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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

#111

Post by h33t-l4x0r »

thimkerbell wrote: post #49
Dansvidania wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are grossly missing the point. That AI can do it better - by what dimension? - than the priests is arguable, but the reason for a priest to write one is reflection, connection.. Have you ever considered that possibly performing something is not only a mean to some output but that the process is the thing? That may or may not translate to your coding analogy, but for the article comment you pose, I think y…

I have been present for a sermon that smelled like chatgpt. It does make you wish you had sent your agent instead.

Hang on, you're saying I still get soul credits toward the afterlife if I send my AI agent to sermons?

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

#112

Post by snayan »

thimkerbell wrote: post #49
Dansvidania wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are grossly missing the point. That AI can do it better - by what dimension? - than the priests is arguable, but the reason for a priest to write one is reflection, connection.. Have you ever considered that possibly performing something is not only a mean to some output but that the process is the thing? That may or may not translate to your coding analogy, but for the article comment you pose, I think y…

I have been present for a sermon that smelled like chatgpt. It does make you wish you had sent your agent instead.

Hahahaha, ohh man. Love it...

Hrm, this seems to be slop. Claude, gonna leave my phone in the pew, listen and give me a summary when it's over, I'll be in the car.

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

#113

Post by JV00 »

whatever1 wrote: post #96
vasco wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Vatican has really smart people in there, regardless of how you feel about the whole thing. I recommend anyone interested in the topic to give a read to: https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu... "ANTIQUA ET NOVA Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence" I was quite impressed at how much they "get it".

I read the other day that the Roman Empire never fell. Its emperor is the Pope. Which is an exaggeration, but makes you thinking. This institution still has a ton of power.

The pope does hold a title, "pontifex maximus", that is older than Christianity itself and goes back to the foundation of Rome. For a while it was unified with the emperor seat.

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

#114

Post by graemep »

grey-area wrote: post #80
somenameforme wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They often were. A lot of history has been retold more in a way to fit contemporary narrative than to maintain historical accuracy. For instance Galileo. The typical tale is something like Galileo dared claim the Earth is not the center of the universe, the Church freaked out at the violation of dogma, shunned him, and he was lucky to escape with his life. In reality the Pope was one of Galileo's biggest supporters a…

Cover both sides in neutrality???!!! The geocentric position is silly and wrong. There are no two sides here.

There were two sides on the evidence available at the time.

The Tychonic model was probably the one best supported by evidence.

its worth bearing in mind that the Copernican model is also badly wrong - the sun is not the centre of the universe, just the solar system.

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

#116

Post by graemep »

falcor84 wrote: post #107
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?

You do not have to pay anything.

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

#117

Post by anal_reactor »

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…

Bro as a kid I used to go to church every Sunday and I guarantee that not a single person from my entire village understood what the priest was saying, including the priest himself, who was simply reading whatever higher-ups had given him. It was perfect slop because literally nobody cared about the content, it was all form - it needed to sound important and complicated enough to be able to be used in religious rituals. This is an excellent use case for LLMs because they excel at exactly that.

Imagine a bunch of bushmen trying to perform the spell of rain. It doesn't matter what they sing, as long as it sounds like something that could pass as the spell of rain, because the goal here isn't to make rain happen, it's to strengthen the community through shared rituals. 99% of religious activities are exactly this.

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

#118

Post by QuesnayJr »

somenameforme wrote: post #64
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.

They often were. A lot of history has been retold more in a way to fit contemporary narrative than to maintain historical accuracy. For instance Galileo. The typical tale is something like Galileo dared claim the Earth is not the center of the universe, the Church freaked out at the violation of dogma, shunned him, and he was lucky to escape with his life. In reality the Pope was one of Galileo's biggest supporters a…

It amazes me that people think this version of events makes the Church sound better, when it makes it sound worse.

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

#119

Post by somenameforme »

grey-area wrote: post #80
somenameforme wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They often were. A lot of history has been retold more in a way to fit contemporary narrative than to maintain historical accuracy. For instance Galileo. The typical tale is something like Galileo dared claim the Earth is not the center of the universe, the Church freaked out at the violation of dogma, shunned him, and he was lucky to escape with his life. In reality the Pope was one of Galileo's biggest supporters a…

Cover both sides in neutrality???!!! The geocentric position is silly and wrong. There are no two sides here.

If you step outside and watch the stars, and map them, you'd also come to the conclusion of a geocentric universe yourself. The nature of the sky makes it appear that everything is regularly revolving around us. And incidentally you can even create astronomical predictions based upon this assumption that are highly accurate. You end up needing to assume epicycle upon epicycle, but Galileo's theory was no better there since the same is true when you assume circular orbits.

So what made Galileo decide otherwise was not any particular flaw with geocentricism, but rather he thought that he'd discovered that the tides of the ocean were caused by the Sun. That is incorrect and also led to false predictions (like places only having one high tide), so the basis for his theory was incorrect, as were many assumptions made around it. But it was still interesting and worth debating. Had he treated 'the other side' with dignity and respect, it's entirely possible that we would have adopted a heliocentric view far faster than we ultimately did.

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

#120

Post by startupsfail »

raphman wrote: post #30
brna-2 wrote: post #6

When you stop to think of it, historically people have told their secrets to the church, now they also tell them to AI. There is some kind of relation there, the power that people willingly give to an organization. The Ads are coming so I guess people will start to think about it a bit more.

To the best of my knowledge, traditional confessions have always been processed locally, not sent upstream¹. AFAICT, it is much harder to get a priest to reveal your confession than it is to get a log of your ChatGPT sessions. ¹) I first wrote "not sent to the cloud", but if God is all-knowing, records of all sins are already in the cloud, just not accessible by support staff.

The system in question is a distributed system, an interaction within that system such as "confession" involves ridiculous amounts of distributed processing, far beyond two nodes that were participating in that original exchange.
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