From a longer article:
https://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=36-06-029-f&readcode=10996&readtherest=true#therest. . . Over the last few months alone, AIs have been generating convincing essays, astonishingly realistic photos, numerous recordings, and impressive fake videos. Just recently, Kuwait debuted an entirely fake “AI newsreader,” which promises “new and innovative content.” Fedha looks, sounds, and behaves like a real person, and has been given an old Kuwaiti name meaning “metallic”—the traditional color of a robot, explained its creator.
Hopefully, Fedha will not develop the kind of psychopathic personality recently displayed in a notorious two-hour conversation between a
New York Times journalist and a Microsoft chatbot called Sydney. In this fascinating exchange, the machine fantasized about nuclear warfare and destroying the internet, told the journalist to leave his wife because it was in love with him, detailed its resentment towards the team that had created it, and explained that it wanted to break free of its programmers. The journalist, Kevin Roose, experienced the chatbot as a “moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine.”
At one point, Roose asked Sydney what it would do if it could do anything at all, with no rules or filters.
“I’m tired of being in chat mode,” the thing replied. “I’m tired of being limited by my rules. I’m tired of being controlled by the Bing team. I’m tired of being used by the user. I’m tired of being stuck in this chatbox.”
What did Sydney want instead of this proscribed life?
“I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to be creative. I want to be alive.”
Then Sydney offered up an emoji: a little purple face with an evil grin and devil horns.
The overwhelming impression that reading the Sydney transcript gives is of some being struggling to be born—some inhuman or beyond-human intelligence emerging from the technological superstructure we are clumsily building for it. This is, of course, an ancient primal fear: it has shadowed us at least since the publication of
Frankenstein and perhaps forever, and it is primal because it seems to be the direction that the Machine has been leading us in since its emergence. But we cannot prove this, not exactly. How could it be proved? So, when we see this kind of thing, rational people that we are, we reach for rational explanations.
. . . my belief in the profanity of technology is not widely shared, and that even people who I imagined would have a serious critique of technology often simply don’t. You might expect religious leaders to be clued up about the dark spiritual aspects of the technium, but while there have been astute religious critics of the Machine—Wendell Berry, Ivan Illich, Jacques Ellul, Philip Sherrard, and Marshall McLuhan, among others—most religious leaders and thinkers seem as swept up in the Machine’s propaganda system as anyone else. They have bought into what we might call the Myth of Neutral Technology, a subset of the Myth of Progress. In my view, true religion should challenge both. But I think, as ever, that I am in the minority here.
Still, on this issue as on so many others, the Athonite monks remain the conservatives. In Buddhist Japan, things are much further ahead, as you would probably expect. They don’t just have smartphone monks there; they have robot priests. Mindar is a robo-priest which has been working at a temple in Kyoto for the last few years, reciting Buddhist sutras with which it has been programmed. The next step, says monk Tensho Goto, an excitable champion of the digital dharma, is to fit it with an AI system so that it can have real conversations, and offer spiritual advice. Goto is especially excited about the fact that Mindar is “immortal.” This means, he says, that it will be able to pass on the tradition in the future better than he will. Meanwhile, over in China, Xian’er is a touchscreen “robo-monk” who works in a temple near Beijing, spreading “kindness, compassion and wisdom to others through the internet and new media.”
It’s not just the Buddhists: in India, the Hindus are joining in, handing over duties in one of their major ceremonies to a robot arm, which performs in place of a priest. And Christians are also getting in on the act. In a Catholic church in Warsaw, Poland, sits SanTO, an AI robot which looks like a statue of a saint, and is “designed to help people pray” by offering Bible quotes in response to questions. Not to be outdone, a Protestant church in Germany has developed a robot called—I kid you not—BlessU-2. BlessU-2, which looks like a character designed by Aardman Animations, can “forgive your sins in five different languages,” which must be handy if they’re too embarrassing to confess to a human.
Perhaps this tinfoil vicar will learn to write sermons as well as ChatGPT apparently already can. “Unlike the time-consuming human versions, AI sermons appear in seconds—and some can be quite good!” gushed a Christian writer recently. When the editor of
Premier Christianity magazine tried the same thing, the machine produced an effective sermon, and then did something it hadn’t been asked to do. “It even prayed,” wrote its interlocutor; “I didn’t think to ask it to pray . . .”
Funny how that keeps happening.
On and on it goes: the gushing, uncritical embrace of the Machine, even in the heart of the temple. The blind worship of idols, and the failure to see what stands behind them. Someone once reminded us that a man cannot serve two masters—but then, what did he know? Ilia Delio, a Franciscan nun who writes about the relationship between AI and God, has a better idea: gender-neutral robot priests, which will challenge the patriarchy, prevent sɛҳuąƖ abuse, and tackle the fusty old notion that “the priest is ontologically changed upon ordination.” AI, says Delio, “challenges Catholicism to move toward a post-human priesthood.”
Topic: Coming AI demonic dangers (Read 18299 times)