One of my favorite examples of an author out of her depth is from Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, where she entertains a childishly reductive reading of Christian belief:
In Africa during the fourth century a great many Christians joined a body of schismatics known as the Donatists who were wrecking the church by maintaining that only sacraments administered by a righteous priest were valid, and that a number of contemporary priests had proved themselves unrighteous during the persecutions of Diocletian. They raved: for according to the Church Christ is the real dispenser of the sacraments . . . But though these people raved they were not mad. They were making the only noises they knew to express the misery inflicted on them by the economic collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Since there was no economic literature there was no vocabulary suitable to their misery, so they had to use the vocabulary given them by the Church; and they screamed nonsense about the sacraments because they very sensibly recognized that the Western Roman Empire was going to die, and so were they.
Donatism is a misreading of Matthew 7:15–20, a conviction that wicked priests cannot baptize, for a corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit. But the Donatists were wrong, for Christ spoke of prophets, of teachers and teachings, not ministers and sacraments. From a good teacher good things come, but a bad teacher bears evil fruit. (For the editor on biblical language, see page 24.) A reader of the passage quoted above would be wise to apply this lesson to Rebecca West. (For Peter Hitchens on her contemporary, Malcolm Muggeridge, see psge 60.)
This passage has been on my mind as I’ve interacted with A.I. chatbots. What kind of teacher is Claude? It is both the teacher (we the users ask it for advice, answers, and analysis) and the fruit, the creation of a company that employs a full-time philosopher. Claude is not the first consumer product to embody an ethos; Dr. Bronner’s soaps, for example, were distributed as a means of spreading the magical quasi-monist philosophy of its founder (for David Bentley Hart on magic, see page 52). Or again, the Oneida Limited company, one of the world’s largest producers of silverware, was incorporated as an instrument of the “Free Love” community led by John Humphrey Noyes in Oneida, New York.
An added confusion, perhaps, is introduced by the techspeak that has been invented to distinguish what these A.I. products do. Claude and ChatGPT are “generative,” meaning they focus on generating answers based on prompts, either text or visual. “Agents,” on the other hand, as the name implies, are supposedly focused on “action.” You ask an A.I. agent to send an email to your dog’s veterinarian scheduling an appointment, and it is “empowered” to actually press send and do it.
Morally, this lets the generative A.I. companies off the hook: Claude merely thinks, but you act. But for Catholics this gets it backward; actions are important indicators of what is really important, our beliefs. Only a Catholic saint could say with Saint Andrew Wouters, the deplorable Dutch whisky priest and martyr, “Fornicator I always was; heretic I never was.”
One of my favorite examples of an author out of her depth is from Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, where she entertains a childishly reductive reading of Christian belief:
In Africa during the fourth century a great many Christians joined a body of schismatics known as the Donatists who were wrecking the church by maintaining that only sacraments administered by a righteous priest were valid, and that a number of contemporary priests had proved themselves unrighteous during the persecutions of Diocletian. They raved: for according to the Church Christ is the real dispenser of the sacraments . . . But though these people raved they were not mad. They were making the only noises they knew to express the misery inflicted on them by the economic collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Since there was no economic literature there was no vocabulary suitable to their misery, so they had to use the vocabulary given them by the Church; and they screamed nonsense about the sacraments because they very sensibly recognized that the Western Roman Empire was going to die, and so were they.
Donatism is a misreading of Matthew 7:15–20, a conviction that wicked priests cannot baptize, for a corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit. But the Donatists were wrong, for Christ spoke of prophets, of teachers and teachings, not ministers and sacraments. From a good teacher good things come, but a bad teacher bears evil fruit. (For the editor on biblical language, see page 24.) A reader of the passage quoted above would be wise to apply this lesson to Rebecca West. (For Peter Hitchens on her contemporary, Malcolm Muggeridge, see psge 60.)
This passage has been on my mind as I’ve interacted with A.I. chatbots. What kind of teacher is Claude? It is both the teacher (we the users ask it for advice, answers, and analysis) and the fruit, the creation of a company that employs a full-time philosopher. Claude is not the first consumer product to embody an ethos; Dr. Bronner’s soaps, for example, were distributed as a means of spreading the magical quasi-monist philosophy of its founder (for David Bentley Hart on magic, see page 52). Or again, the Oneida Limited company, one of the world’s largest producers of silverware, was incorporated as an instrument of the “Free Love” community led by John Humphrey Noyes in Oneida, New York.
An added confusion, perhaps, is introduced by the techspeak that has been invented to distinguish what these A.I. products do. Claude and ChatGPT are “generative,” meaning they focus on generating answers based on prompts, either text or visual. “Agents,” on the other hand, as the name implies, are supposedly focused on “action.” You ask an A.I. agent to send an email to your dog’s veterinarian scheduling an appointment, and it is “empowered” to actually press send and do it.
Morally, this lets the generative A.I. companies off the hook: Claude merely thinks, but you act. But for Catholics this gets it backward; actions are important indicators of what is really important, our beliefs. Only a Catholic saint could say with Saint Andrew Wouters, the deplorable Dutch whisky priest and martyr, “Fornicator I always was; heretic I never was.”
