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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

#141

Post by bonesss »

vasco wrote: post #45
dhruv3006 wrote: post #11

Btw pope is a math phd.

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".

As a massive hedge fund with insane holdings managed by complex legal nuances & historical treaties, juggling critically withheld information, and having an outsize political presence as an independent state (thanks Benito Mussolini!), The Vatican has great financial incentive to have smart quants, historians, lawyers, and others on the payroll.

Based on their balance sheets I think they get it very, very, well.

Steve Jobs took a vow of poverty at Apple, too… somehow, some way, the dividends and stocks and private planes and fancy business dinners and everyone kissing his ass made a $1 salary survivable. Poor guy.

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

#142

Post by [deleted] »

adrianN wrote: post #132
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…

You have a lot of faith in the qualities of average priests.

[deleted]

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

#144

Post by Tade0 »

CodeCompost wrote: post #61

Too bad Terry A. Davis is not around anymore. He would have been literally enraptured by LLMs.

I was thinking about this the other day. My take is that he would definitely have a few choice words for some types of vibe coders.

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

#145

Post by AdamN »

rgblambda wrote: post #109

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 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.

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

#146

Post by gwd »

rgblambda wrote: post #109

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 hea…

> only for it to go over the heads

If it actually went over their heads, then the effort was wasted. I've heard the goal of preaching described thus: "Address the mind to move the heart to change the will." If you haven't addressed the minds of the people you're speaking to, your preaching was a failure.

NB if the people in the parish don't want to change their will, and so close up their minds, that's a different issue.

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

#148

Post by accidentallfact »

somenameforme wrote: post #119
grey-area wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The thing that made him question geocentrism was that Venus quite visibly orbits the Sun.

It has always been known that the tides are caused by the Moon. The hard part is to predict the tides in detail, as they depend on the geography as well. Some of the first computers were invented to predict the tides.

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

#149

Post by graemep »

falcor84 wrote: post #133
graemep wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do not have to pay anything.

Where does the money come from? Religious services are generally funded by donations, and these donations are usually done in the open, whereby (from what I saw) regularly attending and not donating the expected amount would put you in a socially uncomfortable situation.

No reason anyone would would feel social discomfort in my experience, which is mostly in Catholic and Anglican churches, and AFAIK money comes mostly from donations not made in public. I have not felt the least worried about what people would think when I have not had cash on me or about how much I put in.

Depending on the definition of services you are using (e.g. you only mean masses in a Catholic Church, or everything else churches do) lots of things are done without a link to donating: prayers and meditation of other kinds/formats, confession, pastoral care, food banks, religious education and discussion.... In poor countries often things like medical services.

Done the traditional way, no one can really see how much you put in the box and there is no reaction at all from anyone if you put nothing in. Only people right next to you can see anything at all.

Now churches in the UK offer envelopes on which you can write your name and postcode for tax reasons (they can reclaim part of the tax paid on the donation if you are a UK tax payer) so no one can see how much you put in if its in such an envelope.

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