Are AIs the New Gurus? Who Do We Trust Now?

[Parrhesia]

Back in the day, people looked to priests, teachers, philosophers—real people—for answers about life, truth, meaning. Now? We're asking TikTokers, YouTubers, and even ChatGPT what’s real.

We follow “gurus” who drop daily hot takes, let algorithms tell us what to watch, and trust AI to give us the “truth” in a neat little paragraph. It’s wild.

So what does that mean?


Are we replacing old belief systems with algorithms?

Is asking an AI for advice that different from going to a priest or a therapist?

Are we still thinking for ourselves, or are we just outsourcing it to whoever sounds confident?




Would love to hear what you all think. Who do you trust these days—and why?

[kFoyauextlH]

This is a great question and something I've been thinking about a lot again, but a slightly different angle possibly, which is about how people necessarily have to be the judges of who they think are right or wrong, but that really makes their own self the person who is in the position of needing to know best before they have encountered anything and during the encounter with the information. So people "know it to be true", but how? They didn't even know about the topic in the first place sometimes. So that is what is interesting to me, what convinces people that someone is true or false, right or wrong, when they don't know themselves, and that they are left to be the judge, and what smoothly convinces them to take on someone as their guide?

Like, if this person or thing is your guide, and it is telling you things which you didn't know or know about, how did you make it your guide without knowing if it is right or wrong but deciding that it is?

So then all the confidence tricks come in, all the fallacies potentially, the ways in which people hand over themselves to figures that they somehow determined know what they are saying without knowing about what they are saying, which is weird and absurd seeming to me, like a Catch 22 even, but one that goes through smoothly.

There are people that believe in religions like they themselves are in the position to know and to say who or what God is or isn't like or did or does, but how, and who are any of these people, and what really are those writings compared to what people claim of them?

Humans are audacious, and now it has become commonplace and very normalized for huge chunks of the population to say heavy things, like that they are personally addressing the Creator of all the vastness of creation, and are also the child of this, that they call Father? This is a very casual claim commonly made. People are in the midst of a fever dream saying and thinking and accepting without much difficulty or any serious explanation anything they are saying and how they are narrating things about themselves and everything else.

They trust themselves seemingly, which is how they end up trusting anyone or anything else, but they have little reason to trust themselves except that they have no other choice and it is the only option to proceed at all.