Life in this digital age is not easy for even the most discerning Catholic soul. We can barely trust what we see or hear, even from the most trusted sources.
The realisation that information can be reduced to 1’s and 0’s, and stored to a medium which is mutable and only verifiable by more mutable 1’s and 0’s, one can quickly grow in concern.
One can legitimately question how true or real is the digital text, audio, or images which have been published? To what extent have they been manipulated or faked (say by AI generation or talented digital artists)?
In an age where digital automated algorithms have advanced to such a degree, it’s possible to use these automated algorithms to generate text, images, videos, audio, to “interpret” speech, etc. it is astonishing how much God’s gifts of intellect and reason can be undermined, vacated, or manipulated.
The world calls such automated algorithms “AI” – artificial intelligence (but in my book that’s a disservice to the term and is not truly calling a spade a spade – more on that another time). But these black boxes are full of unscrupulous assumptions, corrupt data, and even more insidious and morally bankrupt ethics.
Human thinking is now being influenced by this new actor – generative automated algorithms. The text we read on the Internet, the scripts we hear people reading from, even the images we see and audio we here, we no longer have confidence that that this is the genuine work of humans. Just to verify that it is the genuine work of humans has become, for the first time in history, almost impossible to prove.
I’ve decided not to use ChatGPT or Bard or any of the myriad of automated algorithms for generating text to write this article, and I decide not to do so in the future for anything written on this blog. I could well have decided to use these things, and of course, it would be hard to tell whether somewhere in the background I had. But I can say for sure that such a choice would have come from my sinful side: vanity, pride, envy, slothfulness, etc. not from any virtue.
Here comes the crux – the need for human debate. Not the vacation of reason and intellect to algorithmic interpolation of machines which we humans can not test and critique because of their black box nature.
We humans need human interaction, human reasoning, and in doing so, we not only please God, we also can encounter the Divine. Something which I doubt one can do through the use of automated algorithms…
Hence, the need to promote human debate, particularly among Catholics, where the intellect and reason is truly exercised. In doing so, we use God’s gifts purely and powerfully. For sure, we are slowly getting to a point that the new intruder could inject itself even into that human debate, but it should be spurned.
We are called to use God’s gifts to us, not to vacate them to silicon. A Catholic scout in this world should be an advocate for face-to-face human debate without digital aids, where we can exercise our God-given intellect and reason.
Whether a good Catholic scout should be a neo-Luddite is another question for another time, the short answer being:
2 And be not conformed to this world; but be reformed in the newness of your mind, that you may prove what is the good, and the acceptable, and the perfect will of God.
Romans 12:2
Catholic Scout 