An intriguing dialogue about “Catholic” artificial intelligence is going on right now.
I first came across it last month when New Polity magazine editor Marc Barnes published an article called Delete Magisterium AI, asking the CEO of said artificial intelligence platform to, well, delete it.
Magisterium AI’s creator, Matthew Harvey Sanders, published a rebuttal arguing in favour of an AI that has been fed tens of thousands of Catholic documents and acts as a “dynamic library.”
It didn’t take long for Barnes to notice that the rebuttal was AI-generated, finding obvious signs such as quotation marks around phrases he never used, and he called Sanders out for using artificial intelligence in a debate with someone who was keen to avoid it.
The back and forth between the minds led to a two-hour online debate that anyone can watch online on YouTube.
I’m all for catechisms and libraries that help us find information. These are necessary tools to fill in our gaps of knowledge. But to be Christian is to be human, embodied, and physical. It’s why we rub ashes on our foreheads and paint eggs and get baptized.
Pope Leo recently described his concerns with using artificial intelligence this way: “Each of us possesses an irreplaceable and inimitable vocation, that originates from our own lived experience and becomes manifest through interaction with others,” he said.
“By simulating human voices and faces, wisdom and knowledge, consciousness and responsibility, empathy and friendship, the systems known as artificial intelligence not only interfere with information ecosystems but also encroach upon the deepest level of communication, that of human relationships.”
In a world where our relationships and in-person conversations are being increasingly outsourced to apps and social media platforms, we need to pause and reflect on what this is doing to our “irreplaceable and inimitable vocations,” to use the Pope’s words.
We can start with online tools—though artificial intelligence has this pesky side effect of sometimes “hallucinating,” or inventing information that isn’t actually true, so tread with extreme caution if you do at all—but we can’t stop there.
Artificial intelligence will respond to a query in a few seconds, with a couple of paragraphs and links that are hopefully accurate. If we have some extra time, we might use the links to search some primary texts, like the Catechism of the Catholic Church or the Summa Theologica (which were already digitized, by the way), though more likely we will skim over the information as we do with most internet content.
Our search may ease our minds about a particular question. Likely, we will forget what we read in a few days, unless we gave ourselves the time and space to critically consider what we’ve read.
Is this enough?
Consider the Summa, the great lifetime achievement of St. Thomas Aquinas. He set out to write a compendium of all Christian teachings for the beginner, covering the existence of God, the Trinity, angels, creation, sin, grace, virtues, the Incarnation, the life of Jesus, the sacraments, and the resurrection in many, many volumes. Talk about a great resource! (Magisterium AI recognizes this and uses it as one of its sources).
St. Aquinas left this work unfinished. One day while celebrating Mass, he had a sudden revelation. It was so profound that he never worked on the Summa again, saying, “the end of my labours has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.”
Truth doesn’t just come to us through text on a page. It also comes in sudden epiphanies at Mass, embodied conversations, surprising life experiences, long walks, and heartfelt prayers deep in the night. Our little daily internet searches for truth are part of our ultimate search for Truth.
We can’t leave our search for God in a disembodied search bar on our computers.
If you ask an artificial intelligence for answer, you will get one faster than you can call your local priest or trusted friend, but you may lose out on a chance to evangelize or encourage or grow in holiness.
If we browse our Bibles and other primary documents looking for answers, and carry our questions with us into our daily lives, the answers (and journey to find them) will become part of our testimonies, converting our hearts and giving us stories useful for evangelism.
Can God use artificial intelligence to reach someone’s heart? Well, God can do anything.
But if you’re craving more, you have more than a search bar. You can turn to the Word of God (the Bible), the Body of Christ (all believers), and Truth himself.
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and the Gospel spread like wildfire when living, breathing people couldn’t help but tell others about a Jesus they had really, physically met.
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