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I’m a bit of a techie, and AI interests me, but I think it’s something that people believe has been developed much further than it actually has. The jury is still out, as far as I understand it, on whether AI creates anything new, but rather just takes bits and pieces that it’s gobbled up and reworks them into something else. Granted, when one looks at disciplines such as music – and in particular pop music – one notices that there’s a lot of that going on with humans as well. Nevertheless, by adding all the bits and pieces that get put into the stew and mixing them around, genius comes up with something new – a truly original work. As much as AI is all the rage right now, I don’t think it really creates anything – all AI does is compute what might be a wanted result.

Hilary White, a Catholic iconographer, talks about AI in relation to art, and especially liturgical art, in her Substack blog, which can be found here: https://hilarywhite.substack.com/. One of her recent posts on the issue deals with how AI “confuses” Jesus with the actor Robert Powell, and that a lot of AI art of Jesus is based on images of Robert Powell. (Powell played Jesus in the 1970s film “Jesus of Nazareth”) That post can be found here: https://hilarywhite.substack.com/p/ai-images-whatever-it-is-its-not. It’s a good primer on the limitations of AI in art, and please consider that art is supposed to be one of the areas that AI is particularly good at, considering that there’s a lot of subjectivity to the discipline.

Now, if AI can’t manage to get art right, including making sure that humans have five fingers on each hand, who in their right mind thought that it was a good idea to build an AI service for learning about the Orthodox Christian faith? Well, I don’t know either, because even on the website, though it claims to be created by “Orthodox seminary graduates, clergy, and faithful”, there is no further information given. Asking the chatbot is useless as well, as is asking which bishop blessed the project.

The site of this chatbot is here: https://orthodoxtom.zapier.app/ai. I asked it a simple question, just asking how many men named Symeon are mentioned in the Bible. I believe the answer is six, but this is the answer that I got:

(Sorry, I can’t figure out how to crop the image in WordPress.)

Never mind that I’ve never heard Simon Peter or the other Simon ever being called “Symeon” and the bot missed Symeon, patriarch of the tribes of Israel. All one would need here is a book – widely available – of a who’s who of the Bible to answer this.

I then asked about Symeon of the tribes of Israel, and I think I forgot to screenshot the text, but the chatbot basically responded that, yes, Symeon of the tribes of Israel did exist too, though the tribe became less powerful and important as time went on.

Now the thing about these chatbots is that they are supposed to learn from the conversation, and use this “learning” to be able to help the person asking the questions. After admitting that Symeon in the Old Testament does exist, I asked about Symeon again, and now, the chatbot only can find two – AND STILL NOT SYMEON OF THE TRIBES OF ISRAEL! How stupid is that?

I asked this bot what Jonah’s greatest fault was, and this was the answer:

First of all, the bot criticizes me for looking for someone’s greatest fault, and then rehashes the points of God loving us even when we are disobedient, and that we don’t need to be perfect people. It’s all couched in very “Orthodox sounding” language. The obvious answer, though, is that Jonah felt nothing for the humanity of the souls in Ninevah, to the point where he was angry that they had been saved. This is the thread that binds both parts of the book of Jonah together.

I had a good fight with the bot over the story of the mother of the seven sons mentioned in 2 Maccabees, and then again discussed in 4 Maccabees (which is a canonical book in the Georgian Orthodox Church). By tradition, her name is Solomonia or Salome (depending on translation, I guess) and the OCA has a nice page about her here: https://dce.oca.org/assets/templates/bulletin.cfm?mode=html&id=255. So when I asked the chatbot about Salome’s death, it literally says that Salome’s death is recounted in Matthew – which it is not. (Mind you, I was using one of my favorite “stump the priest” questions on the bot.)

Umm… as far as I know, no one named Salome dies in the Gospel of Matthew.

I can’t even begin to tell you how wrong this chatbot is on a factual level, and that alone is enough that no one should use it. More than that, though, the Orthodox Church is not a church where AI is our god. We believe in a God who wants to be in relationship with each of us, and part of that is building the relationships with one another. AI is absolutely dehumanizing. Yes, we in the Orthodox Church say “ask your priest” or “ask a priest” a lot. Even if the priest is wrong, there still is relationship there. There’s a person to have a real conversation with, not a black box making up answers from who knows where.

There’s a great essay by Nathaniel Marshall talking about AI, apprenticeship, slavery, and Disney’s Fantasia over here: https://thebluescholar.substack.com/p/the-sorcerers-slave. One of the points that he makes that I had never thought about is the idea that even as an apprentice – that is, someone who aspires to someday become a “master” – it is imperative that we actually learn to do the work attached to whatever it is we are learning. In this sense, it was probably less of a sin for Mickey to try to enchant and train the broom, but more so that he wanted to be the magician without actually going through the training for it. AI seems like it is a technology which tries to make that much easier for people to do, and it’s not good for them. If someone wants to learn more about the Church and Christianity, let him or her read and think and ask questions of someone who might know more. Asking a chatbot is ridiculous. Furthermore, I have never heard of anything like a priest being so busy he has to turn all his questions over to a chatbot to take care of. Again, ridiculous!

I believe, too, that there’s a spiritual aspect here as well with AI, something akin to Ouija boards and the like. I’m not saying that AI is possessed, but if someone is looking for bad spirits, this sort of nonsense is a good place to get people who are vulnerable. It’s not like Ouija boards are packaged with small demons in them, but to people who use them to call upon crazy things, the chance that something crazy will respond is so much greater.

This was a funny request I put in to the “Orthodox Research Assistant” that actually was reasonably good: 🙂

Sorry for the light posting; it’s been a crazy week again. Hopefully, I can get posts up tomorrow and then next week will be more “normal”.

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