Related previously:
Message from Pope Leo XIV on the 60th World Day of Social Communications
Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies
321–330 of 473 posts
Re: Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies
#322No priest will feed sufficient context about their community into the context window - even if they were skilled enough to do so, unless the model was locally hosted, doing so would be a violation of their vows of silence. Good homilies are written with the particular community in mind. If it were more effective to write a homily for a generic public, the Vatican would have started publishing standard homilies long a…
Side note, but I've definitely gotten annoyed with "context".
There's context in the strict technical sense - the AI is stateless, you need to get the right tokens to it in the right way, allow it to use tooling calls, etc. I get that. That, is cool. I use agentic coding a lot.
Then there's the sense of what you're saying - you have to feed the AI "enough context". In your case it's critical, but I've seen way too many pro-AI people just dismiss everything and say "context context you didn't give it proper context, have you tried this prompt etc." as a justification for the "lack" of intelligence.
At some point you have to wonder when it becomes unfalsifiable.
Re: Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies
#323Not defending the use of AI, but plenty of people who grew up going to Mass on Sunday know that priests often recycle old homilies, deliver lazily written homilies or homilies that were clearly pulled from the internet, or just skip them if they couldn't think of anything that week or are running late for something. Absolute worst was when an intelligent priest put in incredible effort, only for it to go over the hea…
Yeah I think that happened to me yesterday. We had a new priest (actually retired and visiting) and the homily was 10x more engaging than the normal ones. I fear that the rest of the congregation didn't like that he wasn't using cheap techniques like constant repetition and that the content was more elevated about what was really meant by the authors of part of Genesis.
Why do you fear this? Did you consider discussing this with some of the congregation to know for sure?
I don't mean to pick on you personally, but your comment and the parent comment (among others here) both project feelings across wide groups of people in a hasty generalization. Their feelings could be easily confirmed with human connection. I think the article makes it clear the Pope charges priests with knowing their community. This is good advice for all of us though! So, not just you, but you, the parent poster, anyone else, if you have these fears, if you don't like your priest's homily, please, talk to the proper people about them instead of (or at least in addition to) complaining online to others! This is way outside our sphere of influence.
Re: Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also varies inside countries. Some priests are simply more demure than others. The church as an institution certainly prefers the more radical conservatives as you go higher up the chain, but many low level employees that still talk to commoners do realize that these views are going to put off more people than they attract in developed countries. So in the long term they will only be left with a bunch of crazy rad…
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Perhaps you could share your alternative characterisation of the church to clarify what you mean?
Re: Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
A thousand years? What made you go with that number? The protestant reformation was only about 500 years ago, and I'm pretty sure that Martin Luther wouldn't have bothered that much if the expected "donations" were really cheap. And even if you do go with "a coin", which was apparently the price of an annual indulgence for a regular peasant, that was about the same price as a whole pig, or on the order of $1k in toda…
I know that hackers here need to always be right and go to great lengths to try to distort reality when they are wrong. You're not even fooling yourself by saying that every coin in history is worth a thousand dollars, much less fooling anybody else. If you make it a habit to always lie in order to always be right, you start building castles of lies that hinder you in life. Just because of pride.
I'm sorry if you don't like pedantry, but this is what I'm in HN for.
To be clear, I definitely didn't mean to imply that every coin in history is worth a thousand dollars, and suggesting that this is what I meant is clearly not the "strongest plausible interpretation"[0] of my message. I was referring specifically to the Florin/Gulden/Guilder coins being used across Europe in Martin Luther's time, which contained about 3.5g gold, which at today's gold price would be worth over $500 just as bullion, but it was apparently worth about twice that in terms of purchasing power. From my searches, it seems that the poorest of the poor would need to pay a quarter of a coin annually, the typical commoner would pay 1 per year, and merchants/middle-class would pay 3 or more per year, to eliminate/reduce their afterlife punishment.
You can argue that my focus on indulgences is not relevant for some reason, and I'd be happy to discuss other examples of expectations of monetary payments to the church, but would appreciate if you refrain from accusing me of lying.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Re: Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies
#326The Pope will change his mind with Claude Opus 5.2
You forgot the “/s”.
Re: Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies
#327The “AI” believers will be soo disappointed. Does the holy spirit not inhabit the GPU that computes their slop? Then again, why believe in any god from a classical religion when you can believe in “AI” instead?
Re: Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies
#328The “AI” believers will be soo disappointed. Does the holy spirit not inhabit the GPU that computes their slop? Then again, why believe in any god from a classical religion when you can believe in “AI” instead?
It’s a tough sell considering for many in the West the only idol of worship is money. And the Catholic Church has already rotted itself from the inside when it allowed the mentally unwell homosexuals to continuously abuse children and get away with it.
Re: Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies
#329My old-school protestant pastor started with an AI disclaimer in the sermon yesterday. What a time to be alive!
I don't know what to do with my double standard here.
It seems totally normal and expected that I would outsource aspects of my job solving business software problems to AI, but the idea of my spirituality and cultural experience (music, movies, art, etc) being someone else's business problem to be outsourced and optimized by AI is so gross.
Re: Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
It will surprise you but we don't literally believe there is a face in the sky looking down.
Yeah, but you literally and officially hate LGBTQ+ people, treat women as property, condone slavery, and literally hallucinate that crackers and wine are flesh and blood in spite of what your eyes, nose, taste buds, and all scientific instruments and measurements tell you. Edit: yet you can't counter the objective fact that the Catholic Church is a hateful abusive power hungry cult full of dogmatically hallucinating…
My brother, literally not one of your claims is true. I'm not sure where you have gotten the idea that such lies are the truth, but you really should reconsider your position. You seem to be very angry at the church (based on you posting this sort of thing all up and down the thread), but believing outright false ideas about the church isn't going to fix anything.