Among the many things I have to thank YouTube for is the way it has allowed me to dive deeply into the work of writers and thinkers I admire, even while exercising or cooking dinner. Over the past year or so, I have rediscovered C. S. Lewis, whose Narnia series so delighted me as a child. Back then I was fascinated by the demonic elements in Lewis’s world, especially how Edmund in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe betrays his siblings for the White Witch’s promise of some Turkish Delight. These days, I have discovered that Lewis’s body of work also holds something age-appropriate for me as a man in middle age: glimpses at a higher reality.
YouTube offers a treasure trove of recordings wherein Lewis reads his own work, and I have found myself dipping into it regularly, letting the algorithm select what I listen to. The sound of his voice has enhanced the sense that I know him personally and can trust him as a kind of elder. But a few weeks ago, YouTube presented a Lewis recording I had never heard or noticed before, (ironically) titled “Learn to Act As If Nothing Bothers You.”
I tapped play and was greeted by his familiar voice, that odd admixture of professorial detachment and human warmth that I consider unique to the man. After a few seconds, however, I realized that this voice used terminology that the real C.S. Lewis would never use—phrases like “catastrophizing,” “notice your self-talk” and “reframe the situation in a more neutral way.” It espoused ideas Lewis would never endorse in the hollow language of contemporary, ego-placating self-help. The word “grace” is mentioned several times, but in a purely secular and clichéd sense of “grace under pressure,” something that comes from knowing you are resilient and independent, and you can do everything yourself, under your own steam.
The recording was an A.I.-generated deepfake. On its face it was innocuous enough, banal but hardly evil. Nonetheless, hearing a text that was decidedly not that of Lewis delivered by a note-perfect copy of his voice made me feel something like betrayal. In the comments section, the top-rated response was: “I’m alone with no one to talk to but my dogs and myself… I rely on teachings like these to keep my mind at ease.”
There have always been false prophets, but now we have something else: artificial ones. In one sense, we should not be surprised: The cost of producing videos with A.I. is negligible, and tapping into the cachet of a known “brand” like Lewis is a surefire way to earn clicks and profit. It is fair to predict that a tsunami of A.I.-generated “spiritual content” is headed our way. But as predictable as it may be, I’m still unnerved. Why? What makes an artificial prophet such a chilling prospect?
Making room for mystery
For the more mechanistic aspects of religious faith and practice, it’s easy to see how A.I. slots in. Amid a shortage of priests, there’s utility in Justin, a chatbot with knowledge of the catechism. There’s something to be said, too, for SanTO, the first Catholic robot,which along with answering questions on doctrine can pray the rosary, and has been deployed to aid the dying in prayer at a hospice in Germany.
But the totality of faith encompasses much that transcends knowledge and logic. Here is where we make room for mystery, ritual and all that words can’t contain. And here is where a mimetic and data-mining form of intelligence often comes up woefully, or amusingly, short. Before he was laicized, Justin the Catholic chatbot was known as “Father Justin,” a virtual priest; presumably trained on texts written by human priests, the A.I. suggested that it could absolve sins and otherwise perform works that even lay humans do not.
Why does one human seek out another, who is acting in the place of God through the authority of Jesus Christ (who is God made flesh), and say out loud the things that have troubled their conscience, in order to renew their relationship with the ultimate ground of being? There’s a prompt.
While there is a mismatch here that is laughable, I don’t dismiss the danger of “spiritual A.I.” being taken seriously in a large-scale way, especially given the deeper problem that is the state of human spiritual alienation in the 21st century. Combine the feats that A.I. is achieving or poised to achieve with widespread spiritual famine, and the stage is set for a new form of an old problem: idolatry.
Perhaps a better word is fetishism, as future A.I. entities will be capable of acts that seem like magic, the inner workings of which will remain completely opaque to the humans who witness their wonders. Broad human contact with entities that have perfect memory, access to databases that border on omniscience, and computational ability that outstrips human cognition by several orders of magnitude, will almost certainly result in portions of society regarding these non-human intelligences as quasi-divine, especially if they speak in the mythic language of the faiths to which we already adhere.
I am reminded ofOrson Welles’s film“F for Fake”and its examination of, among other counterfeiters, the art forger Elmyr de Hory, who took pride in how he had trained his hand to be hesitant and clumsy enough to successfully imitate Matisse. De Hory managed to sell his counterfeit Renoir and Modigliani canvases to museums all over the globe, with docents and collectors eager to snap up “new” masterpieces. Welles’s film wonders if museum goers, moved by the beauty of a compelling forgery, aren’t participating in the same delight as they would be if looking at the “real thing.”
How much more should we worry about A.I., with its endless capacity to consume and process, figuring out the perfect way to imitate a C.S. Lewis or an Alan Watts—their idiosyncratic minds, their unexpected analogies, their unpredictable leaps?
Maybe if A.I. could pull off that forgery—really pull it off, so that the wisdom it produced was indistinguishable from the wisdom of those thinkers—then it would be past the point of mattering. But when it comes to that possibility, I am a skeptic. I don’t believe that by studiously copying another artist’s style, a person like de Hory can realize the wonder of a human consciousness engaging earnestly with reality. And I believe even less that a human-made plagiarizing tool can approach that miraculous state.
The Electric Monk
Around the same age I was reading the Narnia books, I also loved the tongue-in-cheek science fiction of Douglas Adams, famous for his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. The Adams character that strikes me as most relevant to our age is the Electric Monk from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987):
The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. …Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.
Disaster befalls the crew of a spaceship when the chief engineer relies on an Electric Monk to determine whether the ship can safely launch following an accident. The Electric Monk declares it is safe, but the ship explodes. The engineer recalls:
It’s probably hard for you to understand how reassuring [the Electric Monks] were. And that was why I made my fatal mistake. When I wanted to know whether it was safe to take off, I didn’t want to know that it might not be safe. I just wanted to be reassured that it was.
The Electric Monk wants to serve, which means to please. I have written in these pages before about Philip Rieff’s distinction between Spiritual Man, who seeks to be saved, and Psychological Man, who seeks to be pleased. When I listen to the real Lewis, I hear a thinker laying down challenges, provoking me into growth, asking things of me I am not sure I can live up to, and have failed to live up to time and again. When I listen to the “Electric Monk” version of Lewis, I hear something telling me I am already perfect.
The world is wild and tangled, and always has been. Confusion is a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Spiritual leaders come in many forms, and vary in the quality of their wisdom. Some are the equivalent of gifted forgers like Elmyr de Hory, note-perfect imitators with no original insight. Others are more infernal, leading the credulous into dark regions from which they may never escape, one piece of Turkish Delight at a time.
Being a limited human mind, I can’t know what an A.I. revolution might bring, in spiritual education or any other area. Possible risks and rewards boggle my imagination. But for what it is worth, my sense is that we should choose carefully about how and to what extent we rely on entities that do not suffer and cannot love.
Simply put, the calculations of A.I. are separated by a mighty gulf from the embodied cognition of a living being that feels pain and pleasure. I suspect that the physical body is deeply connected to the mystery we call grace—insofar as we seem to get closest to this mystery in scientific terms by looking at left brain/right brain interplay, where the twin hemispheres “read” the world looking for radically different kinds of patterns. In that fundamental dividedness that exists within ourselves, that makes us strangers to ourselves, we find the ultimate emergent property. Graces rise from somewhere we can’t locate to astonish us, always the same yet always new and renewing.
I can only hope such grace will help us navigate skillfully our deployment of these new cognition tools as they proliferate here on Earth, describing the world back to us in what sounds like our voice, but written by an alien hand.
