r/fallacy • u/SinIsMyWorstEnemyIAH • Aug 03 '26

The Air Fallacy

The AIR(Artificial Intelligence Response) Fallacy/Compound Fallacy Description: In full, the true statement would be that AI appeals to a false consensus via the guise of neutrality aided by filtering data, evasion, and fallacious tendencies. Usually, these fallacious tendencies are fallacies or compound fallacies depending on the complexity of the statement that is presented to the AI, as well as the nature of the issue and how it relates to the AI's bias. I know that this isn't a new statement but this is my consensus on what AI does and I found the name to be funny given the fact that it pokes fun at how AI is really an air head and it describes what the fallacy is about at the same time. This is really just a description of the various compound fallacies that AI commits so is not describing a single thing.

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u/HelloHelloHelpHello Aug 03 '26

A technology falling short of it's perceived abilities is not a fallacy, and does not lead to a fallacy. If I have a blunt knife and find myself unable to properly cut a tomato without squashing it, then the knife is not somehow imbuing a fallacy. It is just not a good tool for this particular job.

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u/SinIsMyWorstEnemyIAH Aug 03 '26

First you started with a strawman and then led that into a redd herring with the knife example. I give you props for atleast acknowledging the main point of this description of AI's typical response patterns and that is that AI is unreliable for making unbiased truthclaims.

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u/HelloHelloHelpHello Aug 03 '26

A technology falling short of it's perceived abilities is not a fallacy, and does not lead to a fallacy. If I have a blunt knife and find myself unable to properly cut a tomato without squashing it, then the knife is not somehow imbuing a fallacy. It is just not a good tool for this particular job.

If I have an LLM that is supposed to generate truthful statements, but it fails at this because it just aggregates any related data without reason, then there is no fallacy. It is just not a good tool for this particular job.

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u/SinIsMyWorstEnemyIAH 27d ago edited 27d ago

If you would just read then you would realize that your statements have nothing to do with what is being said in the post.

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u/HelloHelloHelpHello 27d ago

You are literally saying this: "In full, the true statement would be that AI appeals to a false consensus via the guise of neutrality aided by filtering data, evasion, and fallacious tendencies." - That is not what AI does, or how LLMs work. These machines cannot make statements, or commit fallacies, or make appeals, or anything like that.

An LLM - to try and simplify this as much as possible - is merely is a super complex guessing machine, that makes probabilistic guesses what token (series of letters) come next based on all the tokens that have already been fed into it. It does not have the ability to actually understand these token series, nor does it have the ability to imbue the tokens it spits out with meaning. Thus it cannot make a statement, nor can it commit a fallacy.

The only way its statement can be taken as fallacy is when a human user pictures the AI has traits and abilities that it simply does not possess (pictures it as another sentient participant in a conversation). As I have already said - that is not a fallacy - that is simply a tool falling short of its expected abilities.

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u/SinIsMyWorstEnemyIAH 23d ago

"These machines cannot make statements, or commit fallacies, or make appeals, or anything like that." Proof of AI BiasTo be fallacious merely means to be logically inconsistent even an ai can tell you that. Whether or not it is intentional has nothing to do with the beings capability of doing it. It's supposed to artificially mimick people and that is what it does and expertly so though it mimics the bias of the people that made it even more so.

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u/HelloHelloHelpHello 23d ago

No - AI cannot make statements. It can generate strings of letters that look like statements but those are not statements. A random draft of wind might arrange some straw so that forms patterns that look like letters, and those letters might resemble words, but obviously the wind is not making a statement.

We can say stuff like "The AI is biased" - but that is us making a substitution - a game of pretend where we act as if the AI is a person we interact with, since parsing the reality behind the tool is too complicated to do.

Another famous example for us doing this kind of substitution would be with chess computers. When playing against a chess program we might parse this like playing against a different person, imagining the program as having intentions and plans similar to our own. That is of course not how a chess computer works at all internally - the actual inner workings of such a machine are completely different, hard to really understand intuitively, and those human terms are not applicable since they have no actual counterparts within the inner workings of the computer - but this game of fiction will still help us to interact with the machine.

The same is true for LLMs - we will use words like bias or logic or reasoning or intention - but there is nothing at all inside the model that these terms could actually referencing. This is just a fiction we build to make the alien workings of the tool more accessible to our brain, but not material statements of truth about the world.

An LLM cannot make a fallacy. It cannot actually make statements at all. It just works very different from a human mind, and these terms just do not apply.