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Praying with Clippy

Praying with Clippy

Last updated on: August 7, 2024 at 5:39 pm by Fred Clark

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Praying with Clippy 2024-08-07T17:39:29-04:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

“August 2, 2024 was Black Friday for the artificial intelligence boom, as a week of rough earnings from Big Tech led to what felt like the entire media industry to ask: is the AI bubble popping?”

That’s tech writer Ed Zitron, who’s been predicting “the AI bubble popping” for a while now because, well, the autofill plagiarism-bots now marketed as “artificial intelligence” are mostly useless and the billions of dollars spent promoting them have mostly just resulted in the deterioration of necessary tools like search engines and the corruption of writing, art, and communication.

Sadly, if not surprisingly, the pivot-to-AI trend is turning out to be a lot like the pivot-to-video trend of a decade ago. Back then, news outlets and other vital websites steered their resources away from their core work to chase Facebook’s fleeting mandate to prioritize autoplay video — something else that nobody asked for and nobody liked. A lot of sites struggled to pivot back, especially those with the bad timing to have jumped on the pivot-to-video train just as the trend was ending.

All of that is why I think this is ill-conceived: “Meet Cathy, the new AI chatbot and Episcopal Church expert.”

A new generation of religious AI is emerging with the advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT — some with mixed success. The latest AI chatbot geared for spiritual seekers is AskCathy, co-launched in June by a research institute and ministry organization and aiming to roll out soon on Episcopal church websites. Cathy draws on the latest version of ChatGPT and is equipped to prioritize Episcopalian resources.

“This is not a substitute for a priest,” said the Rev. Tay Moss, director of one of Cathy’s architects, the Innovative Ministry Center, an organization based at the Toronto United Church Council that develops digital resources for communities of faith. “She comes alongside you in your search queries and helps you discover material. But she is not the end-all be-all of authority. She can’t tell you how to believe or what to believe.”

The folks behind this seem well-intentioned and at least somewhat aware of the potential problems here. But I still suspect this will end badly. Most of the legitimate need that “Cathy” is intended to address would be better served with old-school 20th-century tech like a Yahoo-style directory or even a 1-800 hotline. Anybody with urgent questions is likely to find help from “Cathy” as frustrating as the “help” we all receive from automated phone menus — the ones that have us mashing the “0” on our phones or repeatedly saying “Human. … Human!” only to have the menu start over, re-listing the various options for inhuman assistance.

I wonder what “Cathy” would have to say about this effort: “Top Personal Christian Blogs: Ranked By AI Composite Score.”

Hey, it’s always nice to be included in such lists, so thank you to Adrian Warnock for including this marauding marsupial* in your algorithmic Top 40! I’m happy to see this site listed there at No. 36. (Well, as the first of two No. 36’s — ChatGPT was involved in this list, so it goes 34, 35, 36, 37, 34, 35, 36 …)

My gratitude for that is not diminished by my bewilderment at the criteria:

Once I had found a large list of working Christian blogs I asked ChatGPT to rank them. Each blog received a score from 1 to 10 for each criterion. …

“Personal Stories and Vulnerability (20%): How well does the blog share personal experiences and show vulnerability?

Biblical Insights (20%): How deep and insightful are the biblical reflections and teachings?

Consistency and Engagement (20%): How frequently is new content posted, and how engaged is the author with their audience?

Community and Support (10%): Does the blog foster a sense of community and offer support to its readers?

Relevance and Relatability (10%): How relevant and relatable is the content to current issues and everyday life?

Inspirational Content (10%): How inspiring is the content for readers seeking encouragement?

External Validation and Influence (10%): What kind of recognition or influence does the blog have within the broader Christian community?”

Are the sites listed offering “deep and insightful biblical reflections and teachings”? Are they “relevant and relatable”? Are they “inspirational”? To find out, we asked this autocomplete chatbot.

These are not things that a not-really-AI LLM like ChatGPT is designed to evaluate. They are not things it is capable of evaluating.

And while it may be flattering to have the chatbot spit out a result that suggests this blog is only slightly less inspiring, insightful, and influential than No. 35 Ed Stetzer’s, what it really suggests is this: Somebody is scraping the content from here and from Stetzer’s blog to further refine the autocomplete algorithms of ChatGPT.

That’s not cool. (Even if I’m somewhat amused by the possibility that bots like “Cathy” may one day start referring to “The Liar Tony Perkins.”)

Part of what that means, also, is that all 44 of the blogs in Warnock’s Top 40 are being strip-mined to train “AI” content-generators that other sites will use to produce simulacra of “personal blogs.”

For a glimpse of what this might look like, here’s an article from “Church Leaders” — a site that also hosts Ed Stetzer’s blog: “The Complex Journey of Ted Haggard.”

The byline for that piece simply says “Staff,” but it sure reads like it was churned out by ChatGPT.

This winds up being unintentionally hilarious for anyone who remembers the actual “complex journey” of Ted Haggard:

Ted Haggard’s career was not without controversy. In 2006, he faced allegations that led to his resignation from New Life Church and the National Association of Evangelicals. These allegations and the ensuing scandal were a significant turning point in Haggard’s life, impacting his ministry and public image.

Despite these challenges, Haggard embarked on a journey of self-reflection and healing. Along with his wife, Gayle, Haggard publicly addressed the issues that led to his fall, working towards redemption and restoration. He has since planted another church in Cororado Springs.

Ted Haggard’s life story is a testament to the complexities of human nature. From his early days in Indiana to the heights of evangelical leadership and through the trials that followed, Haggard’s journey offers insights into the challenges and opportunities of faith-based leadership. As the conversation about faith and redemption continues in evangelical circles and beyond, Ted Haggard’s story remains a stunning chapter in the broader narrative of American evangelicalism.

That has the signature “AI” trait of seeming like its saying something without ever actually saying anything. “Haggard’s journey offers insights” — but what those insights might be will remain beyond the scope of this article.

The chatbot’s characteristic style recalls this passage in Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” except that what he wrote as a hyperbolic warning it offers as a sales pitch:

But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent – and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

* Twenty years ago, when the world wide web was formless and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep — or at least before the Big Tech monopolies had taken over — there weren’t many ways to measure traffic or readership for blogs and other websites. One of the more amusing attempts was the TTLP Blogosphere Ecosystem, which ranked blogs by the number of other blogs linking back to them, riffing off Linnaean taxonomy. The agenda-setting highest-traffic sites were dubbed “Higher Beings,” followed by Mortal Humans, Playful Primates, Large Mammals, etc., all the way down to Multicellular Microorganisms and Insignificant Microbes.

That effort withered away once the Higher Beings started monetizing their blogs. Advertisers needed more precise ways to count — and pay for — “clicks.” And once more clicks meant more money, clicks replaced links as the driving force of the blogosphere and there was no longer much point in describing a “blogosphere ecosystem.” (Also, once clicks became money, Facebook and Google stepped in to make sure that All Your Clicks Are Ours Now and, well, that’s what happened to blogs.)

Anyway, the last time I checked, back during W’s second term at some point, this blog was a Marauding Marsupial — smaller than the Large Mammals, but bigger than the Adorable Rodents.

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