Thanks for these thoughts! They've jogged something in my mind: why do we need to investigate or critique along this angle at all? In other words, does it matter if it's AI generated or not? Why not just examine material along the lines of it being good/helpful or bad/unhelpful? I wonder how much of this aignosis is a symptom of these early days of gen-AI. It's a new-ish thing so we are looking around for the new thing. Curious what you think!
This is a good question. It depends on the seat you are sitting in. In my seat I don’t have the luxury of taking a purely utilitarian approach to content. Many fields have that luxury and that is fine for them. There are a lot of things that AI cannot do from a religious standpoint - it has no actual experiences, it has no actual stories, it has no actual suffering, it has no actual joy, it has no Holy Spirit, it cannot do any of the “one another’s in the New Testament, it can’t visit me in the hospital, it can’t administer the sacraments… Does that mean there can’t be incredibly helpful or valuable things that come from the outputs? No, there often is and especially if you know how to harness and prompt. That said, I don’t think that AI can create wisdom, it can only mimic or approximate wisdom. Can approximated wisdom educate or edify? Perhaps. But wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord. There is no fear of the Lord in any machine, it is not capable of that. I want wisdom that comes from embodied people who fear the Lord and possess the Holy Spirit. I don’t mind getting knowledge from AI but I am not looking to AI for wisdom. So, in my seat I am always looking to publish content that has some wisdom component to it. For those reasons, I am looking for distinctly human perspectives. For an even more significant deep dive on this (and maybe I will try to flesh this out some more in a future post) I go back to John Frame’s tri-perspectivalism. If you go and read Frame’s epistemology you can see that there are the normative (head/thinking), situational (hands/doing), and existential (heart/feeling) perspectives and that these things are evident in humans because we are made in God’s image and He is triune and we end up reflecting that Tri-Unity in the unique thinking/feeling/doing ways. LLMs can be pretty strong on the normative perspective but are very truncated in their abilities on the situational and existential perspectives.
Ah yes, I agree that in a spiritual context, it's worth engaging in this thinking. One should not be using AI to write a presentation or paper on discipleship, for example, for all the reasons you spell out. Total agreement there! In my seat of policy proposals, writing about ideas, etc. it's less of a concern--to me at least.
This is the tricky thing about this subject. There are certain areas where we ought to be maximalist and other areas that trend the other end of the spectrum. The broader public doesn't typically grasp the nuances, nor do have they had the opportunity to develop their own "decision tree" about where to land on this use case vs that use case.
Until we have more time for these things to sort themselves out and broader society to develop more nuanced perspectives, I suspect we find that this subject remains polarizing and perhaps very polarizing. There is great need for K-12 educators in particular to understand how it all works, what works great and what doesn't, and what engaging with it looks like in primary and secondary ed.
Thanks for these thoughts! They've jogged something in my mind: why do we need to investigate or critique along this angle at all? In other words, does it matter if it's AI generated or not? Why not just examine material along the lines of it being good/helpful or bad/unhelpful? I wonder how much of this aignosis is a symptom of these early days of gen-AI. It's a new-ish thing so we are looking around for the new thing. Curious what you think!
This is a good question. It depends on the seat you are sitting in. In my seat I don’t have the luxury of taking a purely utilitarian approach to content. Many fields have that luxury and that is fine for them. There are a lot of things that AI cannot do from a religious standpoint - it has no actual experiences, it has no actual stories, it has no actual suffering, it has no actual joy, it has no Holy Spirit, it cannot do any of the “one another’s in the New Testament, it can’t visit me in the hospital, it can’t administer the sacraments… Does that mean there can’t be incredibly helpful or valuable things that come from the outputs? No, there often is and especially if you know how to harness and prompt. That said, I don’t think that AI can create wisdom, it can only mimic or approximate wisdom. Can approximated wisdom educate or edify? Perhaps. But wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord. There is no fear of the Lord in any machine, it is not capable of that. I want wisdom that comes from embodied people who fear the Lord and possess the Holy Spirit. I don’t mind getting knowledge from AI but I am not looking to AI for wisdom. So, in my seat I am always looking to publish content that has some wisdom component to it. For those reasons, I am looking for distinctly human perspectives. For an even more significant deep dive on this (and maybe I will try to flesh this out some more in a future post) I go back to John Frame’s tri-perspectivalism. If you go and read Frame’s epistemology you can see that there are the normative (head/thinking), situational (hands/doing), and existential (heart/feeling) perspectives and that these things are evident in humans because we are made in God’s image and He is triune and we end up reflecting that Tri-Unity in the unique thinking/feeling/doing ways. LLMs can be pretty strong on the normative perspective but are very truncated in their abilities on the situational and existential perspectives.
Ah yes, I agree that in a spiritual context, it's worth engaging in this thinking. One should not be using AI to write a presentation or paper on discipleship, for example, for all the reasons you spell out. Total agreement there! In my seat of policy proposals, writing about ideas, etc. it's less of a concern--to me at least.
Yes.
This is the tricky thing about this subject. There are certain areas where we ought to be maximalist and other areas that trend the other end of the spectrum. The broader public doesn't typically grasp the nuances, nor do have they had the opportunity to develop their own "decision tree" about where to land on this use case vs that use case.
Until we have more time for these things to sort themselves out and broader society to develop more nuanced perspectives, I suspect we find that this subject remains polarizing and perhaps very polarizing. There is great need for K-12 educators in particular to understand how it all works, what works great and what doesn't, and what engaging with it looks like in primary and secondary ed.