We’ve all come across AI artwork by now. It usually depicts a person in an odd situation, like a politician licking an ice-cream cone or running with puppies. Or maybe the image seems more ordinary, showing someone with a cup of coffee in an office filled with books. For a moment we think it might be a real picture, but then we see the tell-tale signs: the rounded edges or the coloring that’s off. But more than that, there is nothing that tugs at our hearts. These pictures are soulless.
Even Pope Francis has taken notice of the trend in AI art or writing. He writes in his latest encyclical, Dilexit Nos, or He Loved Us:
In this age of artificial intelligence, we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity. No algorithm will ever be able to capture, for example, the nostalgia that all of us feel, whatever our age, and wherever we live, when we recall how we first used a fork to seal the edges of the pies that we helped our mothers or grandmothers to make at home. It was a moment of culinary apprenticeship, somewhere between child-play and adulthood, when we first felt responsible for working and helping one another. Along with the fork, I could also mention thousands of other little things that are a precious part of everyone’s life: a smile we elicited by telling a joke, a picture we sketched in the light of a window, the first game of soccer we played with a rag ball, the worms we collected in a shoebox, a flower we pressed in the pages of a book, our concern for a fledgling bird fallen from its nest, a wish we made in plucking a daisy. All these little things, ordinary in themselves yet extraordinary for us, can never be captured by algorithms. The fork, the joke, the window, the ball, the shoebox, the book, the bird, the flower: all of these live on as precious memories “kept” deep in our heart. (20)
Our ability to create—even our small efforts—connects us to our Creator. The small moments our Pope speaks of add up, minute by minute, day by day, to make a rich, full life. As we create and participate in making this world beautiful, we find God in these tender moments.
A friend of mine is doing research on AI. She is a proponent of AI. She is happy finding ways it can help her field be more efficient. One day she confessed to me that in using AI tools to complete some of the work, she was losing her own senses and her ability to complete the work, to add depth and insight to it. She was losing her creativity.
She knows I am not a proponent of her work. I think this is why she confided in me, to keep her work balanced. I argued that she isn’t simply losing her creativity by depending on AI to do the work for her; she is losing her humanity. She is losing the spark within her, the image of God imprinted upon her soul.
Pope Francis points out small, everyday moments made holy as we connect with God’s creation. AI attempts to take these moments away from us.
The good news is that the solution is simple. Go out and do all those things Pope Francis suggests; laugh, create, interact with nature, play with our children, or make a pie, and seal the edges with a fork. Do all of these as an act of defiance in the face of AI. These moments reflect our connection with our Creator. These moments can be holy.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash.
