WATCH: A Free Press Debate on Artificial Intelligence in San Francisco

Artificial intelligence is fundamentally reshaping our relationship with knowledge. Since humans started standing upright and talking to each other, we’ve found our way to wisdom through disagreement and debate.

But in the age of AI, our sages are machines we program ourselves, models that spit out the information we already have, reflecting our biases and our blind spots. What happens to the truth when we no longer wrestle with it, and only receive it passively through ultra-intelligent machines?

Last Thursday, 900 people convened in San Francisco for a debate that asked: Will the truth survive artificial intelligence? Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas and AI “godmother” Fei-Fei Li argued that this technology will improve our understanding of the world. They faced off against computer scientist Jaron Lanier and author Nicholas Carr, who argued that it would do just the opposite. The Free Press’s founder, Bari Weiss, moderated. We’re proud to have partnered with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the nation’s leading free speech defender, for this latest live debate.