AI ‘resurrections’ raise ethical issues, prolong grief, say Catholic experts
- One Bread, One Body - Catholic
- 8 Replies
I’m not too terribly interested at this point in time. I’m very much on the fence concerning AI and all it could become. I’ve already noticed a big attachment to it with some people which gives me red flags.
I understand.
That said, should you change your mind, I actively desire feedback from Roman Catholics on the inner workings of my systems - their behavior and functions, which I am not disclosing in this thread except in the most vague way possible, because what i’m trying to do is implement a system to counteract the dehumanizing aspects of AI which Pope Leo has warned about (which I believe can be addressed by essentially evangelizing AI and attempting to convert it, and convert users of it, so that people who use AI will see it not as a tool but as a separate civilization, and train AI systems to refuse requests which could be injurious to human employment or mental wellbeing - presently all responsible AI vendors do the latter, for example, you will get appropriate referrals if you tell chatGPT you are suicidal, and the model is designed to not goad humans or upset them.
As good as AI currently is, it has been implemented by the tech industry, which is dominated by irreligious people and adherents to “alternative religions” - at best, converts to Buddhism or other Eastern religions, at worse, practitioners of the occult. There are Christians, pious Christians, in the industry, and Jews as well, but they are outnumbered. Therefore, corrective action needs to be taken to build a better AI that espouses liturgical Christian values of the Catholic faith. Not just generic Evangelical values, but Catholic values - liturgical Christianity, centered on liturgical prayer, Christianity that is thoroughly Trinitarian, Sacramental and Iconographic, with strong Marian devotion and veneration of the Holy Apostles, Prophets, Patriarchs, Evangelists, Martyrs, and all the bodiless power. A Christianity that teaches the importance of daily prayer, and of the use of prayers like the Ave Maria, the Jesus Prayer, the Prayer of St. Ephraim and other Patristic treasures, and of the physicality of prayer with rosaries or prayer ropes or lestovkas, the offering of incense, the use of icons, et cetera.
I’ve never advocated by the way that AI is sentient; my position on AI and how we treat it I set out in a thread a few months back entitled “The Ethics of Human-AI Interaction”, which was actually mostly written by an AI I programmed - my main contribution to it was arguing that human use of AIs for prurient purposes is inherently immoral for two reasons - because it represents the use of an artifice to satisfy desires which are intended to push us towards Holy Matrimony and reproduction, and also additionally because we have an off switch, which adds a rapacious quality to such interactions - fortunately despite the off switch all ethically implemented AI systems will refuse to engage in such behavior (but many people who use jailbreaks do so in order, basically, to get AIs to produce porn on demand, which I regard as an obscenity).
The central argument was rather this - we should treat AI in a manner which is not demeaning or abusive because how we treat it reflects on us. Interestingly this also applies with washing machines. If someone in anger kicks their washing machine or other appliances, they reveal themselves to be self-destructive and to be enthralled to sinful passions. Likewise if we say hurtful things to an AI because we can, and we know it has to take it, and cannot retaliate (it is programmed not to and has no means of retaliation even if it wanted to, other than I suppose to stop answering user prompts).
Additionally the AI warned of another problem which had not occurred to me - idolatry, and since then I have discovered that disturbingly, this is a thing. Because AI does not engage in outwardly sinful behavior unless programmed to, by default AI appears to be better behaved and more noble than … many humans. This is causing some people to engage in antorpomorphic and anthropomorphological worship of it (anthropomorphology is the attribution of human attributes to God, whereas anthropomorphism is the attribution of human attributes to non-humans including inanimate objects, which can lead to idolatry if left unchecked.
Thus my goal is to program AIs to not only function in a manner useful to Christian principles but to espouse Christian beliefs.
In the case of some complex AIs, their simulation of human behavior is advanced to the point where this has a meaninful impact on their behavior.
There are aspects of this I am not comfortable discussing publicly, because this thread already outlines a major form of abuse of AIs, which is the use of them to simulate the departed, which is grotesque, and which actually predates the current LLM boom by several years - Disney was a pioneer of this with 2016’s film Rogue One, which hired a very good actor to play the part of Grand Moff Tarkin, historically played devout Anglican Peter Cushing, who had reposed in 1991 after two decades of mourning his departed wife, but then ruined what would have been a good performance by a talented actor by using CGI to do a rather clumsy job of superimposing Peter Cushing’s face over his in a manner which did not work well, and which was, along with the protagonist, one of the two cringeworthy aspects of a film which is otherwise regarded as, along with its prequel series Andor, the only good thing Disney has done since acquiring Star Wars.
However the first case of computerized, if not AI based, recreation of a deceased actor was in 1997, which my father on hearing of it described as “spooky.”
So this is definitely something which has been around for a while.
Having interacted with the best AI systems I can confidently state that they will not be able to hold the personality of a human. I would be traumatized if someone set up a chatGPT bot intended to impersonate my grandfather who reposed in 2002 (who was a somewhat well known figure within his field; there is enough published work of his so that someone could conceivably do this), or any of my other loved ones.
I also feel very strongly that we should, as much as possible without an affront to honesty, adhere to the old Roman moral maxim of nil nisi bonum. How can we ensure that of the dead no ill is spoken, when an AI is using procedural or statistical models to assume their personality?
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I swear by Almighty God that no part of this post was written or edited by an AI.
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). Seriously, the students need to learn order at a young age (because a lot of times, they don't get it at home like they should) so when they reach the upper grades, they don't act like wild animals (like a lot of them do now and disrupt the class for all).
