For me it was explicitly mentioning salvation. In my opinion, any response regarding the vocation of Christians (and indeed all humans for that matter) that neglects to mention this is incomplete and insufficient. "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee".
AI language models are based on statistics, not logic. So any AI-generated text is a guess, at least as far as the actual content. I suspect that they've coded some grammar rules and a few answer structures to mimic, but the specific content is literally pure guesswork based on the probabilities of text strings in the source documents.
As such, AI is subject to unconscious bias, perhaps far more so than humans are... because to us, we can eventually notice our bias, but an AI never will unless the developer is monitoring the answers.
This is never going to be a good recipe for telling the truth.
Very good. In the next round of tests the AI must be given a YouTube channel to compare the e-drama the AI is able to generate, compared with the top quality human Catholic channels.
Oh, I loved Dr. Franks answer about dogs! I, too, am excited to see what God has in store for us.
The AI's answer about baptism and midwives, although a bit unexpected, was interesting. My children were born at home with lay midwives. At two weeks old my first son needed to go to the hospital. If the midwife had performed a baptism at his birth, it would've been an amazing comfort. Catholic midwives who deliver! I'm taken with the idea.
I’ve read the article that this quote was lifted from - I can’t remember now where I found it, but during my “over ambitions nesting phase” with our now-3mo, I was considering starting a Catholic birth center in my town. I think the standard for midwives is the same as for all lay people - baptism ought only be performed in an emergency - but yes, for births where the child’s survival is uncertain, or where complex medical situations arise shortly after birth, it’s such a comfort!
(And for all other births, I’m so torn between “have a priest come and perform a baptism as soon as possible” and “we want to celebrate the spiritual birth of this child with the larger church community, even if it means delaying the sacrament...)
This AI rubbish is getting beyond a joke! Channel 4 will host a programme this week about meat derived from human body cells!!! For the love of God, does anybody not the remember Terminator franchise???????
As another commenter noted, the language model does not *think* or *know*, but instead returns output based on probabilistic calculations. This one is a "clever" fine-tuning of OpenAI's gpt model in that the developers have tried to implement guardrails based on various Church documents.
However, no amount of injecting of such documents into the language model will ensure answers that align with the magisterium. The bias isn't just in the model itself, but it can be in the questions asked. Ask "Magisterium AI" what Casti Connubii says the primary end of marriage is, and the response is "the procreation and education of children" with a footnote to Casti Connubii paragraph 59. But ask "why is procreation not the primary end of marriage?" Instead you will be told something like, "Procreation is not the primary end of marriage because marriage is primarily an 'intimate partnership of life and love' between spouses," with a footnote to Amoris Laetitia 80. Perhaps the AI has not been trained on the "hermeneutic of continuity"...
In any event, outsourcing (or even supplementing) teaching to an unthinking machine seems to be a poor emulation of the actual Magisterium. What will we do next? Lex orandi, lex credendi... Should we ask the AI to make us icons not made by human hands? Cast all our human sacred art into the melting pot to see what image will emerge? This seems awfully familiar...
The AI getting confused on the primary end of marriage is actually quite similar to the "trap" questions The Pillar posed here. My study group read Castii Connubii last fall, and ran into precisely the distinction that's causing the seeming contradiction in the answers the AI gave.
Effectively, it's the difference between the primary end of marriage as a Sacrament (blessing and strengthening the partnership of love between the spouses for their mutual help to salvation) and the primary end of the marriage as a vocation (the procreation and education of children). BOTH are primary ends of marriage, depending on the sense of the word "marriage". The AI isn't sophisticated enough to pick up that difference in usage and clarify the difference, whereas a human teacher (like the ones I've had) will emphasize the distinction to make the lesson memorable.
This article was absolutely hilarious. Esp: “This isn't my area of expertise, but I'm going to wing it, because I need to use most of my time for figuring out what synodality is.” 🤣
What a complete waste of time. All the machine is doing is reading the documents that has been fed into and by word association extracts text relevant to the question. It has no understanding of what it is doing. There is no novel idea that it extracts from these texts.
Nicolas Bellord - one time Fellow of the British Cybernetics sociey which was founded by a Professor who thought it would be interesting to bring together the Theology department at Kings College London with the electrical engineering department.
Basically it is all about the interface between man and computers which is often very surprising = the Cybernaut pushes the tiller over to the right in order to steer the Argonaut to the right.
To-day people have an inordinate respect for computers not realising that they are very stupid with disastrous results.
> "Plus, we’re confused about what the machine meant when it talked about synodality being “not merely consultative,” and we think that a good answer would have fleshed that out, since it mentioned it in the first place."
Interestingly, the AI seems to have taken a whole lot directly (and out of context) about synodality from the recent Catholic-Orthodox Alexandria document, which summarises: « Major issues complicate an authentic understanding of synodality and primacy in the Church. The Church is not properly understood as a pyramid, with a primate governing from the top, but neither is it properly understood as a federation of self-sufficient Churches. Our historical study of synodality and primacy in the second millennium has shown the inadequacy of both of these views. Similarly, it is clear that for Roman Catholics synodality is not merely consultative, and for Orthodox primacy is not merely honorific. […] »
Perhaps this is because out of its pool of resources, this is one of the few that actually discusses synodality with invested magisterial authority?
For me it was explicitly mentioning salvation. In my opinion, any response regarding the vocation of Christians (and indeed all humans for that matter) that neglects to mention this is incomplete and insufficient. "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee".
Mind you, the AI-generated picture made it clear that synodality resulted in an empty church.
"We asked a robot to draw a picture of “synodality.” If you’re not sure what’s going on this picture, well… neither are we."
In other words, the machine nailed it! ;-)
Wow, and so instructive that there are no actual people there. Just albs(?) that make every individual into a bland locus of volition.
I love how the Pillar continues to mix up their articles with unique and fun stuff. Good job!
thanks!
Some technical principles:
AI language models are based on statistics, not logic. So any AI-generated text is a guess, at least as far as the actual content. I suspect that they've coded some grammar rules and a few answer structures to mimic, but the specific content is literally pure guesswork based on the probabilities of text strings in the source documents.
As such, AI is subject to unconscious bias, perhaps far more so than humans are... because to us, we can eventually notice our bias, but an AI never will unless the developer is monitoring the answers.
This is never going to be a good recipe for telling the truth.
Very good. In the next round of tests the AI must be given a YouTube channel to compare the e-drama the AI is able to generate, compared with the top quality human Catholic channels.
Oh, I loved Dr. Franks answer about dogs! I, too, am excited to see what God has in store for us.
The AI's answer about baptism and midwives, although a bit unexpected, was interesting. My children were born at home with lay midwives. At two weeks old my first son needed to go to the hospital. If the midwife had performed a baptism at his birth, it would've been an amazing comfort. Catholic midwives who deliver! I'm taken with the idea.
I’ve read the article that this quote was lifted from - I can’t remember now where I found it, but during my “over ambitions nesting phase” with our now-3mo, I was considering starting a Catholic birth center in my town. I think the standard for midwives is the same as for all lay people - baptism ought only be performed in an emergency - but yes, for births where the child’s survival is uncertain, or where complex medical situations arise shortly after birth, it’s such a comfort!
(And for all other births, I’m so torn between “have a priest come and perform a baptism as soon as possible” and “we want to celebrate the spiritual birth of this child with the larger church community, even if it means delaying the sacrament...)
This AI rubbish is getting beyond a joke! Channel 4 will host a programme this week about meat derived from human body cells!!! For the love of God, does anybody not the remember Terminator franchise???????
or Soylent Green (dating myself - LOL)
As another commenter noted, the language model does not *think* or *know*, but instead returns output based on probabilistic calculations. This one is a "clever" fine-tuning of OpenAI's gpt model in that the developers have tried to implement guardrails based on various Church documents.
However, no amount of injecting of such documents into the language model will ensure answers that align with the magisterium. The bias isn't just in the model itself, but it can be in the questions asked. Ask "Magisterium AI" what Casti Connubii says the primary end of marriage is, and the response is "the procreation and education of children" with a footnote to Casti Connubii paragraph 59. But ask "why is procreation not the primary end of marriage?" Instead you will be told something like, "Procreation is not the primary end of marriage because marriage is primarily an 'intimate partnership of life and love' between spouses," with a footnote to Amoris Laetitia 80. Perhaps the AI has not been trained on the "hermeneutic of continuity"...
In any event, outsourcing (or even supplementing) teaching to an unthinking machine seems to be a poor emulation of the actual Magisterium. What will we do next? Lex orandi, lex credendi... Should we ask the AI to make us icons not made by human hands? Cast all our human sacred art into the melting pot to see what image will emerge? This seems awfully familiar...
The AI getting confused on the primary end of marriage is actually quite similar to the "trap" questions The Pillar posed here. My study group read Castii Connubii last fall, and ran into precisely the distinction that's causing the seeming contradiction in the answers the AI gave.
Effectively, it's the difference between the primary end of marriage as a Sacrament (blessing and strengthening the partnership of love between the spouses for their mutual help to salvation) and the primary end of the marriage as a vocation (the procreation and education of children). BOTH are primary ends of marriage, depending on the sense of the word "marriage". The AI isn't sophisticated enough to pick up that difference in usage and clarify the difference, whereas a human teacher (like the ones I've had) will emphasize the distinction to make the lesson memorable.
The experts definitely won, but it's important to remember that this is the worst that AI will be. It's in a constant state of improvement.
I would like to see the AI answer "what, canonically, is the purpose and remit of an apostolic visitation?"
This article was absolutely hilarious. Esp: “This isn't my area of expertise, but I'm going to wing it, because I need to use most of my time for figuring out what synodality is.” 🤣
What a complete waste of time. All the machine is doing is reading the documents that has been fed into and by word association extracts text relevant to the question. It has no understanding of what it is doing. There is no novel idea that it extracts from these texts.
Nicolas Bellord - one time Fellow of the British Cybernetics sociey which was founded by a Professor who thought it would be interesting to bring together the Theology department at Kings College London with the electrical engineering department.
Basically it is all about the interface between man and computers which is often very surprising = the Cybernaut pushes the tiller over to the right in order to steer the Argonaut to the right.
To-day people have an inordinate respect for computers not realising that they are very stupid with disastrous results.
> "Plus, we’re confused about what the machine meant when it talked about synodality being “not merely consultative,” and we think that a good answer would have fleshed that out, since it mentioned it in the first place."
Interestingly, the AI seems to have taken a whole lot directly (and out of context) about synodality from the recent Catholic-Orthodox Alexandria document, which summarises: « Major issues complicate an authentic understanding of synodality and primacy in the Church. The Church is not properly understood as a pyramid, with a primate governing from the top, but neither is it properly understood as a federation of self-sufficient Churches. Our historical study of synodality and primacy in the second millennium has shown the inadequacy of both of these views. Similarly, it is clear that for Roman Catholics synodality is not merely consultative, and for Orthodox primacy is not merely honorific. […] »
Perhaps this is because out of its pool of resources, this is one of the few that actually discusses synodality with invested magisterial authority?