Is This Your New Spiritual Director?

Spiritual Formation in an AI world

What happens when a chatbot with artificial intelligence can give you spiritual direction?

That’s a question churches are going to be wrestling with sooner rather than later. My colleague, Patrick Miller, and I co-wrote a piece for Mere Orthodoxy this week that attempts to begin thinking about the implications of rapidly improving artificial intelligence on our spiritual formation.

Here’s a big idea: we are close to experiencing the hyperinflation of information.

When information costs almost zero in either money or effort to create, information becomes virtually worthless. It’s nearly impossible to know if something was created by a human or generated by a computer. Wisdom is divorced from effort. Knowledge is divorced from information. Formation is divorced from community.

Here’s a quote from the article:

Algorithmic neural networks of computers powered by machine learning (what we call “Artificial Intelligence”) aren’t made in the image of God. They’re made in the image of man. Computers can’t be wise. A chatbot’s chief end is to mimic human speech—to be a facsimile of human discourse and thinking. They can’t use reason or experience to apply information to life. Lacking relationality, they cannot truly understand the person on the other side of the keyboard. AI can only generate outputs based on data inputs. Large language model AI are the second-hand smoke of the information age. It sucks in all the nicotine, tar and carcinogensof the internet and then blows it back in your face. Secondhand smoke may not kill you, but it can seriously impact your health. Technocrats are like Aaron at Mt. Sinai: they craft idols to give the people an illusion of certainty, control and mastery and the people worship in awe. But the end of the story can’t be avoided: slurping up the burnt, ground-up remains of our idols until we get sick.

All idols mimics the divine. AI pantomimes omnipresence (it’s available everywhere) and omniscience (it claims to know everything before 2021—for now). But it is just an illusion.

As our ability to rapidly generate information hyperinflates, the subjective value of spiritual learning, spiritual experience, and slow growth will all but vanish. The temptation to settle for the convincing but shallow instead of the complicated but deep will be ever before us. We will face the constant temptation to replace the wisdom found in scripture, community, and even nature with intelligence that is—in the most literal sense—artificial.

Read the full article here.