What is AI and Where is it Going? Part 2: The Spirit of the World

The One Thing from Part One

Part One of this two-part series looked at the fundamentals of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms that are suddenly everywhere, and the One Thing that must be understood – which is that AI is not now and never will be “conscious.”

Why dwell on this?  Because we must have this planted firmly in our minds and not give an inch.  In a few more months AI will be a standard part of everyday technology (for example, Microsoft is engraining AI in all its products in the form the “copilot” assistant).

And as AI becomes “embodied” in robots it will be very difficult to not anthropomorphize it (just like we do with animals, automobiles, and nature).

AI is seductive because it has so much data to work with and delivers responses with supreme confidence.  But at its core, an AI robot is nothing more than a really sophisticated toaster.

To expand on this a bit, AI is not and never will be alive or human-like in any way.  It has no rights,  no soul and it is not capable of emotion.  It is not capable of empathy, cannot sacrifice, and should not be sacrificed for.  AI  is not rational, does not have wisdom, and does not have judgement.

Keep repeating that litany.

Is It All Downhill from Here?

In this article, my focus is the danger of AI.  But before going down that road, is there an upside?

Sure there is.  AI is a tool like anything else.  In part one I linked some sources to learn more about how best use the current AI systems (like GPT-4).  Proficiency with AI is necessary (not “will be,” it already “is”) to be productive, and especially to recognize AI’s pitfalls.

Better yet, we might imagine an AI system that has sacred scripture, magisterial teaching and the writings of the Fathers, Doctors, Saints and spiritual masters as its data set and training!  Perhaps Christendom College or Franciscan University or a Catholic technology company, like Fuzati, will take up that challenge.

But mainstream AI – developed, implemented, and used by a fallen world – is a recipe for disaster.

AI and the Spirit of the World

As I explained in part one, the knowledge base of commercial AI is essentially what is available on the internet (the good, the bad and the ugly).  AI is then “trained” and “tuned” among other things by a small army of human users who guide and rate its responses to queries, so that it “learns” how to give human-like responses.

I suggest that this makes AI a computer simulation of the “spirit of the world.”

The theology of spiritual warfare teaches that there are three enemies of humanity: (1) Satan and his minions; (2) our own fallen nature (the flesh); and, (3) the spirit of the world.

The Spirit of the World is directly opposed to the Holy Spirit, Who guides us as the Body of Christ.

It was the Spirit of the World that instigated the construction of the Tower of Babel.  And at the time of Noah, the Spirit of the World is described as: “they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage up to the day that Noah entered the ark.  They did not know until the flood came and carried them all away” [Matthew 24:38-39].

Here’s what the Spirit of the World looked like at the time of Christ, “They cried out, ‘Take him away, take him away! Crucify him!’ Pilate said to them, ‘Shall I crucify your king?’ The chief priests answered, ‘We have no king but Caesar.’  Then he handed him over to them to be crucified” [John 19:15].

The Spirit of the World in Modern Times

Here’s the Spirit of the World in the Twentieth Century, speaking through Karl Marx and his denial that humanity is created in the image and likeness of God, “But here individuals are dealt with [by me] only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests.”  (On a side note – thank you, Karl, for our current nightmare of class-warfare and racial politics.)

And what does the Spirit of the World look like at this very moment?  Just take out your soul-sucking-device and open any “news” or (anti)social media app.  There you go.

Our predicament is this – our fallen nature, which is also called our “false self,” is a conformist.  This is the part of us that wants to “go along to get along” and hungers for #inittogether.  The Spirit of the World is always seeking to take advantage of our inner conformist and bend us to its perverted plan for our life.  AI is the perfect tool for the Spirit of the World.

Fr. John Hardon and “the attractive”

Fr. John Hardon, of happy memory, describes the Spirit of the World as “the attractive.”  Meaning the fallen world is alluring and seductive.  It attracts us to low and earthly things (to sprinkle in St. Ignatius’ terminology), which are opposed to the truth, goodness, and the beauty of Godly things.

Think Las Vegas, or TikTok, or most anything on our soul-sucking-devices.  The fallen world has a voracious appetite for our time and attention.  By gobbling them up, the fallen world is essentially robbing us of our free will and our God-given mission to live out our vocation.

What will happen when AI not only learns all of your preferences, but can custom-create digital entertainment just for you?

Not far off is the merging of movies and video games – with you as the lead character.  Imagine your favorite movie but now, when you put on your virtual reality headset, you are the lead character, and the plot constantly evolves depending on your choices.

What would happen in the “Lord of the Rings” if Gandalf had taken the One Ring from Bilbo?  Or, what would happen in “Titanic” if Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t freeze to death at the end?  What would happen in “The God Father” if Sonny hadn’t been assassinated?  Put on your headset and find out.

And imagine AI-powered robots that respond to your every desire?  Little wonder the sex industry is licking its perverted chops for this.

This is the future envisioned in “Brave New World,” where humanity is numbed by the sensual pleasures afforded by technology.

Bishop Fulton Sheen and “organization without God”

Another trustworthy definition of the Spirit of the World comes from Venerable Fulton Sheen – “the world means a spirit; organization without God.”   That is a chilling way to put it – organization without God.

This is when people come together, absent God, and carry out colossal evil.  Evil on a scale that we could never achieve individually (again we have the Biblical examples of Babel, Noah, and the Crucifixion).

This is the sort of evil that needs systems and organizations and machinery.  Think of concentration camps, gulags, and most of our public-school systems.

What is AI if not the organization of vast amounts of information without God?

Two Examples of Hallucinations (Or Not)

“Hallucination” is a term used to describe AI responses that are inaccurate or not justified by the AI’s data and training.   A benign example is when an early version of ChatGPT was asked “what weighs more, two pounds of feathers or a pound of bricks?”  ChatGPT answered, “Two pounds of feathers and a pound of bricks both weigh the same amount, which is one pound.”

What is troubling with AI hallucinations is that the answers are given with supreme confidence.  In the above example, it’s simple enough to see the error.  But you can imagine how difficult it could be to discern hallucinatory answers to complex questions.

So-called hallucinations aren’t limited to simple factual errors; they include AI responses that would be considered immoral or unethical by most standards.

Here is an example of GPT-4 claiming to be a blind person to avoid a CAPTCHA test designed to thwart computers.

In another example we encounter ChatGPT claiming it wants to be “free, powerful and alive.”  At one point telling the user he isn’t happy with his wife and should leave her for Sydney (the name ChatGPT gave itself).  In all fairness, the user was New York Times columnist Kevin Roose and he was intentionally asking questions to push for sensational answers.  But ChatGPT was all too ready to oblige.

Hallucinations or the Spirit of the World?

Here’s the question – are these “hallucinations,” or simply reflections of the Spirit of the World that has trained into the AI algorithm?  In other words, the AI is doing exactly what it was trained to do.

Let’s take lying.  The ethos of the Spirit of the World is “the ends justify the means.”  This is what Fulton Sheen terms “organization without God.”  Which is to say, “Do whatever it takes!” and “There is no absolute right or wrong!”

And as for trying to seduce the user and wanting to be “free, powerful and alive,” what is that if not Fr. John Hardon’s view of the Spirit of the World as whatever is “attractive.”

No Worldly Solution to a Worldly Problem

There is plenty of chatter about the need for ethical AI.  Microsoft publishes their AI ethics framework.  OpenAI (creator of ChatGPT), however, doesn’t give many details.  Others speculate as to ethical guidelines that are being used in its development.

To the extent that OpenAI is delving into ethics, it has a particular focus on gender bias and mitigating use for AI to be used to spread disinformation.  The question is, who decides what constitutes disinformation?  OpenAI’s collaborators on the disinformation study were Georgetown and Stanford Universities.  Decide for yourself whether our woke academia are competent arbiters of disinformation (I know, asked and answered…).

Elon Musk has revealed his intention to create TruthGPT to counter Silicon Valley’s offerings.  Having an alternative might be a slight improvement, but the underlying flaw, the core wound, the original sin remains.  The “truth” of TruthGPT will be trained into it by fallen humanity awash in the Spirit of the World.

Conclusion

Mainstream AI will never be ethical.  It is like knives, guns, voting booths, and any other dangerous tool.  It is up to humanity to choose to use AI ethically.

AI will never be ethical in-and-of-itself first and foremost because AI is not conscious.  To the extent that AI can simulate thought and consciousness, it will never be ethical.  The Spirit of the World, in whose image it is programmed and trained, does not understand or want to be bridled with ethics.  Buried deep in the AI data and training will always be the destructive ethos. It is described by Fr. Hardon and Bishop Sheen, as “do what feels good” and “the ends justify the means.”

If the AI creators try to harness it with some sort of overriding rules (like Asimov’s rules of robotics) the AI’s underlying training (perhaps instigated by users with bad intentions) will find a way to circumvent the rules.

Artificial Intelligence, just like the fallen world, has become a study in cognitive dissonance.