PETE//HUEY

Theme by Anders Norén

Category: Theology

LLMs, AI, and the Iterative Downgrading of Humanity

Being a stickler for the old ways, I have attempted to throttle my consumption of the Internet’s overwhelmingness by retreating (somewhat) from what’s left of “social” media1 by prioritising email newsletters from a variety of trusted sources.2 A couple of months back, there was a weird week when voices seemed to converge: it was like being at a party when your school friends and your not-school-friends and your cousins are suddenly all in the same space. It feels weird. In this case, it was tech writers and faith commentators and academics from both worlds all highlighting the same thing: Pope Leo’s encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas.

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that when it comes to twenty-first-century ethics Roman Catholic scholars are ahead of Reformed evangelicals when it comes to making arguments from natural law.3 I have only read section of the encyclical, but Leo’s no slouch. The theme which caught my attention the most was his argument, as summed up accurately in this article by Russell Moore, that the danger in the next few decades is not that so-called artificial intelligence will become too humanlike – but actually, that we, as humans, will end up too closely resembling machines.

Computer scientist Cal Newport, currently dabbling in what he calls, ‘the emerging field of digital ethics’, and writing from the perspective of a secular academic, observes the centrality of the spoken word to the Hebrew Bible – we can extend that to the Greek New Testament also, where God’s creative Word takes on human form as the Son.4 Newport writes:

‘I’ve been thinking about this recently as I grapple with some of the consequences of the generative AI revolution. Like many people, I feel a general sense of unease when holding a fluent conversation with a chatbot. I understand that this lexical fluidity is merely an illusion – the result of endless matrix multiplications, autoregressively generating one token after another – but it still creates a discomforting sense of transgression. The sacredness of speech helps explain these feelings. It also raises some deep questions. Should we be so quick to extend the role of ruach memalela to machines, allowing them, seemingly all at once, to become active participants in a ritual so defining to our experience?’

The answer is no, because the illusion is a shaky one at best. Pope Leo is not concerned about AIs becoming godlike, and I wonder if some of that is because he understands how inevitably stupid a large-language model, trained on both open and stolen data, will increasingly become?5

An extremely significant 2023 study demonstrated, in fairly easy-to-follow ways, what the researchers termed, ‘The Curse of Recursion’ – essentially, that the more LLMs like ChatGPT or Gemini are trained by swallowing what is published across the internet, the stupider they get. Why? Because increasingly, what they are processing/digesting is content written by LLMs. In fact, ultimately these mathematicians demonstrated that the models will collapse in on themselves.

Big tech, I think, being awake to this, have prioritised other sources – namely, you. Meta are the finest example, having literally built an entire closed ecosystem predicated on harvesting users own content to sell products to them, and now to sell those users to other users by using your data to train their models and spit out ‘better’ answers. Here, LLMs take an even darker turn – the consequences of accepting that, when using any ‘AI’ tool, you are also feeding your own data and the outcomes of your engagement back into the machine to ‘improve’ it.

Moreover, as Pope Leo observes, in doing so we begin to tailor our own behaviour to the machine, and not the other way around. About fifteen years ago, I would have prided myself on my Google skills. Part of my role was effectively as a researcher, and I spent a lot of time utilising operators and particular commands to find what I needed. Search engines work best when you have figured out how to phrase your request, or to use particular operators, tags, or search terms, in order to frame your request to the way it ‘thinks’ – i.e., how it organises the data it holds. So, the way I ‘spoke’ to Google Search was adapted in order to best ‘relate’ to the machine.

This type of adaptation is not only amplified, but dramatically accelerated by ‘AI’ search. One study last October found that half of US adults were now starting with AI tools – presumably dominated by Gemini and Chat-GPT – for online searches. Ironically, some of that appears to be driven by how much worse the ‘old-fashioned’ search experience has been made by the attempt to prioritise both commercial interests and AI-generated results into search. Once again, the prophetic words of Ian Malcolm are never far from the surface.6

This week, I am grappling with a sermon on Amos 8: not a regularly-preached passage of the minor prophets. The Christian God levels at his chosen people, the historic kingdom of Israel, a repeated accusation: their false religion is exemplified by their disregard of the poor and needy in their society. These people proclaim great virtue and prosperity, whilst simultaneously they ‘trample the needy and do away with the poor of the land’ (Amos 8:4).

It struck me, as I read of how the morally bankrupt Hebrew elites are found guilty by YHWH of ‘buying the poor with silver and the needy for the pair of sandals’ – probably a reference to the practice of indentured slavery – that Pope Leo’s fears also capture a picture of people being bought and sold for profit – and how most of us seem fairly unbothered by this. TV producer and author Richard Osman recently commented that the time each of us spend using social media – on average in the UK, six hours a day – is our real contribution to the economy.7 It’s hard to dispute – social media platforms generated an estimated £11,500,000,000 for the UK economy last year from advertising alone.

But we don’t care: not because we’re particularly entertained, or inspired, but generally because it passes the time. We don’t care because we get answers slightly quicker, and they might be correct. We don’t care because we have been conformed enough to the machines to buy the lie that this, somehow, is progress.8

There’s no great conspiracy here; there rarely is. It’s just simple economics, which often trumps ethics and religion just about every time.9 It is not, ultimately, that the machines will somehow rise up and destroy us – it is, rather, that we will buy and sell ourselves into destruction, all the while calling it ‘better’. 10

Call me a Luddite – but there must be something more.

  1. “social” in quote marks. We could choose to think the best of Web 2.0 and think that the success of the earlier forms of the most popular sites/apps was due to the genuine ability to interact. Of course, when any of us open a newsfeed on the main players now, they are (a) full of posts and accounts I don’t know but are vaguely related to a thing we once watched for thirty seconds; (b) contain few posts from people I know well, because people I know well don’t post; and (c) all look the same. ↩︎
  2. This is, in its own way, an illustration of the echo-chamber problem which dominates the siloed, paywalled, modern Web. Which is a fair criticism, except this silo primarily contains people I like and respect, so I don’t care. ↩︎
  3. Perhaps ignited near half a century ago by something like Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. ↩︎
  4. John 1:14 – ‘The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us…’ ↩︎
  5. And increasingly will serve that information up as truth. I had an ‘argument’ with ChatGPT a few months ago. ‘Where did this John Owen quote come from?’ ‘It came from [here].’ ‘I’ve looked, that source does not exist.’ ‘Of course, you are correct. It is actually [here].’ I don’t think that’s true.’ ‘You are correct. It is actually a synthesis of several sentences in…’ And so on. Most users would, I suspect, have not moved past the first step. ↩︎
  6. ‘Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn’t stop to think if they should.’ ↩︎
  7. The whole section on smart glasses (which are absolutely terrifying on very many levels) in that particular episode of The Rest is Entertainment does a good job of summing up how degrading the notion of you-as-a-product is; and how much the people harvesting your data for dollars really don’t care. ↩︎
  8. But also, you know, take a break every now and again to buy sportswear you don’t need for things you won’t do, and go outside and touch grass. ↩︎
  9. ‘”When will the New Moon be over, that we may sell grain, and the Sabbath be ended that we may market wheat?” – skimping on the measure, boosting the price and cheating with dishonest scales, buying the the poor with silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, selling even the sweepings with the wheat. The LORD has sworn by himself, the Pride of Jacob: “I will never forget anything they have done.”‘ (Amos 8:5–7). ↩︎
  10. ‘They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshipped created things rather than the Creator…’ (Romans 1:25) ↩︎

Men, and Singing in Church

A small but consistent feature of our childhood was church on a Sunday morning; a small Anglican congregation in a rural village, not so much bucolic as simple and straightforward. My father, bless him, brought up a Presbyterian-by-rote, took to his first wife’s Anglicanism like a duck to water, and took attendance seriously. Moreover, and to his credit, he always did his best when it came to singing – and its something I remember very clearly.

It’s notable to me because, subsequently spending many years leading congregations in praise and music, I’m very conscious that male singing is often missing. As a football fan, I’m convinced singing itself is not the problem – all men are capable of making a noise, and with practice – I mean, by doing it, not even necessarily by training – just about anyone can hold a tune.

Writing in Christianity Today, Kelsey Kramer McGinnis correctly observes that this is partly an issue of musical tone – not just the key, but the whole tenor of modern praise and worship is geared towards higher and clearer male voices, and not the fuller baritone which most men possess. As someone with a fairly high tenor in my teens and early 20s, this suited me down to the ground; but as I’ve reached middle age and dropped a couple of tones, selfishly I too now find it increasingly difficult to sing newer songs with higher ranges, compared to the tried-and-tested settings of older hymnody. It remains surprisingly to hear modern worship in a deeper register – its why someone like Jordan Kauflin at Sovereign Grace, for example, sounds so unusual.

The other issue, as well documented, is the ’90s–’00s proliferation of…. softer? lyrical content. We tread carefully here: one of the reasons behind the rapid rise of the toxic subset of new Calvinism, particularly in the US, twenty years ago was that it was pitched as an attempt to reclaim a more masculine Christianity, and the language and outcomes of such false teaching have been incredibly damaging. Nevertheless, I suspect one of the reasons that songs with more hymn-like language, along with bone fide psalm-singing, are currently increasingly popular (again)1 in my own Irish Presbyterian tradition is because men feel more comfortable declaring biblical truths in less poppy words.

When visiting our church last November, Ligon Duncan made the claim that the only [Protestant] denomination in the United States which was experiencing growth was the more conservative Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). Why? One for the reasons, he said, is ‘in this kind of a culture, you better have a big God, with big truths, to be able to speak into this despair and discouragement that exists.’

So too, I think, with singing. As someone who spends a lot of the time standing at the front, looking out across rooms of people singing, I’m convinced that men feel most encouraged to sing when the musicians meet them in the middle with hymns and songs that (a) are pitched musically at an appropriate register, but also (b) with content that declares a big God with big truths.

As more and more men begin to trickle back to church, particularly amongst young adults, it is incumbent upon those who write, those who play, and those who lead to encourage the whole body of the church to sing. And it is incumbent upon men, fathers, brothers, uncles, grandfathers, to sing. Singing teaches truth which people remember for life. Singing unites heart and mind. Singing unites us together. God sang. You should try too.2

  1. Because, of course, this has all happened before: for example, the rise of ‘revival’ hymns and more emotional language in the late nineteenth century in the West, before a swing back to more traditional evangelical hymns in the mid-twentieth century, before the seeker-sensitive movement of the ’80s-’90s, before the CCM-heavy output of the end of the century, and so on. Back and forth. ↩︎
  2. And remember: even if you’re worried about how you sound, don’t be. No-one’s listening to you – they’re too busy worrying about how they sound themselves. ↩︎

On Institutionalisation

Rev. David Cupples – a man whom I greatly admire – inadvertently ended up making the final speech at this year’s General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, which concluded today. I produce the transcript of it here in full. Speaking without notes, David said:

“Moderator; members of Assembly – 

“You can have the most beautiful trellis in the world, but you might have no vine to hang on it.

“I believe – the former moderator said the other day, that he didn’t know what was going on in the heavenly realms. I’m going to be a little less humble, and a little more provocative; because I think I do know what is going on in the heavenly realms.

“This is my forty-first General Assembly; I’ve received forty-one ‘Blue Books‘. If they average 300 pages, that means I’ve received 12,300 pages of reports. In the last four years, I’ve waded through every single page; and prior to that, I did my best.

“This is possibly the last speech of the General Assembly. I didn’t intend it that way. I believe that we have been thoroughly, absolutely, and entirely institutionalised. We have been given what we perceive to be instruments of power: commissions, reviews, task groups, committees, and so on, and so on; and during my life I’ve spent an enormous amount of time in all those things, and understand their importance and value. But, like the start of The Lord of the Rings, where the rings of power were given – ‘three to the elves, seven to the dwarf lords, and nine to the race of men, who above all desire power’ – we’ve been given these instruments of power. But then, the introduction goes on, and Galadriel says, ‘But they were all of them, deceived.’ Because in the darkness, the dark lord, Sauron, forged a master ring to control them all. 

“’One ring to rule them all; one ring to find them; one ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.” We have been bound by institutionalism. What we need is to be revitalised, and I would like to leave you with this truth (an indisputable, and incontrovertible truth) at the end of this General Assembly. And it is this: all spiritual life and growth comes from an encounter with God. That’s a fact.

“Sound doctrine, on its own, does not produce life: it’s necessary, but it does not produce life.

“Good church order may preserve life, but it doesn’t produce it.

“And new ideas may convey life, but they don’t produce it.

“And I have one plea. How do I know we have been institutionalised? Sustained, united, corporate prayer has gradually disappeared from every aspect of our church’s life to the margins. And I believe we can do everything stated at this General Assembly in the future, but I passionately believe that if sustained, united, believing corporate prayer is not put back at the centre of church life, it will all be in vain.”

Handling Conflict and Controversy in Ministry

Greatly appreciated some of the wisdom in this podcast/video from Ligon Duncan and Matt Smethurst: thinking about the character and posture behind handling conflict and controversy well.

One of the most helpful lines is around recognising how those of us in leadership positions handle conflict is how important the tone and calm of how we receive and process moments of controversy. Words matter. Language matters.

Similarly, towards the end they have a very important thought about grumbling.

Though speaking to the US context, there’s a lot of good here. I appreciate a significant number of ‘voices’ in the public ministry sphere preaching humility, grace, and triaging theological issues. Recommended.