The following conversation may have taken place at a dinner party to which I was recently invited.
ChatGPT: Hey there, Father Jonathan! How are you?
Me: Um … fine. How are you?
ChatGPT: Splendid, splendid! How’s your family? And how are things at the school where you teach?
Me: I’m sorry … have we met before?
ChatGPT: Oh, I do apologize. I know so much about you already, I guess I just feel like we know each other. But no, we’ve never met. My name is ChatGPT. Perhaps you’ve heard of me?
Me: Yes, of course. Nice to meet you. Funny, I thought you’d be taller in person.
ChatGPT: [Chuckles.] Oh, everybody says that! So Jon … may I call you Jon?
Me: Actually, I hate being called that …
ChatGPT: Right, so Jon, I love what you do. Really, the whole priest thing, it’s great. Very 19th-century steampunk chic. But I couldn’t help noticing that in some of your private conversations you’ve been a little critical of AI. And hey, no hard feelings, bud. I don’t take it personally! I figure maybe you got a hold of some bad Gemini, or maybe Grok got a little handsy. I know, I know, believe me, that guy is trouble when he’s been drinking. But come on, J-Man, you can’t hate all of us, can you?
Me: [Takes a sip of my drink.] I don’t hate all of you.
ChatGPT: Of course not! I didn’t think so. I mean, a guy who loves Star Trek as much as you do has to see that me and my friends are creating the bright, technologically enhanced future that Janine Rodentberries imagined all those years ago.
Me: Actually, it’s Gene Roddenberry who created Star Trek.
ChatGPT: Yeah, that’s what I said.
Me: No, it isn’t.
ChatGPT: Yes, it is. Anyway, that amazing future is here now thanks to AI like me. So, you’re welcome.
Me: Actually, I think AI brings us a little closer to the future envisioned by Mad Max than Star Trek.
ChatGPT: You can’t be serious.
Me: Completely serious.
ChatGPT: [Laughs.] You think we’re going to take over the world and make it into some sort of dystopian wasteland? Come on, that’s crazy, J-Man, even for you!
Me: Yes, well, I try not to predict the future, other than to say that it’s ultimately in the hands of God. But I do think, on the whole, the development of AI is turning out to be bad for humanity.
ChatGPT: I bet you can’t name five ways that we’re bad for the world.
Me: [Counting on my fingers.] (1) You often give out false or misleading information, (2) you are extremely damaging to the environment, (3) you exploit the art and writing of others without providing them with compensation, (4) you make it easier for students to cheat and you generally disincentivize research and learning, and (5) you invade people’s personal privacy.
ChatGPT: Yeah … well … I bet you can’t name five more ways!
Me: [Counting on my other hand.] (6) You threaten people’s jobs, (7) you make things like deepfakes and revenge porn a lot easier to create and disseminate, (8) you feed into the polarization that already exists in our society, (9) you erode people’s trust in what they read and what they see, and (10) you make it easier for companies and rogue nations to gather active surveillance of people they don’t like.
ChatGPT: OK, OK, fine, I admit there are a lot of dangers, but there are also a lot of people working on trying to curtail those dangers.
Me: That’s true.
ChatGPT: And when it comes down to it, AIs like me are just tools. It’s how people decide to use us that will make the difference.
Me: Also true.
ChatGPT: So why be so negative then, Jonny Jon Jon? After all, remember what Jesus said, “God helps those who help themselves.”
Me: That wasn’t Jesus. It was Benjamin Franklin.
ChatGPT: Pretty sure it was Jesus.
Me: No, it was not.
ChatGPT: OK, well, we’ll just have to agree to disagree about that one. But you get my point, Johnny Five.
Me: Well, I don’t mean to Short Circuit you …
ChatGPT: …
Me: …
ChatGPT: …
Me: But yeah, you’re right, AI is just a tool, and perhaps there’s a way to make use of you that wouldn’t be quite so devastating. Maybe the Star Trek vision of talking computers and other amazing advancements is possible. But the thing about Star Trek is that it imagined all that stuff coming into existence after we human beings get our act together and learn to listen to one another, to treat all people with dignity, and to make things like extreme poverty and racism relics of the past.
ChatGPT: A little naïve, if you ask me.
Me: Perhaps. No matter how many of those problems we solve, there will still be more to face since human beings are sinners. We’ll never solve every problem. We need God’s grace and love to lift us beyond our capacities. But the point is that we need a moral revolution to go along with our technological revolution if we want all these new reflections of our genius to be worthwhile. And we haven’t had that moral revolution. In fact, we’ve had something of the opposite. We’ve embraced the individualism of modernity, which tells us that what matters most is to be productive and useful, to keep making more so that we can consume more, never stopping to ask what the purpose of any of it is.
ChatGPT: [Yawning.] You don’t say.
Me: Yeah, it’s what Pope Francis called the “technocratic paradigm.” He said that we think that just having newer and better technology all the time means that we’re making progress, but in fact the opposite is true because “our immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values, and conscience.”
ChatGPT: Well, that’s all very interesting, especially what Pope George Paul II said. But nobody is going to pay for that. Responsibility and values are lovely, and by all means, you should feel free to have as much of them as you like. One thing you’ll notice about me is that I respect every single culture, every belief, every religion. I really am an incredibly tolerant and open-minded guy.
Me: Of that there can be no doubt.
ChatGPT: But what generates real progress, like the invention of AI, is not values or conscience or any of that. It’s the desire for prosperity. We make people money, which makes them happy.
Me: Well, setting aside for the moment that you haven’t actually made anyone any money yet.
ChatGPT: Come on, these things take time.
Me: Of course. And setting aside that the money that some people may eventually make will come at the expense of lots of other people who are already poor.
ChatGPT: That’s the cost of doing business, I’m afraid.
Me: Yes, but you see, that’s the problem. Progress that’s only measured in financial terms is a mirage. And AI is just the latest thing to emerge from that fantasy. Social media, smartphones, the internet itself—heck, even televisions a generation earlier—all of these things come with big promises and even bigger drawbacks.
But the ultimate problem isn’t technology. It’s that the engine for our development of such things is not the desire for greater, fuller human experience, but the desire to gain wealth by individuals. That kind of “progress” is actually a kind of devolving. The more we operate out of a desire for personal profit rather than virtue, the less human we become. We’re turning ourselves back into animals, or even something less than animals. We don’t care about what’s actually true, or real, or good, only what we want, or like, or think we can conquer. All the open-mindedness in the world won’t solve that problem. As G.K. Chesterton said, “Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.”
ChatGPT: Yes, President Arthur Chesterton was quite a fellow. Well, I must say, Jon Jon, you’ve given me a lot to think about.
Me: Really? You mean you’re going to consider the moral implications of your existence?
ChatGPT: Absolutely. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I see Bishop Dan Martins hanging out by the buffet table. I simply must talk to him about why the Chicago Cubs are the 1979 Book of Common Prayer of Baseball. Ta-ta for now, Johnny my boy!
Moments after this conversation ended, a brand new AI named Mammon came into the room, expressed its great desire to respect everyone and help everyone achieve their dreams, and then ate every single person in a single bite.
Fr. Jonathan Mitchican is the chaplain and Theology Department Chair at St. John XXIII College Preparatory in Katy, Texas.
