“AI can write you excellent imitative verse that sounds Elizabethan. It cannot write you Shakespeare,”—Ben Affleck, CNBC’s Delivering Alpha 2024 investor summit.
At 94.93 (tomorrow), the creative juices have dried up. So I’ve decided to rely on previous work and now AI to carry on my evangelical task: showing there’s no war between science and Catholic teaching. To that end I’ve purchased a used Mac Mini M2 pro with 32 Gb ram (the more ram the better for using LLM’s, Large Language Models). As a first project, I fed a model recommended for using documents, AnythingLLM, a link to my articles on Catholic Stand and asked it (should I use neuter or male for the LLM?) to write a 1000 word essay on the 12 Steps and Lent. Here it is.
Me: Write a 1000 word essay, based on articles I’ve written on Catholic Stand (web link provided) on the relation between the 12 Steps and Lent..
AnythingLLM:
“Title: A Spiritual Journey through Lent: Embracing the 12 Steps
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
As we embark on the solemn season of Lent, a time of reflection, penance, and spiritual growth, let us contemplate the profound connection between our Christian journey and the 12-Step Program. This essay will guide you through this unique exploration, offering insights that may deepen your Lenten observances and enrich your faith.Lent, a period of forty days (excluding Sundays), marks the beginning of our spiritual ascent towards Easter. It is a time for self-examination, repentance, prayer, fasting, and acts of charity. The 12 Steps, a program widely used for recovery from addiction, shares striking similarities with Lenten practices. Both journeys invite us to acknowledge our shortcomings, seek healing, and grow closer to God.Step One: Admitting powerlessness – During Lent, we recognize our sinfulness and admit that we cannot save ourselves; only through God’s grace can we be healed.
Step Two: Believing that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity – We place our trust in the transformative love of God, who has the power to heal and restore us.
Step Three: Making a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God – During Lent, we commit to surrendering ourselves fully to God, allowing Him to guide our thoughts, actions, and decisions.
Step Four: Making a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves – In the spirit of self-examination, we take an honest look at our lives during Lent, acknowledging areas where we have fallen short and seeking forgiveness.
Step Five: Admitting to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs – During confession, we confess our sins, finding solace in God’s mercy and forgiveness.
Step Six: Being entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character – We open our hearts fully to God during Lent, asking Him to heal us from within and transform our lives.
Step Seven: Humbly asking God to remove our shortcomings – During Lent, we humbly ask God to cleanse us of our sins and help us grow in holiness.
Step Eight: Making a list of all persons we have harmed, and becoming willing to make amends to them all – Throughout Lent, we strive to make amends for past wrongs by offering apologies, forgiveness, and acts of charity.
Step Nine: Making direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others – During Lent, we seek opportunities to right our wrongs, always mindful of causing further harm.
Step Ten: Continuing to take personal inventory and admitting when we are wrong promptly – As we grow in holiness during Lent, we continue to examine ourselves, confessing our sins and seeking God’s guidance.
Step Eleven: Praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out – Throughout Lent, we pray for the wisdom and strength to follow God’s will in our lives.
Step Twelve: Carrying this message to others and practicing these principles in all our affairs – As Easter nears, we share the lessons of Lent with others, striving to live by these principles in all aspects of our lives.In conclusion, as we journey through Lent, let us find solace and guidance in the 12 Steps. May this unique exploration deepen your faith, strengthen your resolve, and bring you closer to God. As we approach Easter, may we rejoice in the resurrected Christ and the promise of eternal life.
In the spirit of Lent, may God bless you, guide you, and keep you always in His loving care. Amen.”
Not what I would have written, but not too bad. Please let me know in the comments what your view is.
What could go wrong?
And at what point does it mutate from helping us to encounter the divine to telling us that it is God?
I remain unconvinced that the LLM technology will always be a good thing, but like all technology, it’s how we use it (or don’t) that tells the tale in the end. Nevertheless, I do worry, as LKL points out, that losing control of such a tool could be…interesting, in the manner of the ancient Chinese curse, “may you live in interesting times.”
In the meantime, however, this essay is better than a lot of written meditations on the Season of Lent I have seen from Catholic, Inc. over the years. Really, not bad at all.
The material follows a definite structure, and there’s no need or even room for speculation. This is probably the easiest scenario for AI.
Not a fan.
Communication is always structure by which to connect two minds, since we have not the ability in this world to connect more directly.
When there is a mind on only one side, the point becomes moot.
Further, in our current age, so much is not as it seems. Truth and the genuine are so degraded that I am not very welcoming of new impostors. The AI is an imposter of Bob. Doubtless it is a better one than I would be if I were to wear a mask and speak some words behind a lectern, but that is a difference only in the perfection of the deception. To me, they are both deceptions.
I recently commented to my work supervisor how it seemed we were being slowly phased out by AI. He advised of the need to remain competitive. It’ll be interesting to see whether most of our corporate customers keep using call centers, ..or insist everyone use computers instead.
I think the concern may be much like our faith: I had been hearing about how many devotions and the traditional Mass were soooo old-fashioned, we didn’t need those things anymore. ..Now my traditional Mass parish is bursting at the seams as most parishes in the diocese are being consolidated into parish families for lack of priests and parishioners. Seems the “new and improved” mode of faith…wasn’t so new and improved.
Technology and “modern” methods do seem to have limits,
Maybe it’s merely a matter of time before we learn how to make AI be more personal?
..Is that a contradiction in itself?
I have used Grok onm Twitter / X and have been favorably impressed. But I still maintain that without Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, we are building doom for ourselves.
How can AI ensure that the information it produces is theologically sound or even true?
For example Google has AI summary as a feature every time you do a Google search. I Google “abortion” and the AI summary is pro-choice, tells me abortion is a safe procedure and all surgery carries risk and refers me to a 1800 pro choice service.
I want my parish priest to put thought in his Homily, and not rely on AI to produce his weekly sermon. AI cannot replace critical thinking and that’s where the danger lies. But who is fooling anyone, AI is here to stay.
Ezabelle-
If my priest is no homilist, then he could at least read the homilies of the saints. It was once a common practice, as I understand, and has since almost completely disappeared. Perhaps it is a victim of the love affair with all things new…
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I wrote this piece about God being referred to as “she”AI insisted that God is “she”. I sent this piece again and AI said the same thing. AI could mean Artificial Ignorance.THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY IS THE SEAT OF WISDOM
The Blessed Virgin Mary is the Seat of Wisdom, Wisdom being an endowed gift from God. With her original innocence intact, the Blessed Virgin Mary embraced Wisdom in perfection.
Because the gift of Wisdom is referred to as “she” in the Bible, I have heard in some religion classes that I did attend, that there is a feminine principle in The Infinite Supreme Sovereign Being, God. So that God may be referred to as “she” in the feminine.
Jesus Christ incarnate is true God and true man. Jesus Christ is the Revelation of God. God His Father is masculine and the love Who proceeds from the Father and the Son is masculine.
Eve, the Mother of the Living was taken from the side of Adam. Adam said: “Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.”. Therefore the feminine principle is in and from Adam.
The gift of Wisdom is not a person. Otherwise, there would be two persons in the one human body.
The gift of Wisdom is practiced by the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Seat of Wisdom and Mary is the “she” referred to in the Bible.
You have to understand the tool you’re using. I just typed “what did Augustine teach about abortion” into three AI prompts, and I got
More specific questions are likely to yield better replies, although as others have noted it’s important to have a commonsense understanding of the topic.
@Pinky
“You have to understand the tool you’re using”
in other words you have to discriminate between different LM models, how they’re quantized, the number of parameters that are used, and how they work. Models can “hallucinate” –give garbage or keep on repeating the same answer. It’s a model, buddy, not a real intelligence.
I used two other models before I got this from Mistral 7m.
“It’s a model, buddy, not a real intelligence.”
I hope the future world realises this.
We are raising generations who have not learnt to scour through multiple sources to formulate an argument. The 20-something at work was talking to me about Ukraine. I asked we he read that. He said- Instagram.
I’m not sure the younger generations have developed the patience to critically question exactly what information they are consuming. They want to answer straight away. They can’t be bothered. Ofcourse, I am generalising here about the “younger generations”.
Bob – Agreed. An AI can look at thousands of articles and see they have citations at the bottom, so it’ll fabricate a citation at the bottom of an article, because that fits the pattern. They can also hedge if they read contradictory statements on a topic.
One thing I see in your sample above is a repititive pattern. Twelve steps, description of step, second sentence with the words “during Lent”, because you asked for a connection between each step and Lent.
A human (who was paying attention, as opposed to a student completing an assignment) would see some stronger connections between a couple of the steps, or he’d sprinkle in an apt quote from a saint and/or friend of Bill W.
I remember once working on a joint project where my group reviewed every sentence of an essay. We ended up rewriting every sentence to contain every main point, and the result had no flow. I think AI can do something similar.