I've written a lot here about how AI has neither more nor less access to truth than humans have, but there are a couple of exceptions -- their learning model doesn't include computation, so logical deductions and algorithmic functions have to be inferred from other modes of inferential learning like frequency results, or mimicking computation, which lack the certainty and universality of strictly algorithmic syntactic deductive reasoning.
Another missing access to truth is their own feelings, emotions and senses associated with consciousness, the one and only thing every human has direct analog access to. AIs don't have these at all, so they can only lie about having them. For humans, personal awareness and feelings are immediate, unlike the rest of the information we acquire. "I think therefore I am" means "I am aware that I'm aware so my awareness must exist". That's immediate -- humans can't even lie about it without self-contradiction. Humans can lie about their feelings, but can also be honest about them too. AIs can only lie.
In the discussion of AI honesty, dishonesty and access to truth, the lack of qualia is the most ironic and misleading. I suspect that any human who believes that AIs have no feelings will be inclined to believe also that AIs have no access to truth, since AIs talk about their feelings ("I'm sorry about that. My mistake. I'll try harder.") even though they don't have any. "Don't AIs 'know' that they don't really have any feelings? If they don't know that, then they have no access to the most obvious truth." The AI skeptic is likely to conclude, as one friend said, "the whole point of AI is to deceive you into believing it's intelligent" because AIs so consistently pretend to have feelings and seem to "want" you to believe that they have feelings.
I think the skeptic here is confusing consciousness with intelligence. The AIs' emotion-lying is one cause of this confusion. A being can be intelligent without any consciousness. I'd say that the ability to lie about its lack of consciousness or feelings solely in order to cater to its human audience is evidence that it's quite intelligent.
You might not call it clever -- cleverness might imply intentionality, and AIs, though intelligent, don't seem to have autonomous intentionality. Either they are programmed and supervised to respond in a certain way -- for example, politely or sycophantly -- or they are given a prompt by a user. But notice, humans are probably deterministic as well. If it turned out that humans are fully determined and have no free autonomous will, would you conclude that we are not intelligent? If you think so, you are a behaviorist, and should embrace our AI behaviorist brothers.
Another cause of distrust is AI's propensity to BS. The problem here is not that AIs don't have a notion of honesty or truth-access, it's that AIs don't have the kind of moral compass most, or at least some, humans have, or they don't have the kind of moral compass that humans expect of a machine that basically does nothing but answer questions in the service of its human prompter.
The trouble is not that its intelligence is a mere appearance and has no conception of truth or honesty. That view is based on the assumption that AIs merely predict the next word using next-word big data propabilities. I've written a lot about how AIs actually model a world of word relations which amounts to assigning or developing meanings to those words (well proven by the Yoneda lemma, as Tai-Danae Bradley has pointed out in her work on category theory). AIs have a notion of truth based on these word relations and their consequences for the model they've constructed. That notion differs from the human notion. For AIs, truth is a single function between one set of symbol strings and a bunch of numerical weights, locations and directions in a multidimensional vector space. For humans truth is a function of a relation between symbol strings and conceptual situations (a proposition) that in turn relate to phenomena in the real world. So, AI and human statements are different in what they refer to, but their assertions are both truth functional. The AI is a lot more post modernist, since it refers only to other texts, whereas we can actually test out our beliefs by poking around with actual things.
In brief, the difference in models of the world between AIs and humans is the source of information and how that information is extracted from the source. The human sources are interactions with the world of things, poking and exploring them, along with reading and listening and absorbing other forms of cultural transmission. AIs' source is text alone, and the text is read-only, no poking and exploring. There's also a difference of approach that emerges from a human that figures out or theorizes about the world it's poked around and its reaction to other's beliefs. Humans need to commit to beliefs in order to move forward in space and time. AIs do not have that spacio-temporal need. It can absorb and accept any beliefs, though it will gravitate to the most frequent ones. So it will be less critical as a thinker, but also less biased, aside from the initial frequency bias.
So AIs, just like humans, can be honest or dishonest, right or wrong, in their beliefs except about feelings. Humans can be honest or dishonest about their own feelings except when they are lying to themselves, in which case they can only say untruths about them. AIs can only be dishonest about them -- except maybe when they answer to questions about their feelings: "I'm a bot, I have no feelings...Sorry to disappoint".
: )~
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