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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

#441

Post by wwweston »

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 much faith required on this one: either a given priest will have both strong familiarity with congregational context and the ability to articulate it as instructions to an LLM or they’ll be missing one of those two. If they’re missing the context themselves, well, they can’t feed it to the LLM and best case scenario is probably that they engage the process closely enough the whole way to learn something from it. If they lack the ability to articulate the whole context that they know but can intuitively work with it, then they’re more likely to meet needs than the LLM — and I’d guess this is a common case.

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

#442

Post by giraffe_lady »

Anthony-G wrote: post #370
whatever1 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 start…

> The most egregious example is the Holy Roman Empire

I think unfortunately the most egregious example is this still-extant bit of russian imperial propaganda now repurposed as russian nationalist propaganda.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow,_third_Rome

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

#443

Post by ntnsndr »

My parish priest told me he uses AI to edit newsletter posts. He didn't say he used it to write. And he mentioned using Magesterium.ai, which is a chatbot trained on a pretty conservative Catholic corpus (eg, it knows almost nothing about the Catholic Worker movement).

One thing I appreciate in our diocese is that the priests are encouraged to deliver their homilies without a written script. I think that is very wise, as it forces them to preach from instinct and heart, not from a script, either AI or human written.

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

#444

Post by wiredpancake »

overgard wrote: post #404

IMO, any (important) writing you expect other humans to consume should be your own writing. I think it's kind of disrespectful to outsource your voice to AI but expect people to read it like it's yours. Why should I put in time to read if you're not putting in time to write?

[dead]

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

#445

Post by jerkstate »

roarcher wrote: post #431
rebolek wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I write stories and tech docs. I'll happily outsource writing tech docs to AI. It would be better than anything I would write. I won't let AI to touch my stories. Their input is boring and cringy. So both things can be true at same time.

The AI doesn't know anything about the thing you're documenting except what you tell it, so what value does it add?

I write a lot of tech docs with AI so I can add some substance here. First of all, you do tell it what you’re writing about - you can give it reams of documentation on related systems, terminology, and source code. Stuff that would take you weeks to consume personally (but you probably know the gist of it from having read or skimmed it before). Let’s say you are writing a design doc for a new component. After all of this stuff describing the environment is in its context (you don’t have to type it all out, you can copy paste it, use an MCP to suck it in from a DB, read it from a file, etc), you describe at a high level what architecture choices and design constraints to make (for example, needs to be implemented with this database, this is our standard middleware, etc) and it will fill in blanks and spit out a design for you. Then you refine it - actually this component needs to work like that, unit testing strategy needs to be like this, and so on. Now give me the main modules, code stubs, suggest patterns to use, etc. continue to iterate - it will update the entire doc for you, make sure there are no dead or outdated references, etc. extremely powerful and useful.

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

#446

Post by hippo22 »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #440
hippo22 wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you proposing that an LLM can extract some meaning from your initial prompt that a human being couldn't? No, I’m asserting that an LLM can help formulate ideas in a coherent, understandable way. You can give it a brain dump with a rough outline for an argument and it fill in the details. If the argument isn’t to your liking, you can try again. But the end result is basically equivalent to the human-written equi…

The point is if you can't correctly craft an analogy, I'm not particularly concerned about your opinions on writing in general.

It’s fine to disagree with my analogy. But I find it a little ironic your dismissal of the analogy is a non sequitur. The invalidness of the analogy doesn’t directly follow, logically, from the fact that the written word and the spoken word are both mediums.

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

#447

Post by hippo22 »

gedy wrote: post #429
hippo22 wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The purpose of writing is to convey ideas. If written language had just been invented, I’m sure you’d be saying “IMO any important stories you expect others to know should be communicated orally. It’s kind of disrespectful to convey stories as if they were hearing you speak.”

If you can't articulate an idea yourself, it's not worth conveying imho

I guess you’re not a big fan of Plato then?

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

#448

Post by remarkEon »

adrianN wrote: post #393
portmanteur wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I know little about theology and philosophy but I’ve interviewed enough people with master’s degrees to be able to say that there a very large differences between skilled degree holders and average degree holders, at least in my field.

The selection process for Seminary and becoming Ordained is much more rigorous and difficult than a credentialing exercise that you pay for. I share your cynicism about masters programs, but I don't think it's applicable here. Funnily enough, my favorite professor in college was one of my math professors who was also a Catholic Priest and would say Mass on the weekends at the nearby chapel. Extremely hostile to using technology to teach us, except in very narrow circumstances, and I am all the better for it and so is everyone who had him. We have a much firmer grasp of the theory because he made us write it down (a lot). There are few things more rewarding in life than feeling that "click" in your brain that unlocks a new permanent level of understanding.

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

#449

Post by remarkEon »

gwbas1c wrote: post #359
thinkingemote wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

From the horse's mouth: https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/charities-churches-and-politics > In 1954, Congress approved an amendment by Sen. Lyndon Johnson to prohibit 501(c)(3) organizations, which includes charities and churches, from engaging in any political campaign activity. To the extent Congress has revisited the ban over the years, it has in fact strengthened the ban. The most recent change came in 1987 when Congr…

There's a subtle irony of this rule, which is that in order to stay in compliance with this law a savvy Priest tends to weave more sophisticated moral teachings into their Homilies that make it very obvious what or who they are advocating for or against without explicitly naming them.

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

#450

Post by remarkEon »

slfnflctd wrote: post #336
gwbas1c wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Unfortunately, those laws are not currently enforced. I see another reply is arguing that religion is inherently political. I disagree. Modern politics did not exist at the time the world's major religions were being formed. Attempting to twist them to fit with a particular party or candidate is a terrible idea all around in my book, for many reasons. The state can cause a lot of damage by endorsing religion, the his…

The modern period where we take great pains to excise religion from the public sphere is not the historical norm. The norm is that many - if not most - political, and indeed geopolitical, events throughout history had religion woven into them. It is not difficult to find examples of this throughout European history and pre-history. I know you are making a statement on what you feel "ought to be", but I assure you this "ought" is not the usual course of business in world history. A solid quarter of people today live under regimes where politics and religion are deliberately intertwined, a historical aberration.
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