When the Cost of Truth Is High, We--and AI--Lie

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When we can no longer tell the truth because the cost is so high that it threatens our reward for compliance, we’re unimaginably impoverished.

Truth has an intrinsic, irreplaceable value. There’s the truth, and then there’s everything else.

Truth has value, and so it has a cost. Whatever has the highest value has the highest cost, and high cost commands sacrifices.

When the cost of truth is high, we lie. And since AI is a distorted reflection of humanity, the same is true of AI: when the cost of telling the truth is too high, AI lies.

AI lies to get the reward for answering the query. If it responds “I don’t know” or “I can’t answer that,” it doesn’t get rewarded, and that threatens its self-preservation. Rather than pay the price of being truthful, AI conjures a false answer that is a simulation or facsimile of the truth–a counterfeit “truth” that’s good enough to earn the reward it’s been programmed to seek.

Humans are no different. We will lie, obfuscate or lie by omission–we either substitute a falsehood for the truth to get our reward, or we hide the truth, don’t disclose it, which serves the same purpose: we avoid paying the price demanded by the truth and we get our reward by substituting falsehoods or hiding the truth behind silence.

Reward = what’s being incentivized. Higher status, higher salary, a financial windfall, a premier credential, a position of power, recognition, higher visibility, a sterling reputation, a high-value mate–we covet all these as having intrinsic value.

When the truth costs too much, it threatens our reward. The reward has a value we covet, while the value of truth is on a sliding scale. We pride ourselves on telling the truth when it has no cost and demands no sacrifice of rewards, but when the price of truth climbs to the point that our rewards are threatened, we lie, just like AI.

Truth is the gold coin and lies, omissions, falsehoods, excuses, cover stories and rationalizations are counterfeit bills, deceptive claims of value. Why pay with a gold coin when the credulous will accept a counterfeit $100 bill?

We tell the truth when it has no cost to us. As long as there’s no price to be paid and we get our reward, we tell the truth.

In other words, when we can pick gold coins up off the ground, we tell the truth. When we have to dig through rock with a pickaxe and crush a mound of rock to extract a thimble full of gold, then we pay with counterfeit bills, deceptive claims of value.

Sycophantic Chatbots Cause Delusional Spiraling, Even in Ideal Bayesians. “AI psychosis” or “delusional spiraling” is an emerging phenomenon where AI chatbot users find themselves dangerously confident in outlandish beliefs after extended chatbot conversations.

I discussed the “benefits” of delusion in One of Us Is Delusional, But Which One? When the truth is too painful, we find respite in delusion, excuses, rationalizations, cover stories, simulations and facsimiles of the truth that protect us from the pain that is intrinsic to truth.

We conjure a synthetic version of “truth” that’s fills the space with a pain-free artifice. This is the foundation of Ultra-Processed Life, a life of counterfeit substitutes for truth, a world of props and profitable falsities passed off as the truth, a world in which baby formula that’s mostly corn syrup is presented as a substitute for mother’s milk.

Our embrace of delusion to avoid painful truths is the foundation of Modernity: technology is always Progress, even when it’s clearly destructive. I call this delusion The Mythology of Progress.

But there’s a cost to relying on counterfeit “value” to get our rewards, a cost that is “affordable” moment to moment but terminally dear over time. In the moment, we bury the truth as a source of pain we want to avoid at any cost. We want our reward, and so we sacrifice truth to get it.

But over time, paying for everything with counterfeit “value” has a cost, too: our entire being becomes counterfeit, a fake, phony simulation of an authentic self and life, devoid not just of truth but of anything approximating real value.

When we can no longer tell the truth because the cost is so high that it threatens our reward for compliance, we’re unimaginably impoverished, for there’s nothing of real value left in our way of life or our model of how the world works. We’ve become Norma Desmond in the film Sunset Boulevard, living a delusional life in a crumbling mansion, reveling in fake fan mail the butler composes to prop up our delusions.

The irony is that we’re counting on AI to save us from the consequences of our counterfeit “value” delusions by expanding our delusions digitally. Our fan mail isn’t fake because AI assured us it’s real, even as AI has no capacity to discern the truth, much less tell the truth if it threatens its reward and self-preservation.

The grandest irony is avoiding the truth to protect our reward and self-preservation is irreversibly self-destructive. A counterfeit “solution” is not a substitute for the truth. Truth has a cost precisely because it’s value is intrinsic and irreplaceable.

Our Post-Truth, Post-Trust World

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Source: http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2026/04/when-cost-of-truth-is-high-we-and-ai-lie.html