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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

#301

Post by watwut »

DeepSeaTortoise wrote: post #77
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.

The Catholic Church was funding a lot of research for a long time. E.g the Elon Musk of his time, Galileo, was famously sponsored by it and when asked to contrast his theories against the established view, sperged out so hard against the people tasked with reviewing his publications, they tossed him under the carriage.

Galileo was fascist and liar like Musk?

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

#302

Post by veggieroll »

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.

> overreacting to a small part of [a Pope]'s talk

As is Catholic tradition in the US

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

#303

Post by mjmas »

graemep wrote: post #241
DonHopkins wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A majority of the bible is not true.

Evidence for that statement? Can you give some examples? Mostly when people say "the Bible is not true" its usually a result of misunderstanding it (e.g. adopting Biblical literalism, not understanding the culture and context, not understanding nuance).

What is wrong with taking the Bible as literal statement of fact?

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

#304

Post by falcor84 »

carlosjobim wrote: post #255
falcor84 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do know that, but I also know how donations can become an expectation. Also, it's worth noting in the context of this thread, that people can use AI inference for free on many services, with payment only need for higher usage, and even then, if you don't care about expectations or inconvenience, it's trivial to abuse the free tier.

There's over a thousand years of empirical evidence that a symbolic donation of a coin is accepted.

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 today's money, so definitely not symbolic.

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

#305

Post by gwbas1c »

chasd00 wrote: post #300
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.

American religions are supposed to stay out of politics, or they risk their tax-exempt status.

For me, the disturbing event was shortly before the 2016 event when a Catholic Church in Lowell MA had posters urging people to vote no on marijuana legalization.

(In my case, I smelt the politization when I was a teenager so I never continued being Catholic as an adult.)

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

#306

Post by oytis »

zdragnar wrote: post #104
scns wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Government collects the tax for the churches from their members only, so the government here is merely an intermediary between church members and the respective organisations.

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

#307

Post by thinkingemote »

gwbas1c wrote: post #305
chasd00 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

American religions are supposed to stay out of politics, or they risk their tax-exempt status. For me, the disturbing event was shortly before the 2016 event when a Catholic Church in Lowell MA had posters urging people to vote no on marijuana legalization. (In my case, I smelt the politization when I was a teenager so I never continued being Catholic as an adult.)

The separation of church and state in the US was for the state to stay out of religion.

(the US was founded by religious exiles from a state which didn't stay out)

Religions are explicitly political but politics shouldn't interfere with religions. To follow your religion means interacting with the outside world. It's not some personally private thing like a harmless badge you wear (although there are American faith communities that advocate for that).

The cases in the past where political have interfered with religions are often, ironically enough, by other religious politicians. Hence the good idea to separate church and state.

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

#308

Post by lo_zamoyski »

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.

Contrary to prevailing fetish, not everything is about “power”. Framing everything in terms of it is not only self-refuting, but it impoverishes the range of human relations and warps understanding.

Confession is not about some kind of organizational power. The whole point is that it liberates the penitent. It is protected by absolute secrecy in order to, among other reasons, remove the element of power. A priest who breaks the seal of confession incurs automatic excommunication and faces further penalties, like removal from public ministery and from the clerical state. In short, a priest is expected to endure torture and even death to preserve the seal. There is no admissible exception. Not much of a “power move”.

In the case of big tech and AI, profit and power do enter the picture. Secrecy is the last thing big tech wants.

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

#309

Post by mcv »

cafard wrote: post #238
stratocumulus0 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was raised Catholic and even though the last time I've been to a church could have been in 2019, I don't remember any priest who wouldn't just gloss over the religious content for the day (copied from an online source), itching to share his politics and the most recent ragebait he's got from Facebook at the end.

This is in the US? I have rarely heard political homilies.

Religion has been far more politicised in the US than elsewhere. And not exactly in a direction that makes sense to me (a European protestant).

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

#310

Post by fhdkweig »

gwbas1c wrote: post #305
chasd00 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

American religions are supposed to stay out of politics, or they risk their tax-exempt status. For me, the disturbing event was shortly before the 2016 event when a Catholic Church in Lowell MA had posters urging people to vote no on marijuana legalization. (In my case, I smelt the politization when I was a teenager so I never continued being Catholic as an adult.)

When my state was debating creating a state-run lottery to fund education projects, my preacher gave a sermon on the evils of gambling. Religions can't realistically stay out of politics because every law can be reinterpreted as a moral argument.
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