As I write, Christianity Today have just published an article extolling the use of ChatGPT for Pastors in their preparation for preaching and Bible studies. It has gone viral for all of the wrong reasons.
I am, as you’ll have picked up, committed to ‘cold takes’, so I’m naturally wary about deciding that you really need to read my thoughts on this subject. By the time you are reading this no one will care about the article. CT will either have published a retraction, or a counter-article, or ignored it altogether [they ignored it].
As such taking apart the article isn’t useful to you. It’s not hard anyway, it’s really bad.
I’ve written a little before on the church and social media, including some thinking on the nature of tools and the way that they form us. My concern is that the few Christian engagements with generative AI I’ve seen are very surface level whether positive (look at this neat thing it can do!) or negative (actually the thing it can do isn’t neat). There are some Christian academic engagements too, but I don’t they’re getting much exposure and all the ones I’ve seen are very positive.
I am not very positive. Call me a Luddite but Paul Kingsnorth’s call to airstrike the datacentres (smash the looms) appeals to me. It wouldn’t work, of course, open source versions of the language models are available so it’s in the water. Kingsnorth’s thought feels as surface level (demons, innit) on a first read, though as you engage with his thought you realise what he’s saying is more layered than that.
Generative AI is likely here to stay. Governments don’t seem particularly interested in legislating against it and the genie is by now firmly out of the bottle. I work at a University which is slowly grappling with what this means for—in the school I work in—largely essay-based assessment. The nature of the institution means that thorough responses will be slow, but there’s a general feeling that students need to be taught how to live in an AI world and so some positive engagement with the technologies during their studies would be beneficial.
I suspect many churches feel the same, technology is a tool, so turn it to good use. I’ve written enough on the ways that everything moulds us that I suspect regular readers are expecting me to say that nothing is neutral. Everything teaches. The question is what these technologies teach.
I hope there’s lots of thoughtful engagement out there that I’ve missed beyond The New Atlantis, and it would be great if readers could point me to it. This isn’t quite me engaging with the technologies, but rather a brief attempt to map the field of discussion. I think there are three lenses we need to be exploring this through, the practical, the liturgical, and the spiritual. I’ve currently only seen practical discussions.
Practical Lens
The practical lens is when we consider Generative AI as a tool and assess whether or not it’s a useful tool to us. Anyone I’ve seen be positive about AI is thinking about it on this level.
The Christianity Today article I linked at the top describes ways that ChatGPT could be useful to pastors. It largely argues along the lines of efficiency, it can make a pastor more efficient. I don’t think efficiency is something pastors should prize and we’ve misunderstood what being a pastor is if we think so. Churches aren’t efficient. The incarnation isn’t efficient. The cosmic economy isn’t efficient and if it were we would all be dead.
This is a practical argument against AI, that what it does isn’t useful to pastors or preachers. This doesn’t preclude that a useful tool might be published in the future.
This sort of argument is treating the tool as neutral. It’s important to consider utility when exploring a new technology, but I contend it isn’t all we should consider.
Liturgical Lens
Everything forms us, everything has a liturgy, in the James K. A. Smith sense of the term. Habits are one of the more powerful contributors to our social imaginary. They shape the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and therefore the sorts of categories that we find we think in. Our stories don’t only shape the way we think but they tend to end up shaping what we even can think. We should be greatly concerned by them.
I’m not familiar enough with these language models to exhaustively spell this out, but my initial concerns are that they:
- Change the way we interact with information much as a screen does compared to a page
- If they replace human work, change the way we think about humans are and do
- Change the way we understand discourse, conversation, and communication
- Change the way we learn and work
- Alter the way we perceive reality
Which is to say that I fear they dehumanise us. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve invented something that did, in fact there’s a long road from Babel that leads there. Inevitably any task we turn the tech too is itself reshaped in our minds. Search engines in our pockets have changed the way we talk to each other, the way we remember, and the way we wonder. I’m not convinced any of these are healthy developments.
My argument here is not fleshed out very well, which is because I think it requires more thought. I suspect you could attempt a positively framed liturgical argument where you acknowledge the way it will change us and suggest it’s for the better. It’s important that we talk on this level though, things are not flat containers of meaning, they affect and rewrite the web of meaning of everything connected to them as well.
We could in this same breath remember Albert Borgmann’s distinction between devices and instruments. Generative AI is a classic device. It is, in that sense, magic. I have this strange idea that maybe magic isn’t a good idea.
Spiritual Lens
Buckle in, this is where it gets a little weird. We should also think about these technologies spiritually. By which I mean, what is the spiritual import of them. This is where the “demons, innit” argument would sit.
I suspect many would scoff at that, I—cultured elite that I am—want to scoff as well. Except, this is operating through a lens we need to look through. We tend to avoid looking at the demonic nature of many of our technologies, or of our uses of them.
I’ve seen some respond to the more popular level of these arguments by suggesting that it’s a human technology made by humans and suggesting that it’s demons makes you look hopelessly naïve. It’s a language model, not an intelligence.
That last point is true, which makes the name ironic at least. The problem is that this is the wrong sort of argument in response. It assumes that everything is only one thing. That’s, broadly, modernism 101. Everything is one thing and none of them are spiritual, apart from the spiritual things which aren’t things. This is why people struggle with symbols, because symbols are always at least two things at the same time.
The theological problem here is ‘dualism,’ an unwarranted separation between the spiritual and physical (or between church and world).
What we need to do is consider how technologies are used by spiritual forces on us. Is AI an ‘actual’ demon? I suspect this is a category mistake. However, when I am using AI am I interacting with the Powers who are influencing me and influencing the technology? Almost certainly. The world is riddled with spiritual powers, the majority of which seem to have rebelled against the Lord. If the air is full of demons who hate you, why wouldn’t AI be?
This line of argumentation doesn’t automatically lead to ‘burn it with fire,’ but we need to—along with the other lenses—consider how this technology interacts with the Powers and Principalities, and therefore how it affects us spiritually. We should be thinking about this a lot more.
We don’t because even if we think it we sound bonkers and we don’t like that, and I fear we are so catechised by the world around us we aren’t entirely sure if this is actually true. That level of doubt is what Charles Taylor calls the Secular Age. We may decide that some uses are relatively safe for Christians, but we can’t dismiss the concern as though it’s silly.
Thinking it through
I don’t think any of my arguments so far tell you enough about the technology to tell you how to respond. My own reactions are more visceral than they are thoughtful. I hope they give you some pause about using them without careful thought. I do think we need to continue to look through all three lenses and churches are going to need to think this through. It could be a disaster on at least the level of giving smartphones to children, or it could be a storm in a teacup. The technology is likely here to stay, so what does that mean for the world?
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