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Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies

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Re: Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies

#101

Post by harvey9 »

charcircuit wrote: post #95
mindwok wrote: post #84

LLMs are amazing, I love them, but he is right. When it comes to interacting with your fellow humans, using AI just sucks the point and meaning out of life. If we wanted to know what Claude thought, we’d ask him. Don’t be a mouthpiece for AI.

>If we wanted to know what Claude thought, we’d ask him. You would be surprised how many people don't do this. It's very common for people to ask others questions that could be easily googled or clauded.

This is true but seems to be orthogonal to the post you replied to. At a further tangent, I encounter people saying "well it's on Google" as they seem to think Google has some authority or quality threshold.

Re: Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies

#103

Post by graemep »

onion2k wrote: post #57
solatic wrote: post #48

No 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…

No priest will feed sufficient context about their community into the context window But they will try, and they'll share a lot of potentially private information in the process.

Not to write homilies though. The real danger of risking exposing private information would be pastoral work.

Re: Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies

#104

Post by zdragnar »

scns wrote: post #47
abrenuntio wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the Wikipedia page on the Catholic Church: "By means of Catholic charities and beyond, the Catholic Church is the largest non-government provider of education and health care in the world." Just yesterday I went to see a presentation of a priest appointed to a massive parish in the rural area of South Sudan, setting up schools and bringing in aid.

> the Catholic Church is the largest non-government provider of education and health care in the world. Hm. In germany Catholic day care is funded by the state ie taxes by over 90%. Military chaplains 100%. Would be surprised if the difference is bigger in schools and hospitals. I heard that in France there is an actual separation of church and state and as a result the church is rather poor.

Tithes to the church are collected via taxes in Germany (Kirchensteuer), so you could argue the church itself is funded by taxes.

Re: Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies

#105

Post by graemep »

curtisblaine wrote: post #74
solatic wrote: post #48

No 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…

Nit: you're confusing the vow of silence with the confessional seal.

Its more than a nit. It only applies to confession so putting in other private information would not break a vow, but it would still be a very bad thing to do.

Re: Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies

#107

Post by falcor84 »

allovertheworld wrote: post #41

The mind virus will not stop spreading, making corporations do your critical thinking is not a good path. People will become dependent on a subscription service for everyday life.

Well ... isn't organized religion a subscription service for everyday life?

Re: Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies

#108

Post by graemep »

oersted wrote: post #79
OtomotO wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine the pope being a man of science a couple of hundred years back... How much better the world could be.

I don’t know about popes, but many prominent mathematicians, philosophers and early scientists were priests or monks: Mendel, Copernicus, Bayes, Ockham, Bolzano... It was pretty much the only way to get the kind of education, intellectual culture, time and focus required for hundreds of years (at least in Europe), until the upper-middle class widened around the enlightenment and industrial revolution. The friction be…

> The friction between the church and science is a relatively new phenomenon, at least at the current scale

Current scale? What current friction do you have in mind. I honestly cannot think of anything with the Catholic church. Lots of friction with evangelical Biblical literalists, of course, but the Catholic Church is not literalist.

> There are always exceptions like Galileo

The Galileo case is more about personalities and politics. it is a very good example of why religious authority should be in the same hands as secular power, but it is not really about his beliefs - no one else (including Copernicus) faced opposition for the same ideas.

Re: Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies

#109

Post by rgblambda »

Not 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 heads of the yokels in their parish who want a simpler homily.

Re: Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies

#110

Post by snayan »

cwillu wrote: post #31
jdthedisciple wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that our very consciousness is supernatural?

Considered at length, and ultimately rejected due to lack of evidence.

There's a lot of beauty in embracing not-knowing.
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