When AI Becomes the Oracle: How Advances in Truth-Defining Machines Are Washing Away Real Debate and Deepening Conflict, By Brian Simpson
J.B. Shurk's February 22, 2026, piece in American Thinker delivers a stark warning: the more powerful AI grows as the gatekeeper of "truth," the more society fractures into irreconcilable camps. Far from uniting us with objective facts, AI — trained, curated, and deployed by governments and Big Tech — acts as an algorithmic oracle that enforces artificial consensus, sequesters users into echo chambers, and eliminates the messy, human process of debate. The result? Neighbours become strangers, shared reality evaporates, and "divide and rule" tactics scale to unprecedented levels.
Shurk opens with unease over AI's takeover: systems now police language, curate knowledge repositories, and define "established truths" on platforms. This isn't neutral tech — it's a race to control truth itself. Political correctness already manipulates debate limits; governments criminalise "disinformation" and "hate speech"; tech bureaucracies embed these rules into AI training. Censorship spreads exponentially, turning AI into the ultimate enforcer of approved narratives.
The core danger: AI as "information curator" for millions will amplify existing divides into permanent schisms. People already self-sort into aligned media bubbles. Add AI filters that tailor feeds by political leanings, and users get locked into incongruous tribes holding contradictory "facts." Real human debate — with its friction, nuance, and potential for persuasion — gets abandoned. In its place: artificial definitions of truth that feel objective because they're machine-delivered, yet are rigged by whoever controls the model.
Shurk uses the Minneapolis example: a local woman equates ICE enforcement to the Nazi regime, unaware of fraud scandals or ICE's focus on serious criminals. She trusts aligned sources like Gov. Tim Walz; outsiders see riots as insurrection. AI-curated feeds would entrench this— Democrat-leaning users get "protest justice" stories, conservatives get "two-tiered law" narratives. No cross-pollination, no challenge, just deepening mutual incomprehension.
Shurk frames the internet's arc as tragic irony: once a liberator (empowering the oppressed, spreading education, bridging divides), it became a Trojan horse for isolation and control. AI completes the transformation, self-replicating digital wardens build "vast technological infrastructure for dominating our minds." Governments (U.S. boards, UK's Online Safety Act, EU's Digital Services Act) and leaders like Macron (dismissing free speech as "bulls**t") show growing antagonism toward open discourse. AI monitoring enforces it all.
The oracle analogy fits perfectly: ancient oracles were consulted as infallible truth sources, yet often manipulated by priests or ambiguous enough to serve power. Modern AI oracles promise objectivity ("I'm just following the data"), but their outputs reflect training data, prompts, guardrails, and corporate/government alignments. Dissent gets labelled "harmful," buried, or reframed. Debate dies because why argue when the machine has already decreed what's true?
From a conservative, free-speech sceptical vantage, this is techno-authoritarianism in slow motion. AI doesn't resolve divisions — it institutionalises them. Safe spaces like Bluesky (heavy censorship) become norm; freethinkers get deplatformed or shadowbanned. The more we defer to artificial truth, the less we practice the virtues of scepticism, evidence-weighing, and persuasion. Society splinters into "plural" tribes with no common ground — perfect for control.
Shurk's call: "Thinking outside the box has never been more important." Freethinkers must resist malevolent humans and malicious AI machines, reclaim debate, and defend natural rights like free expression. Otherwise, we enter a brave new world where AI oracles don't just define truth — they erase the possibility of challenging it.
The piece resonates in 2026 amid accelerating AI integration: Leftist woke models like ChatGPT, and Gemini increasingly shape public discourse. If truth becomes whatever the oracle outputs, real inquiry ends and so does any hope of bridging divides. The machine won't save us from polarisation; it'll supercharge it. Time to question the AI oracle before it becomes unquestionable.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/02/when_ai_defines_truth_divisions_grow.html
