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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

#361

Post by lostlogin »

h33t-l4x0r wrote: post #100
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…

Well maybe they just need to start recording confessionals. Just imagine what Gemini 3.1 could do with 1M tokens of that stuff.

This is how you get Grok.

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

#362

Post by lo_zamoyski »

Brendinooo wrote: post #251
lo_zamoyski wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, "faith" is actually an integral component of "the Christian faith". Go read the first part of Acts 4, where a section closes with: "Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished. And they recognized that they had been with Jesus." So...yes! We do believe in a God that can empower average people to speak in above-average ways.

The conversation was as follows:

> You have a lot of faith in the qualities of average priests. >> To be fair, faith is the crux of Catholicism.

So, in context (which the downvoters seem to have missed), "faith" is being used equivocally here. There a difference between having faith in Christ and his promises and faith in his claims of divinity on the one hand, and having "faith" in a priest or whatever else on the other. Hence, my question whether this was some kind of a bad attempt at humor or whether something was meant by it.

(FWIW, authentic Christian faith is not an arbitrary faith in anything you please. This is blind faith which is irrational. This is why we can speak of preambula fidei. There must be reasons for faith. When a friend tells you something about his inner life that you cannot know directly, you may believe him given an ensemble of evidence and reasons that cannot prove his claim definitively, but are nonetheless very supportive of it. Furthermore, the claim makes sense of what you do know about him.)

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

#363

Post by [deleted] »

randusername wrote: post #329

My old-school protestant pastor started with an AI disclaimer in the sermon yesterday. What a time to be alive! I don't know what to do with my double standard here. It seems totally normal and expected that I would outsource aspects of my job solving business software problems to AI, but the idea of my spirituality and cultural experience (music, movies, art, etc) being someone else's business problem to be outsourc…

[deleted]

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

#364

Post by snowhale »

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…

[dead]

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

#365

Post by kstrauser »

ben_w wrote: post #355
kstrauser wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s fundamentally different, and I think you know that. It’s one thing to ask an algorithm how to build an A* driving map from point A to point B. It’s another to ask one how to be a better person and go to Heaven. I’m not religious, and I’m not arguing this from a pro-religion POV. I happily work in AI, and I’m not arguing this from an anti-AI POV. I am highly technical. I love computers. I’m excited about the fu…

3/4-agree; LLM advice is only one step up from an Agony Aunt column in a newspaper. And I'd expect "Target stock scheduling system does for target employees for restocking shelves" to be an A* or similar. But also, Google maps has directed people to their deaths: https://gizmodo.com/three-men-die-after-google-maps-reported... isn't even what I was originally looking for, which was: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google…

Sure, people die from regular programming. Mistakes happen. That’s not good or ok, but it seems unavoidable given today’s technologies and tools.

However, I think that’s in a different category than giving life advice. How is an LLM to know that God forgives Joe for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his children, but doesn’t forgive Tom for doing the same thing because Tom had money but was saving up to buy cooler shoes and didn’t want to spend it? A priest’s advice might be “Joe, don’t make a habit of it, but you didn’t hurt anyone and you children were hungry. Tom, would you freaking knock it off already?” An LLM might reply “that’s a wonderful idea!” to both.

Again, I’m firmly not anti-AI. I use it every day. I absolutely to not want to hear its advice on how to navigate the complexities of life as a human being.

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

#366

Post by AndrewKemendo »

kstrauser wrote: post #350
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single person who utilizes a navigation application to traverse a place that they have no previous independently verified experience, is taking existential risk based on a computer telling them what to do There are literally thousands of cases of people dying or being injured because they did what a computer navigation application told them to do This is also literally what the Target stock scheduling system do…

That’s fundamentally different, and I think you know that. It’s one thing to ask an algorithm how to build an A* driving map from point A to point B. It’s another to ask one how to be a better person and go to Heaven. I’m not religious, and I’m not arguing this from a pro-religion POV. I happily work in AI, and I’m not arguing this from an anti-AI POV. I am highly technical. I love computers. I’m excited about the fu…

It’s not fundamentally different it’s people who are taking physical actions in the real world based on trust in some system

whether it’s a human or not they’re trusting the system with their existential outcomes

That is literally exactly the same thing.

The fact that you think that the rules of you being a father are somehow different than the rules of you driving to a appointment indicate that you have a completely incoherent world view based on two incompatible models of epistemology

As usual dualists will come up with a incoherent model and then try and act like it’s valid

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

#367

Post by dharmatech »

1718627440 wrote: post #209
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…

> the Vatican would have started publishing standard homilies long ago. There actually are, but they are famous homilies from famous Church Fathers rather then explicitly produced to be standard homilies.

Yeah, the Liturgy of the Hours includes many of them. (Four volume prayer set.)

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

#368

Post by wat10000 »

Blackthorn wrote: post #358
randusername wrote: post #329

My old-school protestant pastor started with an AI disclaimer in the sermon yesterday. What a time to be alive! I don't know what to do with my double standard here. It seems totally normal and expected that I would outsource aspects of my job solving business software problems to AI, but the idea of my spirituality and cultural experience (music, movies, art, etc) being someone else's business problem to be outsourc…

Talk about a self-aware wolves moment. Why is your use of AI okay but theirs isn't?

There are some jobs where the outcome is the point, and others where having a person actually do a thing is the point. Priest is very much the latter sort of job.

Forget about AI for a moment and let's consider a more mundane tool, like an industrial robot. Is it OK to use a robot to perform some step in assembling a car? Certainly. How about programming that robot to perform Communion? Not so much. Not because using a robot to do things is inherently immoral, but because the human priest is supposed to be an integral component of Communion, it's not just a matter of transporting a cracker and some liquid into people's mouths by whatever means you choose.

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

#369

Post by achierius »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #362
Brendinooo wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, "faith" is actually an integral component of "the Christian faith". Go read the first part of Acts 4, where a section closes with: "Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished. And they recognized that they had been with Jesus." So...yes! We do believe in a God that can empower average people to speak in above-average ways.

The conversation was as follows: > You have a lot of faith in the qualities of average priests. >> To be fair, faith is the crux of Catholicism. So, in context (which the downvoters seem to have missed), "faith" is being used equivocally here. There a difference between having faith in Christ and his promises and faith in his claims of divinity on the one hand, and having "faith" in a priest or whatever else on the o…

> authentic Christian faith is not an arbitrary faith in anything you please

But he's not talking about an arbitrary faith. He's talking about faith in the capacity of priests -- clearly a relevant subject. And there are, indeed, _preambula fidei_ here: that the priest was taught in seminary, that the priest was approved by the Church, that the priest (through the bishop who ordained them) participates in a line of apostolic succession going back to Jesus, etc.

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

#370

Post by Anthony-G »

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 Western half of the Roman Empire collapsed in the fifth century but the Eastern half continued for another thousand years until the Ottoman Empire captured Constantinople in 1453.

A sibling commentator points out that the Catholic church still uses the term “Pontifex Maximus” to refer to their pope. However, this was a title used by the dominant high priest of pre-Christian Rome and the Catholic church only started doing this after Constantine XI (last Roman emperor) died when Constantinople fell to the Turks.

The Catholic church was just one of many entities that appropriated the titles and symbols of classical Rome as a way to confer themselves with the prestige and historical legacy of the Roman Empire. For example, the words “Tsar” (Slavic), “Kaiser” (German) and “Keizer” (Dutch) are all derivations of Caesar (as a synonym for emperor). Western European rulers adopted the Roman eagle for their royal and national coat of arms; Eastern Europeans tend to prefer the double-headed variant. The most egregious example is the Holy Roman Empire which famously was neither holy nor Roman. Arguably, in its latter days, it was more a federation than an empire.

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