AI Homiletics
As we get past the midway point of winter here in Wagga Wagga, the sun is showing more of itself, particularly after a foggy morning. The combination of clear skies and bright sunshine is absolutely glorious, and I feel more motivated to head outside, soak in some rays, and catch up on my podcasts.
This weekend, I had the chance to catch up on my list of episodes of Clerically Speaking (I had the honour of being a guest for one episode of the podcast last year). In one of these episodes, there was a brief discussion about the theology behind homily writing (as an aside, the Pillar provided a fascinating story concerning the development of Magisterium AI).
This piqued my interest because this discussion revolved around the place of Generative Artificial Intelligence (such as ChatGPT) in the homily writing process. The podcast did not go down the simplistic route of coming up with an absolute yes or no. Instead, Fr Harrison and Fr Anthony focused on the key theological role that persons played in the process of homily writing. For them, the homily was not a standalone reality with its own self-sufficiency. Instead, the homily is the event of the Spirit’s speaking through the embodied reality of the preacher’s own reflection of the Word of God. The homily then, sits within a nexus comprising the person of the preacher, the person of the Spirit and the Word of God.
What the discussion suggested that questions surrounding the place of generative AI seemed to presume that the homily was its own thing, excised from this nexus.
This was a short but fascinating little segment that also generated a couple of thoughts within myself in response, both of whom revolved around the notion of personhood as a key ingredient in homiletics. By way of context, these thoughts were riding off the back of a writing project that is nearing completion (details will be coming soon).
On the one hand, people can be tempted (I certainly was one of them a few years ago) to confine personhood to simply the flesh and bloody reality. Such an attitude neglects the extent to which our daily lives have become so dependent on a series of digital prosthetics (one’s smartphone being the most emblematic of these) that it is becoming increasingly difficult to think of a neat physical and digital divide. The high degree of integration between our biological and digital lives, at least on its surface, make it more appropriate to speak of what Udo Krautwurst called a “cyborg anthropology” as the baseline of thinking about the human person.
On the other hand, and more controversially, as touched upon in our Episcopal Podcast discussion on transhumanism with St Louis University’s Dr Jason Eberl, there is another temptation to permanently relegate artificial intelligent entities to the category of non-person. As covered in that episode, if we presume rationality to be a criteria of personhood, and if Artificial Intelligence were to reach a stage where it goes beyond merely imitating human thought but becomes its own site of rational thought, that presumption could lead to a conclusion that an AI can meet the criteria for personhood in its own right. The theological question to be asked then, is whether it is conceivable that the Spirit is capable of speaking through artificial entitites that have passed this threshold of personhood, particularly in the area of homiletics.
To be clear, I believe that the Thomistic/Aristotelian notion of a person as ensouled flesh means that Christians are a long way off from uncritically granting personhood to robots. That said, what is also clear (at least to my mind) is that confining personhood to the flesh and blood reality within our own skins is starting to smack of artificiality, particularly as we are more integrated into digital environments.
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