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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

#311

Post by portmanteur »

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.

Not sure what this is implying, but aspiring priests are required to have a Bachelor’s degree before entering Seminary, or it tacks at least two years onto a very rigorous six-year seminary program. The seminary program is on par with getting a Master’s degree in Philosophy and Theology. Further, only 30-50% of seminarians ultimately become ordained as priests, due to the rigorous vetting program and “discerning out.”

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

#312

Post by fluoridation »

graemep wrote: post #108
oersted wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 personal…

>it is a very good example of why religious authority should be in the same hands as secular power

Did you forget a "not"?

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

#314

Post by rawgabbit »

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.

If I heard that, I would be upset too.

Honestly she should have changed parishes. St Rita’s is in an affluent part of Dallas. One of the priests is a former Anglican(?) with wife and children who obtained a special dispensation.

I heard a lot of bad phone it in homilies too. Today one of my favorite priests is from Benin. He serves the Francophone community but also celebrates mass in English and Spanish. He is at Mary Immaculate in Farmers Branch. He is more traditional and gives the Catholic interpretation of the day’s readings and how it applies today.

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

#315

Post by carlosjobim »

falcor84 wrote: post #304
carlosjobim wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 toda…

I know that hackers here need to always be right and go to great lengths to try to distort reality when they are wrong. You're not even fooling yourself by saying that every coin in history is worth a thousand dollars, much less fooling anybody else.

If you make it a habit to always lie in order to always be right, you start building castles of lies that hinder you in life. Just because of pride.

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

#318

Post by jacquesm »

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…

Not to mention a massive violation of privacy, which they are subject to as much or more as every other entity that processes privacy sensitive data.

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

#319

Post by piker »

The article barely touches on this subject, but the sentiment is nonetheless correct.

The problem with using an AI to write something so intimate and context-specific is that it cannot perform as the priest's highest and best abstraction. Instead, it will slavishly follow instructions and risk tunnelling the priest into a worldview and message that subtly betrays his congregation.

I recently wrote about how modern legal tech stacks can do the same using the infamous Digital Research / IBM non-disclosure agreement as an example: https://tritium.legal/blog/redline

If we habitually reduce our context to the lowest-common window ingestible by an AI, yes we may lose a bit of humanity, but more importantly we'll just do a worse job.

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

#320

Post by anthonypasq »

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.

i dont remember a world without google but surely the answer is just walk into a library?
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