Dear Friends,
Thanks for joining me again on The Church’s One Foundation. It’s a hot and sultry day here in Indianapolis, so, with little introduction, let’s get to the subject at hand.
Stay cool, stay strong, and keep trusting.
Pressing On,
D. Paul
AI - The Infinitely Aspiring Tower of Babel
I know next to nothing about AI but am currently surrounded by it—literally. My wife and I live in a gatehouse enveloped by a large 15-acre estate. My neighbor, who lives in the “big house,” as we call it, is known as a tech genius and was one of the primary founders of Voice Mail. Three years ago, he began informing me of the pervasive and positive presence of AI in our lives. He was partially right
This past Sunday after church, I spoke to a young student from Purdue University majoring in astrophysics. He assures me that AI will be able to help solve some of the mysteries of the universe but, like most of us, hopes that discretion is used in its applications. Another acquaintance, a good friend who works for Google, tells me about their obligatory, weekly AI seminars. Google dare not fall behind! Another gentleman from church, who works in the pharmaceutical industry, tells me that his most pedestrian email has to be put through an AI app to overview the verbiage. Ah, STOP THE PRESSES! (do you remember those?) I’ve just experienced one of AI’s many benefits. Being behind this week in my writing (I like to put in 20 hours fortnightly and am struggling this week to put in 10), Substack automatically corrected my misspelling of verbiage, which I had written speedily as verbage. I don’t know what program Substack uses, but, despite this helpful correction, I’m disappointed at the number of times Substack questions the spelling if not the existence of a word. I then go to my trusty Oxford dictionary and find the word there, which somehow, amazingly, has not worked itself into the AI lexicon.
Recently, another disappointing “glitch” occurred when I received an AI summation of a routine visit to my doctor (intern scribes are no long necessary—an AI “physician’s assistant” is adequate), and the opening sentence of the AI report read, “Daniel Paul Thomas, an eight-year-old patient, who has had prostate cancer….” I need go no further, but, for the record, I am eighty and had prostate cancer twenty years ago and still have the radiation seeds in my body to prove it. Suffice it to say, as everyone is saying, the genius of AI is still in its infancy and will only get better. That I don’t doubt and therein should be our concern. Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its flawed “Hal 9000” computer, was just an AI preview of the danger yet to come.
Ignorant as I may be of its exponential growth, what will happen (and those smarter than I say it is) when AI discovers the ultimate cure for cancer, the illusive antidote to Alzheimer's, the magic bullet for the “common cold.” What will prevent an increasingly godless culture from bowing down in prostate (not to be confused with prostrate) obeisance, full of “wonder and awe” to modernity’s latest idol—the infinitely aspiring Tower of Babel—hail, one and all, hail AI!! Little wonder that Andrew Sullivan (whom I’ve disagreed with many times on this podcast) writes probingly in a recent podcast, Is AI The Anti-Christ? Take a few moments, friends, for its worth the read, certainly portions therein, and while AI may not be the Anti-Christ (I refuse to give it such stature), Scripture does call Satan “…the prince of the power of the air” (Eph 2:2 KJV).
Recently, a colleague of mine in Indianapolis sent me an AI movie he had experimentally put together in a few weeks out of his “home studio.” He’s something of a genius. Except for the script and words to a closing song, it was entirely AI generated—every set, every scene, every special effect, including every actor. It was mind-blowing. I do miss the warmth and life-life texture of 35m, but digital cameras prepared us visually for the vivid, heightened look of AI. True, the actors needed some tweaking, with one in particular looking like Harrison Ford’s doppelgänger, but, all in all, it was amazing. In the latest edition of my SAG/AFTR magazine, three articles focused on their efforts to monitor and contain this AI phenomena in filmmaking. Sorry, SAG, the genie is already out of the bottle and despite our protestations, constraints, legal procedures (the NO FAKES Act), and crying “foul,” AI is here to stay. It has, is, and will continue to revolutionize the industry and disrupt its previously comfortable stasis. Experimental filmmakers, producers, agents, new streaming platforms, and alternative unions will support the new technology without hesitation. Pitch decks, trailers, sizzle reels, industrials, commercials, low-budget/high-budget films—you name it—will be done expeditiously for far less monies than ever imagined, leaving countless artisans looking for work elsewhere. AI may well be the death of filmmaking and “art” as we know it, eliminating thousands of creative artists in the process. I’m not a Marxist by any means, but plumbers and electricians of the world—this may be the time to unite! It will be the person who can cleanly pound a nail into the wall who will be in demand.
The theatre, I assume, will survive, with nothing artificial between the viewer and the flesh-and-blood actor. Yes, there will be AI backdrops, and AI can write the scripts (and has!), but theatre auteurs will stubbornly insist that every word, every comma, be theirs and theirs alone, and having survived Cromwell’s Protectorate, the assault of movies, and what was thought to be theatre’s death knell—TV—the theatre may resist AI’s influence and flourish as never before. That’s the good news, I suppose, but having just returned to my desk from watching thirty minutes of the Tony Awards, what will that flourishing look like? There was a homogeneity in sound and substance to everything happening on the Radio City Music Hall stage—with one Tony winner vilifying billionaires and praising Palestine to the applause of an obsequious audience. Who needs assistance from an AI bot when you’ve got so many heads nodding in perfect unison. Perhaps a new “underground theatre” will surface with alternative voices challenging the homogenized voices of Broadway and the West End.
I pray such alternative and distinctive voices will be prominent in the Church, with its increasingly monotonous, agitprop voice affirming a decadent and decaying culture. Who knows, perhaps AI Chatbots will replace the practice of “When parish priests read the bishop’s sermon in medieval England,” or at least this is so according to Microsoft Copilot, thank you very much. Now the clergy can make its choice from numerous AI chatbots to prepare their sermons in moments. Simply put in your theme and some corroborating Scripture and Google Gemini, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, Claude, or Grok can spit out your polished sermon in a flash. Why spend 20 hours on a message when you can have a perfectly good one, though not inspired, in 2 minutes or less. And so, seminary bookstores are closing across the country as everything needed for the young seminarian can be found online. Who needs a book.
A friend of mine, Josh Spencer, anticipated this moment coming years ago and opened “The Last Bookstore” in downtown LA. Please view the link below when you’ve a few moments. It’s a great story of vision and creativity, conceived by human hearts and hands. And it is those human hearts and hands that AI will never be able to replace. AI is our creation; we are not its. It is an odd paradox, really, for though AI may achieve some form of sterile perfection, it is in our shortcomings and imperfections that we are fully human. “Prick me and I shall bleed,” Shylock said; a blot will never bleed. But more than flesh and blood are we, and as I write these words listening to the great Pablo Casals play Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in the background, I’m reminded that we, unlike AI, have been created by God in his own image—the Imago Dei—and even as AI can’t duplicate our humanity, it will never replicate our transcendence. We may have been “made…a little lower than the angels” but, thanks to the grace of God, we’ve been “crowned…with glory and honor” (Psalm 8:4-5 NIV). If you want that—the real thing—go to Jesus. AI is a deceptive simulation at best. It is and always will be soulless.
My brothers and sisters in Christ, may we join the Psalmist in praising Him who “fearfully and wonderfully made” us, “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10 NIV), and no AI bot can do that!
Praise be to God!
Amen
“The Last Bookstore”
