AI’s “mastery of the Christian tradition outstripped many a well-trained pastor or academic,” write the editors of Comment magazine, describing/promoting Matthew Milliner’s recent piece. “Yet real humans broke the spell.”
I like Matthew Milliner. Two pieces I highly recommend are Hive Mind and The Wisdom Hypothesis. But I will not likely be reading his latest essay in Comment.
People seem to really like the piece and that’s all well and good and whatnot; I’m happy enough to just be a curmudgeon here. And don’t get me wrong, I am all for more more more stories in more places about why we absolutely do not need AI in our daily lives at all. (Ethan Hawke: “I am in open rebellion.”) But I sense the rise of a kind of “I plunged into AI, survived and have a story to tell” genre of essays. And I expect a reasonably healthy dose of “No shit, Sherlock” response essays. Put me in the latter camp.
I have long since more than moved on from my John Piper days. In fact, one of only two memes I’ve ever made was about those days:
I guess that’s less a meme than just a borrowed cartoon with a text edit, but to any past evangelical born in the 80s it could easily obtain memehood.
But still, I did happen upon a little Piper not long ago and, although I’m not really interested in his world anymore, I’m happy to see he’s still plugging along. His message in summary: “Computers do words better-than-you-duh!”
Words do not a human make, mmkay. Not at all surprisingly, John Piper gets this. But more than a little surprisingly, I actually prefer his hard, preacher-gonna-preach, jump-scare “No!” over some self-induced AI Stockholm syndrome recovery story.
Frankly, JP is a bit tame compared to another JP. Here’s Jason Peters from the Front Porch Republic, whose Pure Curmudgeory I am more than partial to — and maybe even aspire to:
We are assured by the maniacal technocrats suffering from acedia that AI, like the smartphone or the atomic bomb, is “just a tool.”
AI is the most insidious manifestation we have yet seen of the affront to work—work as opposed to toil—and therefore an affront to play and to art and to pleasure. It is a middle finger to the imago dei. It is Gnosticism, that deathless heresy returning in a hockey mask, knife in hand, like an immortal villain in a horror flick, except of course this protean monster will never show itself thus. It will take whatever guise suits it. It will be General Patton standing in the hatch of a tank’s turret; it will appear before us meekly, as if riding on the foal of an ass. And this manifest evil will deprive us not only of our dignity but also of the pleasure permitted us in our work.
Preach it, JPs.