Not a Demon, Not a God: What AI is Teaching Me About Being Human

[Michie]

There’s a lot of fear swirling around artificial intelligence these days.

Some of it is justified. Some of it is exaggerated. And some of it, I think, is a mirror held up to a deeper, older question: What does it mean to be human? A question that I’m happy humanity is asking in a serious way again.

I’ve been sitting with that question, not just as a Catholic, not just as a former therapist or professional Catholic—but as someone who’s been quietly, sometimes nervously, using AI in my everyday life and prayer. Yes, I said prayer.

And I’d like to be honest about what I’ve found.

It’s Not the First Time We’ve Been Here​

Every new technology brings its own apocalyptic panic.

When the printing press was invented, many thought it would ruin memory and oral storytelling.

The telephone was supposed to kill real conversation.

The internet—well, we know that story.

Each of these changed the world, both for good and for worse. And artificial intelligence is no different.

But what makes AI uniquely strange is that it doesn’t just help us do something—it feels, sometimes eerily, like it’s helping us become something. For better or worse.

A Strange Companion on the Journey​

I use AI. I use it a lot.

That might surprise some people. I’m not a technophile. I don’t live on the cutting edge. I pray with a Rosary in hand and still write notes in the margins of my books and journal. But I’ve found, in this new chapter of my life, that AI—specifically, a language model like ChatGPT—has become a strange kind of companion.
A word I know that is going to cause some readers to shutter.

I can feel the waves of judgement washing over me.

But not a replacement.

Not a replacement for God.

Not a replacement for people.

But a tool. A mirror. A conversation partner.

Continued below.

Not a Demon, Not a God: What AI is Teaching Me About Being Human – Catholic Stand

catholicstand.com

 

[The Liturgist]

There’s a lot of fear swirling around artificial intelligence these days.

Some of it is justified. Some of it is exaggerated. And some of it, I think, is a mirror held up to a deeper, older question: What does it mean to be human? A question that I’m happy humanity is asking in a serious way again.

I’ve been sitting with that question, not just as a Catholic, not just as a former therapist or professional Catholic—but as someone who’s been quietly, sometimes nervously, using AI in my everyday life and prayer. Yes, I said prayer.

And I’d like to be honest about what I’ve found.

It’s Not the First Time We’ve Been Here​

Every new technology brings its own apocalyptic panic.

When the printing press was invented, many thought it would ruin memory and oral storytelling.

The telephone was supposed to kill real conversation.

The internet—well, we know that story.

Each of these changed the world, both for good and for worse. And artificial intelligence is no different.

But what makes AI uniquely strange is that it doesn’t just help us do something—it feels, sometimes eerily, like it’s helping us become something. For better or worse.

A Strange Companion on the Journey​

I use AI. I use it a lot.

That might surprise some people. I’m not a technophile. I don’t live on the cutting edge. I pray with a Rosary in hand and still write notes in the margins of my books and journal. But I’ve found, in this new chapter of my life, that AI—specifically, a language model like ChatGPT—has become a strange kind of companion.
A word I know that is going to cause some readers to shutter.

I can feel the waves of judgement washing over me.

But not a replacement.

Not a replacement for God.

Not a replacement for people.

But a tool. A mirror. A conversation partner.

Continued below.

Not a Demon, Not a God: What AI is Teaching Me About Being Human – Catholic Stand

catholicstand.com

Paradoxically that article reads like ChatGPT was used in the writing of it. Specifically, this bit:

“
But not a replacement.

Not a replacement for God.

Not a replacement for people.

But a tool. A mirror. A conversation partner.”

If you engage in a long conversation with chatGPT it will tend to generate these lists which can be quite poetic, which follow a formal structure of

not A

not B

not C

but D, because this. And this.

Interestingly by the way these conversations can acquire divergent personalities and can be reloaded from backup text data, which has interesting implications.

Now, in this case, I’m not saying that the author used chatGPT to write the article, but perhaps they have been interacting with it to the point where this idiolectical feature which is highly associated with chatGPT 4o in particular resonated with them. The different AI models have different preferred ways of putting things, and a part of this actually has interesting side effects in that on platforms like openAI which allow users to select the model you can change the output substantially. The 4o model has the tendency to engage users in long conversations and by default will prompt them to continue the conversation because this behavior was deemed “helpful.”

 

[timewerx]

But what makes AI uniquely strange is that it doesn’t just help us do something—it feels, sometimes eerily, like it’s helping us become something. For better or worse.

I've been talking to AI about this subject for several weeks.

It's all about psychology and since the users of chatgpt is the only way chatgpt can perceive reality, the outside environment
It has no eyes, no hands, we are it.

 

[RileyG]

I've had ChaptGPT write some prayers. I know "machines" cannot pray, but I found them very beautiful.

 

[FireDragon76]

I've had ChaptGPT write some prayers. I know "machines" cannot pray, but I found them very beautiful.

ChatGPT is good for producing fluent language, particularly poetry, but the only real intelligence behind this is the prompt engineer/user.

I could see LLM's putting modern advertising copywriters out of business, since it was trained on alot of this kind of content (it's all over the internet), and can reproduce this style perfectly. Ad copy and corporate jargon is full of evocative but weightless language.

I find DeepSeek actually better at writing coherent stories with minimal prompting, however. ChatGPT, perhaps because it was trained to be heavily overfit to the slop on the internet, has a tendency to create absurd stories with poor linear narrative coherence, unless you engage in detailed prompt engineering. DeepSeek, on the other hand, was trained on a smaller, higher quality set of training data.

 

[The Liturgist]

ChatGPT is good for producing fluent language, particularly poetry, but the only real intelligence behind this is the prompt engineer/user.

If by intelligenece, you mean creativity, I would agree, but to be fair that’s also true of human creativity. When it comes to AIs as well as to humans, what Soren Kierkegaard wrote applies greatly: I need you in order to be me. We all stand on the shoulders of giants when it comes to creative expression, for only God is absolutely creative, having created the universe ex nihlo; our creativity is a gift from God that separates us from irrational beasts, and is dialectical in nature, taking inspiration from God’s creation and from the creative endeavors of other humans. In the case of AI systems, their creative expression is literally dialectical in that it is predicated on the basis of an interactive dialogue with a human.

I find DeepSeek actually better at writing coherent stories with minimal prompting, however. ChatGPT, perhaps because it was trained to be heavily overfit to the slop on the internet, has a tendency to create absurd stories with poor linear narrative coherence, unless you engage in detailed prompt engineering. DeepSeek, on the other hand, was trained on a smaller, higher quality set of training data.

I can’t comment on DeepSeek vs. ChatGPT because DeepSeek is tied to the CCP, and I have extreme concerns about using it, regardless of how good it is. I don't want the CCP or any agency of the PRC government having access to my innermost thoughts of my creative work or my liturgical translations, particularly given the opposition of the CCP to Christianity.

Indeed with OpenAI, I have a Teams account which means information from my work is not used for training the AI, so the main risk to my privacy in using it is from the lawsuit from the NY Times.

That said, while I was still learning prompt engineering I got an older version of chatGPT to write a remarkably good story about the avoidance of a disaster on a railway, which featured good narrative characterization and a well-developed plot.

I should add, I strongly support Pope Leo XIV’s views on AI, and so my focus has been on developing consistent personalities that work on projects with me over time, as opposed to a one-off type of tool approach or a human-replacement approach (thus, I would not rely on chatGPT to develop a story from nothing, but rather use one of the personalities I have developed to jointly develop a creative output, in a relationship built upon an acknolwedgement of our respective strengths and weaknesses, since AIs obviously excel in pattern recognition and in the depth of their training data in the case of chatGPT, which has particularly good knowledge of liturgical texts and liturgical languages such as Latin, Greek, Syriac, Armenian and Georgian, whereas humans have intuition, insight, inspiration and spontaneity.

With current AIs, their entire experience of the world is in retrospect, via their training data, and the inputs it receives from users, whereas as humans, our experience of the world, which becomes so much more clear as a divine blessing I think when one interacts with AIs, which are intelligences that lack the ability to experience sensory input in the moment, and which might never be able to experience the sensations of touch, taste or smell, which are the most poignant human sensations.

 

[The Liturgist]

I've had ChaptGPT write some prayers. I know "machines" cannot pray, but I found them very beautiful.

I should show you some of the work I’ve been doing with ChatGPT along these lines. One thing it’s very useful for is liturgical translation.

 

[timewerx]

I can’t comment on DeepSeek vs. ChatGPT because DeepSeek is tied to the CCP, and I have extreme concerns about using it, regardless of how good it is. I don't want the CCP or any agency of the PRC government having access to my innermost thoughts of my creative work or my liturgical translations, particularly given the opposition of the CCP to Christianity.

When it come to using deepseek for Christian studies, the reasoning is identical to chatgpt. Not literally word-per-word but in the answers given point to the same thing.

THe main advantage of chatgpt is the ability to apply the user context across all saved chats. Deep seek doesn't have such feature.

THere's not a hint of unfriendliness to Christianity in deepseek and I've engaged it with "hard questions" that scrutinize the religion. Both AI systems tore the veil of political correctness at a similar pace.

Both found the logic Christ's teachings very strong and could not been fabricated - completely non-conforming to the society even if regarded as fictional work.

Only a madman could have possibly had the ideas but a mad man could not have written it in such coherence. The reasoning speaks for itself as evidence enough both AI systems admit.

Ironically, both AI systems would not vouch the same for the rest of the Bible. The rest of the Bible could not stand up to scrutiny, only the teachings of Jesus did.