What happens to truth when AI can make any opinion sound convincing?

Rabbi Landau explains it with an economic picture. “When government prints unlimited money, money loses value. AI is printing unlimited persuasion.” Every opinion now has endless reasoning behind it, and “when persuasion becomes infinite, persuasion becomes worthless.”

For thousands of years, power belonged to those who could produce convincing arguments. AI makes convincing arguments abundant, so “the scarce resource becomes reality itself.” He calls this “the post-opinion age,” and it exposes something mostly hidden before: “people never disagree because of missing information. They disagreed because they had different values.”

Rabbi Landau says this is what our sages said about our times: “Vatehi ha'emes ne'ederes,” the truth will be missing, because it becomes split into many separate flocks and goes away. AI may give everyone an argument, but it cannot give every argument truth.

Going deeper: Rabbi Landau's teaching, level by level

Surface claim

AI prints unlimited persuasion, and like printed money, persuasion loses its value.

Fear, vulnerability, or tension

When every opinion sounds intelligent and logical, it becomes hard to know what is actually true.

What may be behind it

Why do people really disagree?

Rabbi Landau teaches that people never disagreed because of missing information but because of different values. In A Soul at Peace he writes that the mind is a “lawyer” that justifies what the heart has already decided.

Deepest human truth

When arguments are everywhere, the scarce and precious thing is reality itself, the truth that our sages said would be missing in our times.

More questions from this teaching

• Why do people really disagree, if not over the facts?