Here’s Part VI — the final installment of the series. This one examines how learning against learning enters its ultimate phase with AI and generative technologies, producing not just overload but infinite, self-replicating chaos.
Learning Against Learning, Part VI: AI and the Infinite Reproduction of Chaos
Introduction
Cardinal Wolsey’s phrase learning against learning was born in the age of the printing press. He saw that knowledge, when multiplied too quickly, turns against itself, creating confusion rather than clarity. Five centuries later, this principle has reached its most extreme expression: artificial intelligence.
AI does not merely multiply information; it automates and accelerates contradiction. Where once pamphlets or newspapers flooded the field, now machines produce infinite streams of text, images, and media—indistinguishable from human creation. The result is the ultimate ordo ab chao: a reality where truth itself dissolves into an endless mirror of itself.
Generative Overproduction
Unlike earlier media revolutions, AI creates infinite, synthetic learning.
- Text Generators: Large language models can produce endless plausible narratives, explanations, or “facts,” whether true or false.
- Deepfakes: Audio and video fabrications blur the line between real and artificial, undermining trust in all evidence.
- Automated Disinformation: Bots powered by AI can flood social media with millions of tailored posts, overwhelming organic discourse.
- Self-Reinforcing Cycles: AI systems draw on their own generated outputs, compounding errors and contradictions exponentially.
The effect is not just overload, but infinite recursion of knowledge against itself.
Contradiction at Machine Speed
In the AI era, learning against learning no longer requires human debate. Machines can generate contradictions instantly.
- A true story can be buried under thousands of fabricated versions within hours.
- Every correction can be matched by endless counter-corrections, each as convincing as the last.
- The very distinction between “fact” and “fabrication” collapses.
What Wolsey feared in the printing press—multiplying interpretations—has become an automated process of reality fragmentation.
Cognitive Collapse
The human mind cannot withstand the pace of AI-driven overload.
- Verification Breakdown: Traditional fact-checking collapses when synthetic content outpaces human review.
- Perpetual Doubt: Citizens no longer trust images, recordings, or documents.
- Psychological Exhaustion: The flood of AI content breeds apathy—why seek truth when it cannot be confirmed?
- Tribal Retreat: Overwhelmed individuals cling to ideological or algorithmic filters, surrendering independent judgment.
This is learning against learning at its most devastating: not only overwhelming intellect, but collapsing the possibility of shared reality.
Ordo ab Chao in the AI Era
From a conspiratorial perspective, the AI revolution is the endgame of information warfare.
- Overwhelm: AI creates an infinite ocean of contradictory narratives.
- Confuse: Reality itself becomes unstable, with every fact shadowed by synthetic alternatives.
- Exhaust: Populations, unable to discern truth, give up on critical inquiry.
- Control: Into this chaos step centralized arbiters—AI platforms, governments, and corporations—offering curated “truth layers.”
The principle of ordo ab chao achieves full maturity: chaos is manufactured at infinite scale, and order is imposed by those who claim the power to filter it.
Conclusion
Cardinal Wolsey’s 16th-century warning has come full circle. Learning against learning began as a flood of books, matured into the pamphlet wars of the Enlightenment, metastasized in mass media and Cold War propaganda, and now reaches its apex in the age of AI.
Here, knowledge is no longer merely multiplied. It is infinitely reproduced, automated, and weaponized. Truth collapses under the weight of its own simulation.
And yet, the cycle remains the same:
- Multiply knowledge.
- Contradict endlessly.
- Exhaust the seeker.
- Impose order—ordo ab chao.
AI is not the solution to Wolsey’s problem. It is its culmination.
Sources
- https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-age-of-ai-disinformation
- https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/ai-and-disinformation
- https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/11/15/ai-and-the-future-of-information
- https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/deepfakes-and-disinformation
- https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA179-3.html