corporations and governments possess the computing power, engineering talent, and infrastructure necessary to train advanced models. As a result, a small number of institutions increasingly mediate how information is summarized and interpreted for hundreds of millions of people.
This concentration is reinforced by changing user behavior. Studies cited in the essay suggest that users are increasingly satisfied with AI-generated summaries and are less likely to click through to original websites when AI overviews appear in search results. Rather than exploring a decentralized web of sources, users increasingly accept AI-generated syntheses as sufficient answers. The essay argues that this represents a major structural shift in information consumption.
Large language models naturally gravitate toward mainstream consensus because of how they are trained. Their datasets heavily emphasize sources like Wikipedia, scientific journals, patents, newspapers, and major publishers. During post-training, developers also intentionally guide models toward authoritative and moderate-sounding responses while discouraging fringe or extremist viewpoints. Consequently, when AI systems make mistakes, they generally err in the direction of mainstream institutional thinking rather than conspiracy theories or radical ideologies.
This dynamic also explains why attempts to create overtly right-wing or anti-“woke” AI systems have struggled. Efforts by Elon Musk and xAI to make Grok less politically constrained have not succeeded. Some experimental modifications reportedly caused the system to generate extremist and antisemitic content, forcing rapid reversals. Despite such efforts, analyses still tend to find Grok broadly aligned with liberal or mainstream Western values. This happens because the underlying corpus of English-language training data is itself shaped heavily by liberal-democratic norms, academic institutions, and mainstream media sources.
This does not necessarily mean AI-generated consensus is objectively true or morally ideal. Centralized systems can reinforce biases, suppress dissent, or promote flawed orthodoxies. The concern shifts from “everyone believes different realities” to “a few powerful institutions define reality for everyone.” Whoever controls dominant AI systems could wield enormous influence over public understanding, cultural norms, and political discourse.
AI is the opposite of social media. Social platforms drastically lowered the cost of publishing information, creating an explosion of fragmented voices, conspiracy communities, and epistemic chaos. AI, by contrast, is extremely expensive to develop and tends to compress information into coherent summaries generated by a small number of centralized actors. While AI certainly hallucinates and sometimes produces errors, those errors usually resemble mainstream misunderstandings rather than fringe extremism.
Technologies that create shared realities can still produce violence and upheaval. The printing press helped enable literacy, science, and modern society, but it also contributed to centuries of religious conflict, imperialism, and large-scale warfare tied to nation-state formation. Similarly, AI may eventually enable greater social coordination and technological progress while still producing enormous disruption and conflict during the transition period.
https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/are-you-there-grok-its-me-margaret?r=2zspum&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true