Abstract
The classic epistemological questions revolving around the notions of trust, dependence and expertise in the acquisition of knowledge are today taking on a new twist with the emergence of what are sometimes called "epistemic technologies" (Alvarado, 2023), i.e. high-performance artificial systems unscrupulously presented as being capable of "making decisions", "making predictions", "issuing diagnoses", "categorizing", etc. The question of dependence, delegation and deference, once limited to human experts, now seems to extend to artificial systems, which then act as epistemic agents in their own right. How can we understand this unprecedented relationship between human and machine in an epistemic context? Stéphane Chauvier's recent article "IA: le test de la déférence" (2023) will serve as a springboard for me to address the question of the epistemic status of such artificial systems.
