The Synthetic Public
Epistemic Agency and the Erosion of Democratic Deliberation in the Age of LLMs
Keywords:
Synthetic Public, Simulation of Public Opinion, Epistemic Agency, Political Discourse, Deliberative Democracy, Large Language Models (LLMs)Abstract
The article examines the emergence of “synthetic public” caused by the proliferation of network technologies, highlighting the resultant threats to epistemic agency and democratic deliberation. Key areas of analysis include simulation mechanisms, how public opinion is artificially manufactured, theory of deliberative democracy as the foundation of democratic political discourse, deliberation and simulation as opposing political tendencies, social epistemology as a normative analysis of ways to organize political discourse, the erosion and collapse of epistemic activity, and elections, which blur the dichotomy between “organic” public opinion and technologically mediated content. The article concludes that the synthetic public is not a step toward true democracy, but a harmful way to imitate and circumvent it. Finally, the article asserts the urgent need to safeguard citizens’ epistemic autonomy in the age of Large Language Models (LLMs).
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