chimera

On AI Governance: Taming the Chimera

K.A. Taipale *

Abstract:

Generative AI systems are increasingly employed to mediate human decision-making and provide essential services, yet they remain at their core epistemically unstable stochastic engines that simulate coherence and presence without possessing cognition or personhood. In addition to these instabilities inherent in their statistical architecture, AI systems are further shaped by opaque design and deployment choices that embed normative values throughout the system and introduce additional epistemic risk.

As a result, consequential human decision making and action is being delegated to machines whose epistemic foundations differ fundamentally from human reasoning. This delegation is accelerating regardless of specific technical architectures. The framework developed in this monograph is a method for examining when that delegation is justified—and for holding accountable the technical, institutional, and civic conditions under which it occurs.

Drawing on law, philosophy, STS, and systems architecture, this monograph examines how such simulations acquire social and institutional force, how they induce misplaced trust, and how they are engineered and shaped.  It argues that governance must be reoriented toward structuring the conditions under which reliance on epistemically unstable systems can be justified—not as minds to be aligned or technology to be regulated, but as socio-technical infrastructures to be governed and held accountable.

Part I diagnoses the nature of generative simulation, its persuasive force, and its inherent instabilities. Part II analyzes the mechanisms through which simulation is engineered, sculpted, and politically shaped, showing how design interventions often compound inherent epistemic risks. Part III develops a framework for evaluating responsible reliance grounded in three factors: the degree of affective seduction engineered into the system, the adequacy of epistemic transparency, disclosure, and control, and the context and stakes of the deployment. 

Rather than prescribing specific regulatory structures or policies, this monograph offers an analytic methodology that diverse actors—developers, regulators, institutions, courts, insurers, and users—can apply within their own contexts and circumstances to judge reliance. It argues for recentering governance discourse toward architectural responsibility for the epistemic conditions of reliance through technical and institutional accountability: taming the chimera by holding architecture, not illusion, responsible for reliance under conditions of uncertainty.