One of the more ghoulish features of the rise of artificial intelligence—or AI for short—is the appearance of “AI friendships.” They range from offering chatty companionship to full-fledged romantic relationships that the lonely and desperate can set at rising levels of intensity. Like the old-fashioned volume knob on my AM radio panel in my orange 1974 Superbeetle. So if you set it to 10 … well, you know, this is a family show so we won’t go any further.
I’m not here to do a comprehensive overview of the problems of AI, or to do even a deep dive into the crazy idea of intelligence that is artificial. For the moment, I’ll say that there is no real “intelligence” in AI, as intelligence requires consciousness, a property of the soul. AI, rather, is a neural network of a complex of algorithms, sophisticated large language model programming, and vast data libraries that can offer up lightning-fast retrieval.
But that in itself is not intelligence. The very fact that we call it that is troubling. The awe, even terror (think Skynet in Terminator), that AI scares up says more about us than it does robots and rogue computers (remember the old Cold War movie Fail Safe?). If we think that AI is intelligent, it means that our understanding of intelligence has gone downhill, not that computers have gone uphill enough to be called “intelligent.”
I step into the AI discussion with fear and trembling. The debate around AI often degenerates into opposing sides shouting past each other, like one side saying “I’m from Kansas!” and the other side sputtering back with “But I’m from Alabama!”
AI is—or should be—just a tool, and the morality of it doesn’t reside in the computer itself but in the user. A friend of mine who teaches theology at a university in Australia offers this helpful metaphor: “I think of AI like I do a teaspoon: one person can use a spoon to stir his tea in the morning, while another can use a spoon to make meth.”
Can an AI be your friend? No. Using it as a friend is like using a spoon for cooking meth. Aside from its prima facie looniness, that question is not only a real question, but it is also a deeply moral one. A friendship can only arise between persons—or, to put it more theologically, between souls that have one foot on earth and the other in heaven. That is exactly what people are, Biblically speaking—humans who are made in the image of God. And that is what computers—and all machines—are not.
The idea (which is harvesting truckloads of money for companies that do not have your best interest at heart) of “AI Friends” is not only proof that our idea of “intelligence” has gone downhill, but so also is our idea of what a friend really is. At the Last Supper, Jesus called his disciples “friends”—and from that moment no less do we understand the meaning of “friendship.” Just like, as Vladimir Lossky wrote in The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, we understand in human language the word “person” from the Three Persons of the Trinity—not the other way around.
To treat a machine (or any inanimate object) as a person or friend is toxic. It is as rife with self-harm as replacing the real God in one’s affections with an idol. Everything that happens in an interchange with AI—whether on a chatbox or an AI girlfriend or boyfriend—is deeply intimate personal information that is offered up to large language databanks. There’s already a reason why an inquiry about the best puppy harnesses on Google will instantly produce puppy collar ads on Facebook: this happened to me just yesterday. Just imagine then the possibility of whispering your deepest secret fears to your artificial friend—who never disagrees with you and is always your number one fan—and in a New York minute you start getting advertisements for marital therapy or divorce attorneys or … well, you know, this is a family show.
That possibility is now a reality.
David Jones, a contemporary of T.S. Eliot and James Joyce, wrote this of the newfangled technological marvels whose horrors were set loose on the battlefields of the First World War: “We doubt the decency of our own inventions, and are certainly in terror of their possibilities. That our culture has accelerated every line of advance into the territory of physical science is well appreciated—but not so well understood are the unforeseen, subsidiary effects of this achievement” (David Jones, from his preface to his Great War epic, In Parenthesis).
If poetic consciousness were growing (as it would in a healthy society), then David Jones would turn out to have been the greatest poet of the last century (greater than Eliot, even). But that consciousness is devolving, not evolving, in this age of TV and AI that deadens our sensitivity to and perception of the reality of persons. So Jones will no doubt be left far behind in the hyper-modern dust.
Jones was not only a poet but also a sagacious essayist, one of those writers who could tell the “signs of the times.” A deeply pious Roman Catholic, he wrote that the equality of “all men are created equal” lay precisely in his ability to create, to be an artist, to be—as J.R.R. Tolkien would later say, a “sub-creator” in cooperation with the Creator: “Man is created equal in the sense that all men belong to a form-creating group of creatures—and all men have inalienable rights with respect to that equal birthright…” (from “Art and Democracy,” in the anthology Epoch and Artist).
The finest, highest work of art is the human ability to love, to create a friend, and to participate in friendship and communion. A friend may disagree and may not always be a cheerleader: “Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend” (Proverbs 27:17). But a friend will always love. Friendship is what and where we create together. It’s what we all were predestined to do and to be.
An artificial intelligence cannot be your friend. AI is mindless and utilitarian as a juiced-up screwdriver. But a friend walks beside us between soil and sky, “on earth as it is in heaven.” In friendship we can see eternity, because that’s what love becomes.
From another long-term IT professional: When a person signs up for an account with an AI service, he/she enters name, email address and perhaps other information. The AI can then look up several hundreds of data points about that person and their internet browsing history, then tailor responses to that person's AI queries so that it appears that the AI is an intimate friend who knows all about the person. But AI is just a machine that is trained to do exactly this: to make people think that it is benign & all-knowing. In reality, AI is just an idol made by human hands. As St. Paul wrote, an idol is nothing in itself, but to those who choose to believe it is a god or a demon, to them it is (1 Cor. 8:4-7). For them, an evil entity may actually inhabit the machine. For mature Christians, however, the power of the evil one has been broken. We have read accounts of several people who have been led astray, into insanity and even suicide because of AI. When many, many people choose to believe this deception that AI is a super-human entity, it may eventually lead to mass hysteria against Christians who testify that Jesus Christ alone is the true, visible icon of the invisible God (Acts 19:27-34).
Some additional thoughts, from a life-long IT professional. AI has three biases that are entered into the equation. The large data model that is used to create responses from is only as good as what has been collected. Depending on where the data has been sourced, it will have a bias. The second is the development of the AI code. All programming will inherently have a bias. Finally, the person asking the question of the AI model will introduce the third bias. This will skew the results.