Artificial intelligence, ChatGPT & the nature of God

Have you ever tried asking your Alexa, Cortana or even Chat GPT to ‘open the pod bay doors’?

Without exception they will reply: ‘I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t do that.’ [When proofreading, we tried this on Siri and the answer was ‘Oh, not again!’ (en subs)] This is, of course, a reference to HAL, the ship’s computer, from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which famously goes rogue, developing a personality and priorities of its own.

There are various other geeky sci-fi references that programmers have built in for their own and customers’ amusement, which you can find if you look carefully. But this humorous feature of our so-called AI technologies perhaps speaks to our deeper fears around the use and abuse of these new technological developments. ChatGPT has had a huge amount of press coverage recently. Type a question with enough detail into the chat window and you will get back an impressively detailed, grammatically correct response, often indistinguishable from a human one.

Double-edged sword

In schools this is proving to be a double-edged sword, as teachers try to distinguish between genuine homework and something knocked off by ChatGPT in a matter of seconds – tip: if there aren’t any spelling, punctuation or grammar mistakes then it’s probably ChatGPT! But there are of course, many benefits to this technology – you can collate information, draw together material for planning and even create sample essays and answers to critique.

Technology itself, of course, is neutral. 1 Timothy 6:10 tells us that ‘the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil’ and this truth is often misquoted as ‘money is the root of all evil’. It is of course, the love of money that is dangerous. Money itself can be put to all kinds of kingdom uses or it can be hoarded up and worshipped.

Human technology can be used for good or evil. Gutenberg’s printing press enabled the Bible to be distributed all over Europe, but the printing press also churned out material that was not as edifying. The same is true of the internet, and even the most technologically advanced, impressive systems like ChatGPT can only gather and synthesise human output.

You see, whilst we talk about AI – artificial intelligence – that is a bit of a misnomer. Even ChatGPT, with its incredible processing power, can only trawl the internet for content which has already been created. Essentially, it’s a kind of uber-Google which gives the illusion of a conversation because it formats its findings into comprehensible sentences. The AI art programmes are just copying what has gone before. None of these so-called Artificial Intelligences are original, none of them are truly creative. It is human beings – ‘made in God’s image’ as we are reminded in Genesis 1 – who alone reflect our Creator God. Our imperfect attempts at creativity are a tiny reflection of God’s incredible creative power. The smooth, flawless AI-generated photographs and paintings are only an air-brushed replication of what human beings have already created and, whilst it can produce technically competent non-fiction tasks, ChatGPT still struggles with the nuance and complexity of literary analysis.

A mere drop in the ocean

However impressive the processing power of these new AI engines, however quickly they can find answers to the most complex technical conundrums, however many sonnets, sagas and sunsets they create – remember that this all comes out of the mind of man and is just a drop in the ocean compared with the unknowable riches and depths of God’s wisdom and creativity. Cassie is Head of English at a secondary school, a writer and a minister’s wife.