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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

#291

Post by ssl-3 »

Tade0 wrote: post #155
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.

Yesterday I when I was googling something it hit me: I wouldn't know how to find anything without a search engine. We're already reliant on big tech regarding what information is presented to us and LLMs are just the next step in that direction.

When I was a kid, we had a long shelf dedicated to storing a voluminous encyclopedia in the family room, and subscribed to periodic (annual?) updates.

This was expensive.

IIRC, these books were purchased one small stack at a time from a locally-owned grocery store, which spread the expense over a longer period. One week, they'd have the books 1-5 on display and for sale, say. And the next week, it'd be books 6-10. After a time, a family could have the whole set.

Anyway, we had that. So when I wanted to find general information about a topic back then, before Google or Altavista or Webcrawler or whatever, I'd look in the encyclopedia first and get some background.

If it was something I really wanted to dig deeper on, I'd go to the library. If I couldn't find what I needed, I asked for help. Sometimes, this meant that they'd order appropriate material (for free) using inter-library loan for me to peruse.

If I already had enough background but needed a very specific fact, then I'd call the library's reference desk and they'd find it for me and call back. They'd then read the relevant information over the phone.

And if I wanted a reference to have and keep, then: We had book stores.

---

Nowadays: Encyclopedias are basically dead, but we can carry an offline copy of Wikipedia in our pocket supercomputer if we choose. Books still get published. Libraries are still present, and as far as I can tell they broadly still find answers with a phone call.

It's not all lost, yet. The old ways still work OK if a person wants them to work. (Of course, Googling the thing or chatting with the bot is often much, much faster. We choose our own poison.)

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

#292

Post by giancarlostoro »

gwd wrote: post #146
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 is…

> 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.

Reminds me of Pauls retort about speaking in tongues with no translator. ;)

The idea being, that if it serves nobody but the person themselves, they should keep it to themselves, if you're going to "share" with the whole congregation, then it should edify the congregation.

1 Corinthians 14:27-28 (KJV)

"27 If any man speak in an unknown tongue, let it be by two, or at the most by three, and that by course; and let one interpret.

28 But if there be no interpreter, let him keep silence in the church; and let him speak to himself, and to God."

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

#293

Post by Quillbert182 »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #282

If the priest is using AI to write homilies what is even the point of going to Church I could just get an AI to be my priest and stay home. Using AI generated text to interact with a human that is expecting a human touch is gross. Even AI generated corpo-slop emails give me the ick. To me, it shows a deep lack of respect for the other person. I would rather something in broken English than bot vomit. I’ve ended frien…

In Catholicism the homily is not the main point of Mass, it takes a far secondary role to the Eucharist. Bad homilies definitely show up, but from the Catholic perspective that does not diminish or detract from the purpose of the Mass as a whole.

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

#294

Post by emil-lp »

midtake wrote: post #40

The article seems to be overreacting to a small part of Pope Leo's talk. It seems to me his real point was that using AI to hasten writing homilies leads priests to treat this work as busy work instead of thoughtful, focused work.

Priests who use generative AI to craft their homilies should openly share the prompts they rely on, because those prompts shape the theology, tone, and pastoral direction of what is proclaimed from the pulpit. In a community rooted in trust and accountability—especially within the Catholic Church—transparency about AI use is not optional but a moral obligation.

— ChatGPT.

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

#295

Post by bibleguided »

superb_dev wrote: post #271
bibleguided wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re right that a priest can’t (and shouldn’t) dump private pastoral context into a prompt. But context doesn’t have to mean identifiable confession details. I’m building BibleGuided, and one thing we’re adding is a church feature where congregants can opt in to sharing prayer themes, and leaders can see aggregated and anonymized trends over time rather than identities. That’s enough to shape a homily toward what p…

How are you dealing with the Pope saying priests shouldn’t use your product?

I agree with the Pope’s point. Priests should not hand pastoral judgment to a model. BibleGuided has church management tools plus optional AI help for drafting and organizing, with the priest making the final call.

For community context, we avoid confessional and private pastoral data. It is opt-in from congregants, then aggregated and anonymized into themes and trends.

We think AI can be a helpful tool across many areas, including faith, and over time many church leaders (of many denominations) will get comfortable using it in bounded, and responsible ways. If a church does not want AI used for homilies, those features can be toggled off and the rest of our tools still work.

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

#296

Post by ssl-3 »

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.

Back when my parents made me go to church, I remember observing that a lot of the donations being made were in envelopes that the church provided.

That's pretty private, I think, in that one's fellow churchgoers can't discern much but the thickness of the envelope. It'd look the same if the donation consisted of 5 singles, or 5 hundreds.

(I have no idea if that's standard accepted practice everywhere, though I might imagine that someone would be getting pretty uptight at some level if people weren't giving enough to put another layer of gold on the roof of a Catholic church -- envelope or not.)

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

#297

Post by soderfoo »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #223
soderfoo wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, faith is the crux of Catholicism.

I assume this was intended as a joke, even if it is one that doesn’t land? Because it’s not clear what this could mean otherwise.

99% of the jokes I've made throughout my life don't land. For better or worse, if I find something amusing I impulsively share it.

In this case, I thought it should be obvious that OP must have faith in priests, given that they're Catholic, which requires faith as a prereq.

If you read my comment as a slight against Catholicism, I can understand, but I wouldn't feel comfortable publicly joking about any religion other than my own. If that's the case, you're in good company, with the multitude of nuns who've admonished me for similar offhand comments spanning 20 years of Catholic education from pre-k to college, this is old hat for me.

God willing, I'll mature or start telling better jokes some day.

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

#298

Post by watwut »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #287
aubanel wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit harsh! I go to mass every Sunday (in France) and rarely have political stuff. When there, it's most often about abortion or euthanasia (of course in a pro-life (or anti-choice) direction, "you shall not kill") But dull, empty homilies are (alas) very frequent.

I mean what exactly do you expect them to talk about week after week in what amounts logistically to a book club that only reads one book? Doubly-so since people are now apparently criticizing Christian pastors for quoting Christ.

Catholics have more then just one book. They have whole libraries of theology and tradition way larger then just a bible. And large lists of saints to refer to.

Evangelical would be closer to one book thing, altrought it would still ve a stretch.

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

#299

Post by lotsofpulp »

rationalist wrote: post #267
lotsofpulp wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand why you’re downvoted. “No priest would ever break rules” is such a strong and ridiculous claim that I thought solatic was trolling.

It's alluding to something off-topic, with a hint of "edgy-ness"

How is it off topic? The entire basis of solatic's comment is the assumption that priests would not break the rules. A track record of breaking the rules is reason to not make that assumption.

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

#300

Post by chasd00 »

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…

all the homilies i've heard were pre-written but ended with current events... like telling the congregation to not vote for Obama heh. My wife was Catholic until that moment, she never went back after that. This was St. Rita's in Dallas TX.
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