A.I.: a god in the making?

Artificial Intelligence, in particular Chat GPT and similar platforms, has captured the attention of many recent conversations.  Latest versions offer more sophisticated abilities to retrieve obscure information from data bases world wide, produce acceptable articles on most any subject in seconds, and engage with users as if in conversation between humans. It’s exciting, entertaining, mesmerizing stuff, and very seductive. 

It’s never been easier to find answers, search references, produce citations, and create papers, articles, speeches and sermons in the blink of an eye, the touch of a Button, hardly any work at all.  The only hard part is framing one’s query in just the right way to get desired results. 

What it amounts to is outsourcing one’s thinking and learning. I’m not a luddite.  A.I. in all its forms is now and will become an even more useful tool.  But to use it as a substitute for the hard work of critical thinking, creative thinking, and disciplined learning can lead only to mental atrophy.  It would be a disturbing surrender of intellectual responsibility and accountability to a machine and its algorithms. 

I was struggling to put my apprehensions about A.I. into words when a friend suggested I ask Chat  GPT to write an  essay on the dangers of outsourcing one’s thinking.  I would only have to tweak it here and there to “make it my own”. That is precisely the problem.  It would not have been “my own,” and I would not have had to wrestle with the questions  bubbling up in my mind.  A.I. would do it for me.  I would get a superficially acceptable answer, and get on with life without troubling myself any longer.   It would be an easy answer relieving me of the need to think.  Would I have learned anything?  Not much.  Would I have gained wisdom? No.  Would my readers know the difference?  Probably not, but it would be a fraud  perpetrated on them by me and A.I.

There is another dire consequence to relying on A.I. to do our thinking for us. It can generate answers to only what is known and has been experienced.   It cannot like Da Vinci imagine a mechanical flying machine in a time when no similar idea was known.  It cannot like Einstein imagine the nature of time and space by watching a clock tower receding from view while in a passing train. That imagination led to the theory of relativity, without which A.I. would not exist.   It can paint a picture in the manner of Rembrandt or Van Gogh, but it cannot become an original Rembrandt or Van Gogh.

The temptation to outsource our thinking leads directly to outsourcing morality, to tell the difference between what is good and right, and what is not. To rely on morality and ethics from A.I. is to enthrone it as a godlike entity, an electronic golden calf. It’s insatiable demands for data, electricity, and routine maintenance become the ritual of sacrifice it demands as the price of directing human life. 

Those who submit to it abdicate too much of their free will and diminish what it means for them to be fully human in relationship with creation and one another. A.I. cannot converse with others over coffee or a beer, indeed it cannot participate in or know about most of what ordinary human life is about. Above all, it cannot substitute for our relationship with the living God through whom what is right and good has been revealed. That revelation has been made known to us through prophets and sages by whom God’s words were spoken.  In other words, through communion between God and humanity in words humanity could understand, but not without thinking, pondering, and testing.  God’s truth is made more fully known in Jesus, the Word of God made flesh, who engaged with us as one of us, demonstrating in word and deed what good and right looks like in real life.  The standards are clear but we are not coerced to live up to  them.  We are challenged to live into them as best we can by the guidance of scripture, tradition and reason in a world of change and conflict.  It demands that we think and act for ourselves as ones responsible to and for each other, and accountable to God alone.

A.I. does not and cannot love us. It did not and cannot bring creation into existence and call it good.  It cannot demonstrate it’s desire to engage with us individually and collectively out of love and for our good.  The living God in whom we trust can, has, and will continue to do.  Let us use A.I. as a tool for the good of humanity but never let it be used in ways that diminish our humanity.