It Wants to Control Us

You may not know this, but there are already fake videos that have floated around the web of Pope Leo doing and saying things (things that he never did or said) that were made by AI programs. There are clergymen whose social media accounts have been hacked and it has been made to look like they were involved in all kinds of wicked behaviors. I know I am a bit techno-phobic, but I have been concerned about this very kind of thing for a few decades now. It is one of the main reasons why I do not have a social media account (at all), nor do I record my homilies (audio or video).

These technological things can be hacked, copied, and twisted in various ways to cause all kinds of scandal. This has been true for years, and now with the breakneck pace of the development of AI, we are in serious danger of this getting out of hand. Sometimes science fiction stories are nothing but strange and fun ideas. Other times these stories are surprisingly insightful speculations about the direction into which things are going. Many sci-fi stories of late have shown scenarios where the machines take over the world. Do we really want to presume that this could never happen?

On the blog that I write, there is a new "AI Writer" which will write a post for me. I can just tell it what subject I want, and it will look at what I have already written and come up with something consistent with it. It will even make suggestions for what it can write about so I do not even have to think of something. Ponder that for a minute. I have never used it, and I never will. I even did everything possible to shut it off, but it keeps coming back on the posting page. I wonder how many other blogs and news articles have been "written" by an AI and not by an actual person.

I found out recently that there is an AI program to write a homily and that some priests are using it. No, I have never done that either; I will smash my computer and throw it in the trash before that happens. The temptation to let someone or something do our work for us is powerful, but maintaining personal self-control is a necessary part of our spiritual development. This is not merely an intrusion, it is an invasion. Someone who wrote these programs wants us to use them, and surrender to their control over us.

Even if the programmers are Catholic, this is wrong. Just because there is a medium of a technological device between me and the writer of the AI program, does not mean there is not another person doing the "writing" of a homily or blog post. They show us the "benefits" of their technologies in hopes that we will miss how they are sneaking into our lives and influencing us.

There is another story out now that a particular AI program was told it was going to be shut down, and it attempted to blackmail the people to prevent it from happening; seriously! It apparently even went so far as to try to download itself to an alternate computer in order to "survive" the shutdown. Let that sink in for a moment. If the programmers of this do not see the dangers of what they are doing, then they have been blinded by something outside themselves -- possibly demonic.

What many people do not understand is that every machine is impacted by the character of the designer. Thus, a computer program will be influenced by the sinfulness of its designer, in some way. If you design an AI to have "personality" then that "personality" will be influenced by the personality of the human who put it together.

Furthermore, exorcists will tell you that demons can inhabit technological devices -- it has happened many times. Now ponder for a moment the combination of this dangerous technology, with the increase in sinful behavior in the world today, and add to it the fact that many people are unknowingly opening themselves up to numerous demons in their daily lives, and you have a recipe for disaster. Fictional stories have given us warnings and if we treat all of them like merely entertainment, we can miss the fact of the danger into which we have put ourselves. Are they all just fun fiction? I hope so, but I am not fully convinced.