In a world where it is easy to be disheartened by the nattering of nabob negativism about AI, Calgary Bishop William McGrattan offers a refreshing reassurance of the good old Good News.

Tall foreheads everywhere tell us incessantly, of course, that the only viable choices as we face the AI onslaught are fight or flight – and flight just left town.

But as the Register’s Quinton Amundson reports, McGrattan struck the truly intelligent note at a weekend conference co-hosted by the Calgary Diocese and the city’s St. Mary’s University on preparation for the artificial intelligence future.

Advertisement

For starters, Bishop McGrattan said, we must learn as Church the language of large language model (LLM) digital life. 

“We must not be an AI illiterate Church,” McGrattan said bluntly.

Read that sentence until it’s embedded in memory and then put it under a fridge magnet of the Blessed Virgin Mary for refreshment as necessary.

The only thing we have to fear is no longer fear itself but rather refusal to understand the vocabulary of AI. It’s essential to effectively dispute the premises underlying it, not to mention the fever dreams of hype artists getting mega-rich promoting it.

One of the most critical of those premises, which must be intelligently challenged at every opportunity by all of us, is that AI is what the acronym says it is: intelligence. It isn’t. AI is a different order of computational power and process. 

Advertisement

It simulates the human capacity for making seemingly dissonant connections between disparate pieces of information beyond the binary choices of conventional computing’s ones and zeros. But it is nowhere remotely close to our natural intelligence.

 University of California psychology professor Cory Miller clearly explained why in a recently published article.

“AI systems, including the most powerful large language models, rely on computational force,” Miller wrote. “Despite their apparent sophistication, these models don’t understand the world, they merely identify statistical patterns in massive data sets. They can’t form abstract concepts, adapt to unfamiliar environments or learn from sparse information the way a human toddler can.”

To illustrate the massive difference of kind between real, human intelligence and the non-intelligence of AI “intelligence,” Miller noted the human brain requires 20 watts of power. By contrast, it would take the “amount of energy that powers the entire city of Dallas” for the best LLM models to match the computational ability of a single human brain.

None of that is to dismiss the shifts that AI non-intelligent intelligence is already causing in the world. On the contrary, as Bishop McGrattan wisely pointed out, it is imperative to recognize the change in order to put our infinitely more powerful 20-watt brains to work making it work for us.

A critical task – and opportunity – for the Church in that regard is talking the world down from the hallucinations of all the “old heresies” that AI is, by its very nature, bound to revive among people whose minds have let slip the foundational truth of the Incarnation.

As Bishop McGrattan framed it, it’s the opening for the Church to return the Word to a world that risks being overwhelmed by “Gnosticism that in some ways the human person is disembodied, that our consciousness, our thinking, is what defines us solely as a human person without reference to the gift of the body. Or the reductionism of the human person to what is just simply material, to what we’ve heard as the temptation of this transhumanism, to actually see our humanity be transformed into a material machine.”

Advertisement

Paradoxically, the Church taking a complementary, rather than oppositional, approach to AI is the very evangelizing opening it needs to refute the biological lies of the later 20th century – abortion, euthanasia, sexual amorphism – and renew the truth of the world as created, incarnate, ordered, real rather than artificial. 

The advent of AI can be, then, a moment of glory that only God could give to bring the inherent concreteness of the Good News back to worldly awareness, to consciousness. By advancing genuine understanding of AI, the Church can carry out and carry on its call to lift human hearts with the peace that passes all understanding.