God is personal, and human beings are persons too - and ultimately reality is a matter of relations between persons, or more exactly Beings (alive, conscious, purposive etc).
Life in 2025 is pushing us towards either a clear recognition of this reality, or else a collapse into nihilism, then despair.
Inwardly to reject the so-called "AI" push/takeover ought to be a no-brainer for a discerning Christian; but way too many have failed to recognize this latest threat - which means they have taken the side of consciousness-denying abstraction, rather than personhood.
AI is therefore a Test. And, as with all the Litmus Tests, un-repented failure in one Test strongly leads to further ramifications of the problem (to more sins of other kinds) - and I sometimes observe a remarkably rapid collapse into general failure of discernment.
To deny the qualitative gulf between AI and the personal, goes with a (typically "optimistic") denial of the realities of our civilization.
Once we have edited-out the absolute necessity of individual human beings from our definition of discourse - inevitably, there will be adverse consequences spreading-out from this un-repented failure - metastasizing: forming secondary spiritual dysfunctions.
The "problem" is that to reject AI means to put oneself outwith the mainstream - which is infiltrated and polluted with fake-discourse.
And it is trying to spread, all the time. Already this blog has experienced several AI pseudo-commenters*.
The answer is to reject the modern value of "openness" including to become suspicious of "strangers" as being probably-malign, in the same way that happens in tribal societies.
Trust must be "earned", including being trusted to be human and free; rather than mechanical and automatic.
And therefore some humans will, in the nature of things, be rejected as AI - not least because many/most people in public discourse are already operating mentally (and spiritually) at the same level as AI, so as to be indistinguishable from an algorithm.
But that is their problem - not mine.
*An increasing proportion of public media discourse consists of AI-generated text interacting with AI-generated comments/ reviews/ discussions. The truly pitiful thing; is those human beings who are paying attention to it.
4 comments:
for a few years now, i've asked myself about quite a few interactions online, whether it was a real person or not i was interacting with. at first i dismissed it as paranoid (if a little sad, that people were starting to sound so... mechanical), but who knows at this point, if it's the people imitating the machines or just machines. i just tune out when i get a whiff that it might be either one. you also have the people complaining about how search results on the internet are unreliable and just barely readable slop, and saying that 'ai' is the solution (or at lest that it provides better results), and they don't see how one thing contributes to the other - or how it got us to the problem in the first place. the saddest thing as you say is that, for a lot of real people (including supposedly spiritual people!), with flesh and blood and a soul (presumably!), it makes no difference whatsoever.
@Laeth - It's one of those "people get what they want, then want what they get" things. In the end, one can only rail against this stuff for a while, then let people get on with it -- but making the needful discernments, and adjusting one's own behaviour accordingly.
@Bruce, indeed. i am prone to ranting about it, unfortunately, because it just offends me at a very primal level. still, out of those rants, every once in a while, there is an insight into something deeper, so it's not a total loss (or so i like to believe).
That feeling when you realize the dead internet theory is real - whether the users are technically bots or not
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