AI is becoming epistemic infrastructure controlled by a handful of private individuals?

Most people treat AI as a convenient black box. Ask it something, it answers, you move on. But we’re sleepwalking into something bigger. I think Whoever controls the infrastructure of knowledge controls how people think The Church held that position for centuries through controlling scripture. The printing press broke that monopoly by distributing interpretive power. AI is doing the opposite recentralizing it into a handful of corporations with no democratic accountability. “AI says X” is structurally identical to “studies show X” you’re invoking an authority you can’t directly access. Except with a study you can theoretically trace the source. With AI the chain is opaque by design. And it delivers wrong answers and right answers with identical confidence. There’s no texture to signal doubt. AI isn’t neutral, it’s being heavily calibrated. In the west, the models are trained to be more “ethical” maybe more liberal and always try to give you a more “balance” take on things. Chinese AI simply doesn’t allow you to access to anything that put the CCP is a bad light. The more you rely on AI in domains where you lack expertise, the less capable you become of evaluating whether to trust it. AI works best for people who already know enough to catch its errors the opposite of how most people use it. OpenAI said 10% of our entire population has already started using chatgpt. Regardless of the accuracy of this number, I feel like we are slowly entering into a mass hallucination / blind reliance on these AI models. We’re not just offloading cognitive effort. We’re handing the dial over who shapes how billions of people understand reality to a small group of unelected, largely unregulated private individuals.