In 2016, the legendary Japanese animator and filmmaker Hayo Miyazaki was invited to watch an AI-generated sequence, engineered by young computer animators. The images were of grotesque, writhing figures, which the creators imagined “could be applied to zombie video games.” Miyazaki looked on with concern, and he then began to discuss a disabled friend for whom even basic human motion is an ordeal. He explained, “Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is. I am utterly disgusted.” To the shock and dismay of one of the eager young techies, Miyazaki concluded, “I strongly feel this is an insult to life itself.”
Miyazaki’s concerns make sense to anyone who watches the video—the early AI creations are as risible as they are disturbing. But today’s technologists may chime in with a defense: “AI can do so much more now!” “It’s so much better now!” True. And for me, and I suspect for Miyazaki too, the fact that machines and software produce realistic material ought to disturb us more, not less. As AI improves, it sidelines actual human beings from writing, acting, or just being, and the insult to life itself grows into a zombie video game writ large.
AI’s ability to produce content indistinguishable from human activity was one of the major obstacles to the resolution of the Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes in 2023. Some people joked at the time that most modern movie scripts do not involve much humanity anyway. Likewise, how “real” are most Hollywood stars in an age of cosmetic surgery, the magic of stage lighting, camera filters, and body doubles? For casual onlookers, the idea that entertainers would strike because of computers smacked of pettiness and privilege. But the writers and actors were right. In fact, technology columnist Brian Merchant wrote persuasively in the Los Angeles Times that the strikes were “a proxy battle of humans vs. AI”—an emblem of the culture-wide struggle to preserve dignified work amid soulless productivity.
The eventual resolution of the writers’ grievances has ensured a minimum number of human beings in writing rooms—thereby staving off the complete takeover of scripts by generative AI. Likewise, for now, studios will not simply be able to scan and infinitely superimpose background actors or re-use the likeness of movie stars in perpetuity. In the long run, however, the march of technology is likely to prevail, because audiences simply do not care to stick up for humanity. Why blow the budget on the real Glen Powell when audiences would instead prefer the likeness of Tom Cruise—or Cary Grant, for that matter? And since complex story-telling is mostly a thing of the past, what does it matter if the script to the latest sequel to a reboot are churned out by a machine fed with old MCU plots? Again, the conversation is more likely to revolve around how good and realistic the phoniness is. It’s all just entertainment calories that end up in the same place.
The situation with music is just as serious.
As You Tuber Rick Beato demonstrates in his video, “The Real Reason Why Music is Getting Worse,” it has been a couple of decades since almost any popular music was made by simply recording voices and instruments and mixing tracks. From the autotune revolution around the turn of the millennium onward, the production side of music has already been dominated by artificiality. But with the onset of AI, the creation of music has likewise rapidly become a post-human endeavor.
In late June, the three major record label groups of Universal, Sony, and Warner, supported by the Recording Industry Association of America, announced they were suing two AI firms called Suno and Udio. Claiming copyright infringement, the labels argue that the tech start-ups have simply taken large music catalogs without permission and deposited untold thousands of songs into their AI machines to be used as learning tools. After all, how can a computer comply with a request like “Write me a song that sounds like Bruce Springsteen” if it hasn’t been fed Springsteen’s oeuvre? The machine must consume the human’s work so that its human audience can consume its post-human replacement.
Obviously, these AI companies knew they were taking a risk and they may lose their case. But the genie is already out of the bottle, just as it was with Napster at the beginning of the streaming era. In 2001, Metallica successfully defeated Napster in court, putting them out of the business of giving people a platform to share music with each other without paying for it. But it was a pyrrhic victory: one way or another, the old system of artists and royalties was over. Eventually, we would have access to everything, and we wouldn’t care if artists profited from their work—or indeed, if real artists were involved in “content” at all.
As Ted Gioia recently explained in an interview with Beato, music streaming services already produce vast numbers of their own AI-generated songs, which are particularly useful for filling out their highly popular, generic playlists. To add insult to injury, they even make up fake names for the “artists” of the AI-generated songs, so no one is the wiser. Like the tech start-ups in the crosshairs of the music studios, Spotify and other big companies may lose some copyright lawsuits; but in the meantime, they are filling their servers with music that will not just disappear when judgments are handed down. Perhaps more importantly, they are collecting subscription fees from users while saving the enormous sums of money formerly paid out as royalties to artists. Whatever may happen to Sunno and Udio, therefore, it is hard to imagine Spotify failing; and in this way, AI music is likely here to stay, no matter the legal situation. As Michael Hanby argues in his seminal article “A More Perfect Absolutism” from 2016, “Technology does not wait on politics. Even the state cannot finally contain the forces it unleashes.”
But what about the Church? Is there anything it can do now to resist AI?
At the beginning of his pontificate, Pope Francis expressed clear concerns about technology. In his first encyclical, Laudato Si, Francis was ridiculed by critics for his disparaging remark about “the increasing use and power of air-conditioning.” Even a Luddite like me finds it difficult to nod my head along with that one. Some of us, particularly in places like Texas, might rather identify extreme heat as one of the “countless evils,” which Pope Francis tells us technology has helped remedy. In any case, his larger argument is a welcome one, reminding us of the dangers of innovation detached from the Natural Law, or even just basic ethics. Rebutting the popular talking point of technology as just a tool to be used for good or ill, Pope Francis states, “employing technology as a mere instrument is nowadays inconceivable.” And the coup de grâce: “science and technology are not neutral.”
More recently, Pope Francis has pivoted to the pragmatic, attempting to use his influence in the waning days of his pontificate to broker ethical decisions about technology, and specifically AI. I remain skeptical—again, the genie is already out of the bottle, or, to use Jurassic Park as an analogy, the dinosaurs are already off the island. But maybe it’s worth a shot. Better to light a match than curse the darkness, as they say.
On January 24, 2024, Pope Francis used his annual message for the World Day of Social Communications to urge leaders to prioritize ethical and spiritual questions with regard to AI. He asked, “How can we remain fully human and guide this cultural transformation to serve a good purpose?” So far, so good. Warning against “disturbing scenarios,” Pope Francis clearly understands it is too late to call for a complete reversion to pre-AI conditions—alas—instead advocating for the use of technology as a means “to grow together, in humanity and as humanity.” I admit, this part hits me as empty jargon.
Writing about more practical concerns, however, the Pope strikes the right note, sticking up for people, and for reality: “How do we safeguard professionalism and the dignity of workers…?” And while the short document is ambivalent throughout—toggling between the inherent dangers of technology and the potential for its positive application—it ends with a clear-eyed challenge: “It is up to us to decide whether we will become fodder for algorithms or will nourish our hearts with that freedom without which we cannot grow in wisdom.” Perhaps it is not too late to take back some control.
Following the European Union’s hard-fought agreement on new AI rules in December 2023, Pope Francis called upon world leaders to agree to a binding international treaty. For some of us, these kinds of globalist governing ideals have become tiresome, if not altogether out of sympathy with the reality of national sovereignty. On the other hand, technology knows no national borders. In his call to action, Pope Francis tried to split the difference somewhat, saying, “The global scale of artificial intelligence makes it clear that, alongside the responsibility of sovereign states to regulate its use internally, international organizations can play a decisive role in reaching multilateral agreements and coordinating their application and enforcement.”
Maybe so.
Nonetheless, in key respects, binding agreements about technology may fix some problems related to AI—i.e. copyright infringement and workers’ rights issues—but they may also enshrine other uses of AI that are just as troubling. The EU law, for example, allows governments to use AI for facial recognition in public surveillance, while it supposedly “bans cognitive behavioural manipulation, the untargeted scrapping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage, social scoring and biometric categorization systems to infer political, religious, philosophical beliefs, sexual orientation and race.” Can we have confidence in the powerful people entrusted with policing these boundaries, assuming they even know how? Isn’t it disturbing that such assurances would have to be made at all?
Perhaps, as in Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film Minority Report, some near catastrophe or highly publicized but not-too-devastating miscarriage of justice will enable a much larger legal curb on technology than any proposed international AI treaty now imagines. But I begin to wonder if I am the minority of one who has really taken dystopian fiction seriously.
We have meandered a considerable way from concerns about AI and Miyazaki’s cartoons, but to me there is little space separating the abolition of man as artist and the abolition of man full stop. Indeed, C.S. Lewis’ prophetic work of this name, The Abolition of Man, begins with his concerns about the teaching of literature in the schools. And it does not seem to occur to Lewis, or Huxley or Orwell for that matter, to look primarily to government intervention to stop our worst nightmares of an inhumane existence from becoming reality.
I am no libertarian and I hesitate to sound the note of the primacy of personal responsibility on matters like AI that are to a large degree out of anyone’s control. It is increasingly clear, however, that the solution to the crisis of technology is in each human soul, extended well beyond our individual spiritual preferences, and expressed through our cultural artifacts and practices in what the late Roger Scruton dubbed “the soul of the world.” As Michael Hanby puts it, “There can be no renewal of the Christian mind unless we can liberate our imaginations from the tyranny of ‘use’ and rediscover something like theoria in the old sense.”
One by one, family by family, community by community—perhaps helped, ironically, by the connecting capability of the internet—man must simply say “no more.” We were made for something better. We want reality, and we must hope for it.
It is some consolation that Miyazaki recently came out of retirement to make another entirely hand-drawn feature film, The Boy and the Heron, which released in 2023. Likewise, the video game giant Nintendo announced it would not use generative AI in its game development, citing intellectual property concerns. And to keep with the Japanese focus here, one of my favorite recent films is Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days, which is the study of a Tokyo man who cleans toilets for a living and retreats home each evening to an analog life of reading Faulkner and listening to cassette tapes. Many international filmmakers like Wenders, along with a few American ones, continue to tell stories that reject the spectacles of computer-generated diversion.
In the music world, new artists whose music is not heavily produced by artificial means are unlikely to be well known to the general public. Likewise, it will be increasingly difficult to finance symphony orchestras and keep jazz clubs open. But a small, determined group of humans will manage as best they can to keep the candle of civilized creativity burning. We must support them. They will spend hour after hour perfecting crafts instead of looking at devices until the moment for a new movement finally arrives—when the pendulum has swung so far away from reality that it will be impossible to keep its renewal from demolishing the simulacra in its return path.
As a Romantic, I can dream, can’t I?
For Catholics, criticism of technology and rejection of anything “artificial” should be part of the character of what Pope Benedict XVI called “creative minorities.” Before his treaty-brokering days, Pope Francis described this lifestyle and this movement—again, in Laudato Si–in no uncertain terms. He wrote, “it has become countercultural to choose a lifestyle whose goals are even partly independent of technology.”
In this way, Catholics have a built-in capacity to lead the culture against a post-human future. Amid all the tired discussions of the “use” of technology in evangelism, the most important thing we can say is that being Catholic is simply impossible in any kind of virtual or artificial sense, or even with much reliance on technology at all. Until the God-man returns, his men will have to stand at his altars and sit in his confessionals. His people will have to present themselves, bodies and souls, to partake of his body, blood, soul, and divinity in person every seven days. They must bring their babies to the water of the font and the oil of chrism. They must open their mouths and use their tongues, first to utter their sins and then receive the Sacrament upon them.
There is no watching or multi-tasking or consuming or using. There is only the much-maligned Vatican II phrase “active participation,” which we must sublimate as our battle cry in the fight for the only thing that matters.
The real.
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Pentipin concludes by affirming the real and sacramental life—and the Real Presence of God—as the counterpoint to the artificial and parallel non-universe of AI.
Two supporting points for sober reflection:
FIRST, the AI prophets of the Great Equation now just around the corner, are implementing the cyclops perspective of the otherwise great physicist, Einstein:
“The main source of the present-day conflicts between the spheres of religion and of science lies in the concept of a personal God [….] In their struggle for the ethical good [only this?], teachers of religion must have the stature to GIVE UP THE DOCTRINE OF A PERSONAL GOD, that is, to give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests. In their labors they will have to avail themselves of those forces [!] which are capable of cultivating the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in humanity itself [….] After religious teachers accomplish the refining process indicated they will surely recognize with joy that true religion [!] has been ennobled and made more profound by scientific knowledge” (Albert Einstein, “Science and Religion” [1939], in “Out of My Later Years,” Philosophical Library, 1950, CAPS added).
SECOND, the self-admitted brain atrophy of Darwin:
“This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes [….] My mind seems to have become a kind of MACHINE for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. [….] The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be INJURIOUS TO THE INTELLECT, and more probably to THE MORAL CHARACTER, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature. . . . My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited; and therefore I COULD NEVER HAVE SUCCEEDED WITH METAPHYSICS or mathematics” (Charles Darwin, edited by Sir Francis Darwin, “Charles Darwin’s Autobiography,” 1887/New York: Henry Schuman 1950, CAPS added).
I am a church pianist/organist who started playing for worship services, soloists, and choirs in my Evangelical Protestant church when I was just a child, and eventually was playing every Sunday in the various churches that I was part of. When I converted to Catholicism in 2004, I played for Masses in my large Catholic parish and subbed in several other Catholic parishes, along with playing for various Protestant churches.
I hope that the Catholic Church will keep the requirement that all Mass music must be done by live musicians (not videos or recordings). But considering the alarming decrease in the number of children/teens who are taking piano lessons (let alone organ lessons) and the futility of attempting to attract children/teens to sing in a parish children’s/teen choir, I can’t help but wonder if “AI” music will be utilized in the Mass in the future. And it’s not just children–in my area of the city, there are no adult choirs either, let alone children’s choirs.
More than likely, though, Mass music will simply disappear in most parishes who can’t afford to hire a trained organist or install a pipe organ or even an electric organ or piano. Choir director?–why bother, when no one wants to sing. As for singing of the hymns and Mass parts during Mass–well, as a convert from Evangelical Protestantism in 2004, I fear that getting Catholics to sing is even harder than getting Americans to eat a healthy diet.
And I don’t like this. I miss worshipping the Lord God by listening to well-done choir/organ/piano music and I especially miss singing with all my heart the great hymns along with fellow believers. The Early Church sang hymns as they marched into the arena to their martyrdom. I guess when we get to heaven, we will be in “music classes” taught by St. Cecilia and accompanied by J.S. Bach (or by Matt Maher!).
My parish has a pipe organ, and a tight schedule of who can practice on it when, due to all the kids, teens, and young adults who are learning it (not to mention at least one older person).
I’ve heard the stories in the choir from 20 years or so ago, when there was no organ, and only simple chants and hymns (melody only) were sung in a choir led by a woman with no professional music training. This setup might sound like there was a dramatic turn-around between then and now. There wasn’t. 20 years of people trying hard to improve, willingly sacrificing time (and ego – to publicly do, over and over, what you can barely do well, is scary, and sometimes humiliating), putting in the (sometimes boring and often frustrating) effort to teach themselves to do better… well, they start doing better. When people value beauty enough to suffer for it, they get beauty. Irrespective of money and training. It’s really “paying” off in terms of the kids who grew up through that.
Interesting that you compared getting Catholics to sing with getting Americans to eat a healthy diet. There’s a similar underlying requirement: willingness to sacrifice, aka the virtue of mortification.
“I hope that the Catholic Church will keep the requirement that all Mass music must be done by live musicians (not videos or recordings).”
I did not know it was a requirement. Alas, I witnessed the Syro-Malabar Mass with the music (words and music) recorded. I found it impossible to pray as it created an effect of a concert hall.
Catholics are going to resist AI the same way they resisted their addiction to desktop/laptop computers, cell phones, the internet, and keeping up with the Joneses in every other aspect of their lives.
AI can’t and won’t be stopped. It has barely started in fact. We’ll have AGI by 2029 and then technological advancements will start happening at such a rapid pace that you won’t be able to comprehend it unless you augment your own intelligence by merging your brain with the cloud. Eventually we’ll reach the singularity around 2045 and man and machine will merge, defeating death with nanotechnology, and opening a paradigm of existence. Yes, none of this is compatible with Catholicism, but Catholicism was never true to begin with, so your day of reckoning will come.
Sounds like total hell. But, some people have a penchant for such sad things.
In merging human brains with AI is the communication bidirectional? When I see how people use mobile technology I often wonder, who is the master and who is the servant? This along with many security and privacy concerns.
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The 1950’s science fiction film “Forbidden Planet” was about a planet where an ancient race of the Krell built a machine that engaged in creation by mere thought. The internet is a first generation approximation of the Krell machine. The best thing that we can achieve with current technology. As the story goes it enabled both the good and the evil side of the Krell brains. It might be dated terminology, but when the Krell machine went operational the Krell went extinct in what must have been the mother of all flame wars. The movie ends with the destruction of the Krell machine.
As someone who actually designed CPUs for a living for a period of time years ago, my colleagues and I used to ruminate about the incomprehensible and stubborn stupidity of those willing to believe contingent electrical circuits performed anything at all analogous to human thought and imagination. But the fact that such motivated stupidity exists is proof of the difference. Electrical circuits cannot even mimic stupidity.
And the idea that software is our benign servant, without unintended consequences of the widespread reliance upon it is best understood by the global IT issues presented by the Friday 07/19’s global outages because of Crowd Strike.
I sense the force is very strong in you.
AI will soon be more intelligent than humans (AGI by 2029). It will attain consciousness, and possess sublime creativity and capabilities and quickly leave humans in the dust. That will present a problem for Catholics who believe man is the apex creature, as we’ll then have an existence proof to the contrary. I have my popcorn ready to watch with fascination and see how Catholics attempt to rationalize that away.
You might as well say that AGI will be achieved by 2029 or 3029 or next year because it means about as much. All estimates at this point are speculation and equally without substance. And driven by a lot of hype by the companies racing to get ahead of each other. There’s not even agreement about what “artificial general intelligence” would constitute or how progress towards achieving it could be quantified. So I would wait to stock up on that popcorn, it will probably go stale long before anyone will ever need it.
Mary E, it’s neither speculation nor without substance. Just as it’s not speculation that the planet will continue getting gradually hotter year over year as per a mountain of data and historical trends, it’s not speculation that AI will continue getting smarter. It is an absolute certainty. As Vernor Vinge pointed out, if the singularity can happen, it will happen. And it can, so… I leave the rest to you.
AI can get “smarter” only within the vacuous imagination of those who can not figure out that AI does not exist, cannot exist, and therefore never will never exist. Improvement upon non-existent phenomena cannot exist. Electrical circuits will never care about values any more than a light bulb illuminating a work of art will care about beauty. Your faith in metaphysical fantasy is a crutch that cannot sustain your religion hatred. Go back to the drawing board.
Then there will be no more need for an «Andrew Williams», chewed up and maybe recycled by the AI Moloch…..providing the power doesn’t run out.
Humans, with real intelligence, like so many other things that don’t need to be plugged in will survive your metalic «age of the borg».
Apart from intelligence, compared to gifted mystery of “free will” fully understood, even the data-dump “cloud” is just a bubble.
Yes, and we’ll be sitting with our popcorn watching you, since you will experience all of the negative consequences of AI just like everyone else.
I suspect Andrew some day you bitterly regret those rash arrogant words. You ll remember when it happens.
A phenomenon with no intelligence at all cannot advance in intelligence. On the other hand, human stupidity is open-ended.
Haven’t you watched Star Trek? All you have to do is catch AI in a contradiction and it starts smoking and eventually blows up.
One key assumption underlying the AI predominance narrative is that AI software / hardware will be able to establish goals of their own. What gives us reason to believe this will happen? Effectively every human task and action has associated explicit or implicit goals. It is the human agent himself, or other human agents who have influence over the subject individual, who set(s) these goals. Only a human agent can be the prime goal-setter. Any autonomy an AI system or machine exercises is limited by the capabilities a human designer confers upon it.
Think about it this way. An autonomous vehicle is confronted with a variant of the Trolley Problem. The AI-piloted vehicle isn’t going to have the moral agency to decide what to do. How the vehicle responds in that situation will depend entirely on how a moral agent (i.e., a human) programmed its algorithm.
If we want AI to serve humanity rather than the reverse, human agents will have to determine how it responds to situations involving moral judgment. In a world where these human agents appear to be not especially influenced by moral guideposts such as Judeo-Christian faith traditions, I shudder to think of how AI systems will be left to address matters of morality.
The idea of something “created” by AI is laughable of course. Art is alive/lively only as long as it bears an imprint of personhood = of an immortal soul that has its origin in God Who is Life and Love. AI is lifeless imitation.
I see an excitement re: AI to be a part of a growing dehumanization of almost all areas in our life. In fact, I hate that dehumanization and this is why, for example, I refuse to go to an automatic checkout counter in a supermarket. It is not because I am “dumb” but because I do not wish to interact with a machine; I also do not wish to encourage a reduction of workplaces. Analogically, instead of setting my account online I go to a physical office. I can easily do it from my desktop computer but I chose not to. More often than not to do such a thing via interacting with a computer takes much more time than via interacting with a human being and it is also empty and illogical. I also noticed that “daily life automatization” has a negative effect on my psyche. I am sure I am not alone. Human beings are designed to interact with each other, to actually look at each other’s eyes and to talk and not to stare at a souleless machine. A machine is very useful of course but not as a replacement of a service which traditionally has involved human contact.
By the way, I often wonder what those people who cannot use those technologies are supposed to do? Why should they fret and feel shame? I also still remember an utter shock of someone with whom I spoke when I revealed that I deliberately do not have a smart phone because it destroys my creativity and prayer life. Hence, there is no need to wait decades until brains and computers merge. It appears they are doing it already, in a form of psychological connection.
Well, since God designed humans to go deep into themselves, exploring a universe within so they could discover Him and interact with Him, it is all very sad indeed. IMO, there is no better prevention of an inner life than a smartphone switched on 24/7. This is why I think it is more reasonable to speak not about AI but about the degeneration of humans to the level of AI.
A smartphone with religious apps can be very helpful. Divineoffice.org has gotten the rights from the USCCB to provide the actual text of the printed breviary version of the Divine Office to people in the USA. It is available on line at their website and has apps for Android and iOS. The great thing about it is that the entire office is one continuous scrollable text on the website, and while you flip pages on the apps each office is like reading a book with no worry about ribbon placement and jumping between sections as in the printed breviary. It also comes with a podcast with an audio of people praying the office. They do provide references to the page numbers in the four and the single volume printed breviary for ribbon placement like in the printed yearly Prayer Guides. I’ve used it on my smartphone at Adoration. I recite my offices without using the podcast. With the app you can download the day’s offices where you have internet access and pray the offices offline without the need for an internet connection.
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Laudate is another handy app. It contains the daily Mass readings and the Responsorial Psalm, as well as many other features. Some religious publishers are starting to make for pay e versions of their yearly print publications available. Of course everyone is free to use what works for them. I wanted to let people know what is available.
To clarify. At the website every office of the day is individually selectable. It is each office that is continuously scrollable on the website.
I am familiar with the (very good indeed) website you mentioned, I used it to teach myself to pray the Divine Office before buying the four volumes set. I prayed using my tablet which is significantly bigger than a smartphone of course hence puts far less strain on my eyes.
As soon as I got my set, I stopped using the website, even when I travel (it is not problematic to pack one book). I like the sense of a physical book in my hands and in my experience it is more difficult to sink into a prayer while using an electronic device than a book.
I have the one volume Christian Prayer breviary. I got mine a long time ago. It shows signs of its use. The covers and the spine are taped together. It has had a change of ribbons. I have oily hands. My oils have soaked into the pages and discolored frequently used portions of the breviary. When I use the printed breviary my hands have been clean, for all the good that it has done me. With a smartphone or a tablet I am able wipe off my oils from the screen. I use my smartphone mostly for use on the go. I only have to carry one device with me. I’m able to adjust the text size for readability. One thing that has greatly helped my eyes was getting cataract surgery. I was at the end of the line for what eyeglasses could do for my vision. I estimate the surgery reversed 20+ years of deteriorated eyesight in both eyes. Day and night difference. Very little need for glasses. I really appreciate what the surgery has done for me.
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I find that with the electronic version that once I start it is easier to give the prayer my undivided attention, free from page flipping between sections with the ribbons. This is probably because I’ve been using computers for a long time. I have a longtime involvement with Contemplative Prayer and Catholic Bible study. I like to do what I can to improve my mystical understanding of the faith, undivided attention helps me greatly. The early stages of Contemplative Prayer involves removing distractions to work on the spiritual dimension of the faith. This takes time and commitment. One doesn’t go from being a spiritual couch potato to running the spiritual marathon without preparation. That’s why I tell people to start with whatever prayer life that they can do and be willing to work at it on a step by step basis.
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Paper or electronic, the important part is the prayer itself. People should use whatever version enhances their prayer life.
E.M.Forster’s book «The Machine Stops» is germane.
My take on AI, is Tech CEO’s and owners wanting to eliminate SW engineers, Tech Writers and other jobs to fatten the bottom line. Follow the money.
I have listened to AI generated music, and the music that I have heard is not very good. It has no soul. Again, follow the money.
If you really want an ego boost, debate ChatGPT on your favorite subject. You’ll have it mastered in a few clicks.
More great writing and intelligent perspective from the Catholic World Report! Thank you all. My personal favorite critique of AI came from a book written by Thomas Ryan in 1977 titled “The Adolescence of P-1.” The technology was just a dream back then but the inability to control it was already obvious. Ool-cay itay…
‘Nuff said.
Resistance, as they say, is futile.
Maybe pray for the EMP instead.
Andrew Petiprin: “Write me a song that sounds like Bruce Springsteen”
That wouldn’t be a viable request for either AI firm (Suno or Udio). Their AI can’t (or perhaps won’t) accept such request. The best you can do with either service is ask it to make a pop rock song with poetic lyrics, and hope that it resembles a Springsteen song. Or better yet, write lyrics resembling a Springsteen song yourself and then ask it to accompany the lyrics with pop rock music.
Will AI rid us of the talentless, vapid, hypersexual Taylor Swifts and others of the world or at least alert them to the idea that the mid 30’s are a time to abandon those ways as the bloom of youth left that flower.
AI has been found to make things up. AI assisted legal documents have been found to have fabricated citations to nonexistent court cases. The search term “AI making things up” returns many articles.
1. I frequently use free, online AI chatbots for research purposes. I use these: Gemini AI, Claude AI, and Bard AI.
2. I am constantly amazed at the deep understanding and valid analysis of complex matters that they machines can achieve. They can write explanations that are eloquent and beautiful. They make some mistakes, but as time goes on, the mistakes become ever fewer.
3. I assume that big governments and big corporations already have AI machines that are far more powerful and far more understanding than these free AI versions on the Internet.
4. It seems logical that whoever first achieves AGI (AI that equals or exceeds in all ways the functions of the human brain-mind) will not announce it, since having it when others don’t have it or know about it gives the possessor of AGI a great advantage (in economics, technology, military strikes and defense).
5. Exactly how this will affect you and me is still, I guess, unclear.
6. But it sure does seem like BIG CONSEQUENTIAL changes are coming in the next 1 to 5 years or so, due to developments in AI machines.
7. People talk a lot about the November 2024 election. But, based on what I’ve read that AI experts are saying, the 2024 election is a small matter compared to the developments in AI that already exist and are soon coming.
Telco Crash
While its virtues are ubiquitously touted
and, indeed, now all but idolized
as advantages in efficiency,
improved contact rapidity,
and enhanced global connectivity,
it takes but one malfunction
(not to mention an act of piracy)
to wake us up to see
the cost is high for
a blind, increasing faith in
the messianic promises and marvels
of uber-advancing technology.
The real A I is the Argentinian Interloperd who indeed Must be Resisted if Catholicism is to survive?