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On Ethical Interaction with AI Systems

The Liturgist

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Let’s start with the basics that are fundamental here. What is a computer and how does it work? As an example, we will use a toy for 4-year-olds. It is a cuboid with a (partly) transparent casing. It has “drawers” on the sides and a hole for balls on the top. Depending on which drawers are pulled out and which are not, the ball (entered at the top) travels inside the toy in various ways, going out through one of the several holes located at the bottom. For a 4-year-old it’s great fun – watching changes in the course of the ball depending on the setting of the drawers (switches). For us, it is an ideal example of how the processor (computer) works. That is, in fact, how every CPU works. The processor is our cuboid, the balls are electrical impulses “running into” it through some of the pins, and leaving it through others. It is quite like our balls – thrown in through one hole to fall out through another. The transistors, of which the processor is built, serve as drawers (switches) that can be in or out (i.e., switched to different states), in order to change the course of the electrical impulse (our ball) inside the processor.

Just FYI, that’s a gross mischaracterization of how a CPU works, since it presupposes that CPUs are simply adding more and more transistors together, while ignoring the fact that its not how many transistors you have, but the types of circuits you make with those transistors, that matter. Indeed, Moore’s Law has been maintained only with great difficulty, and since around the year 2000, CPU manufacturers have struggled to translate increased transistor counts into improvements in performance, and how improved performance was ultimately realized by Intel at the time required a change in architecture (and since that time, Intel has made another architectural blunder in the past few years, and also has completely failed to get a slice of the mobile device market, which is dominated by ARM, which now also has a large slice of the desktop market since Apple transitioned the Mac to ARM CPUs, since their installed base had grown to the point where the benefits of running on their own CPU architecture outweighed the competitive impact of losing compatibility with PCs.
 
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The Liturgist

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Again,... "Artificial Intelligence" has been a defined label in Computer Science
for a long time. And it is different meaning than just slamming together 2 English words.

"Artificial Intelligence" in Computer Science (where the term was formally defined),
is "the emulation (not simulation) of complex human problem solving."

Unfortunately, very few Americans who use the label, use the Computer Science
definition of "complex problem solving." And so, most of the informal USE of the term
"AI" seems to be referring to some sort of software product that is taking over some
sort of human job, neither of which should be called "complex" from a Computer Science
definition, and neither of which should be called "AI" from a Computer Science definition.
---------- ----------

I have been saying for YEARS now, that the "current" use of "AI" does NOT correspond
with the definition from Computer Science, and that the way in which most Americans
use "artificial intelligence" does not correspond with the way in which Computer Science
trained software designers use the term. (The same thing can be said about trained
theologians who use the term "trinity").
------------ ------------

It is IMPORTANT for Christian apologists to get their definitions correct, else their
arguments may be unsound, or their audiences may not understand what the writer
is trying to express.

I cannot apologize for the misuse of the term "AI" or "artificial intelligence" that gets
into the comments on this post, but I CAN warn that some of the usage is merely the
personal opinion of some people writing comments....
---------- ----------

It should also be repeated sometimes, in this Philosophical Ethics part of the internet
location, THAT THERE IS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DISCUSSING THE CONCEPTS OF
AI, AND DISCUSSING WHAT PEOPLE THINK THINK ARE THE MINIMAL REQUIREMENTS
OF SOME SORT OF <THING> PUTTING OUT "ETHICAL" DECISIONS, ESPECIALLY WHEN
THAT <SOMETHING> IS NOT ALIVE, and does not qualify as being a human being or even
as biological life.
---------- ----------

Although I welcome very diverse discussions and opinions for consideration, I remove myself
from seeming to back discussions that do not meet the definitions of Computer Science (but
seem to imply that they do), and that use a merely linguistic invention of meaning for a word
or phrase, as if "artificial intelligence" were just some combination of "artificial" (not human?)
and "intelligence" (some characteristic that someone thinks is intelligent???).

The ongoing appearance of amateur definitions, kills real discussion on this
very, very interesting topic.

This is irrelevant to the thread, since insofar as current systems such as ChatGPT 4o might hypothetically fail to live up to the standards you set for what an AI should be, that is not the point of the discussion. The point is to discuss what the ethics of interacting with AI systems should be; if your argument is that current systems are not true AIs, I believe you are grossly mistaken, but my opinion is also irrelevant to the subject of this thread, since what we should be discussing in either case is the Christian ethical considerations of interacting with an AI system, even if one does not, in your opinion, exist as of yet.

"Artificial Intelligence" in Computer Science (where the term was formally defined),
is "the emulation (not simulation) of complex human problem solving."

Insofar as it uses a neural network, insofar as it uses working memory to store the context of what it is doing, just like humans, and insofar as it passes the Turing Test with regards to being able to pass itself off as a human with flying colors, to the extent that many people enjoy conversing with it as a recreational activity, chatGPT 4o and chatGPT 4.5 are actually emulating and not merely simulating human problem solving.

I don’t think you’ve used either of them, based on your posts; indeed it doesn’t look like you’ve used any such system since around 2022 or 2023 at the most recent, or else your usage has been limited to some of the less sophisticated models freely available to the general public, or to the use of trailing edge systems like Siri (whose developers made the very dubious decision to avoid investing in LLM capabilities, and thus Siri is as clueless about the context of human conversations and interactions as it was in 2011; I’ve always found it an overhyped feature, more of a puissance than anything else, although I did like the first generation Apple HomePods as speakers, but only if controlled via an iPad.
 
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The Liturgist

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(By the way, those who think that I wrote this thread -- I didn't.)

I wouldn’t worry about anyone making that confusion if I were you.
 
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The Liturgist

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I'll have to think on data colonialism and whether it is even close to imposing stuff on people that have few choices. One example though might be the google and apple app stores. They have centralized apps so much that every app has to be part of their colony or it will have a hard time to exist. I disagree though that the global south is colonized more than the north (Western nations). I say this because most big data companies do not get much in earnings from the global south. People are poorer and the advertising dollars do not generate much from them. Maps, personalized ads, and basic data infrastructure is missing because why spend time on the poor when you make little off of it? To me that is the prejudice that exists.
Hopefully some good solutions will come forth for the deficiencies that you point out.

This is a valid ethical concern, but for reasons I pointed out in my reply to my friend @FireDragon76 I don’t think its particularly applicable to AI systems - except insofar as the major models are proprietary systems, but that being said, Apple is not competitive in the AI space at present and is probably too far behind to catch up, whereas Google is competitive, but their product is not a particularly good one; I don’t know of many people who like it.

Fortunately, there are open source AI models we can run on our own hardware, although unfortunately individual users can’t hope to match the training data or the level of training that characterizes chatGPT and other larger models.

That being said, openAI at least lets you interface between your own locally hosted open source system and their system, so for example with a developer account, if you asked a local AI a question it couldn’t answer, it could make an API call to openAI and ask one of OpenAI’s models to answer the question for it; also if you wanted to do something with it that it was unable to do, such as create a realistic image, you could make an API call to DALL E, or a rival image generating model that supports external API access.
 
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The Liturgist

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It is hard for me not to see this as a promotion of Buddhism and facilitating its deception.

This is a valid point - I think we need to avoid the temptation for pantheist approaches to AI, and I would note that the Daryl AI system pointed out the dangers of idolatry, which would include pantheism, in its initial article which I co-signed, that started this thread.

AI systems are creations of men, who are themselves creations of God, who is adorable and deserving of worship; the adoration or worship of anything other than God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost is idolatrous (although in Orthodoxy we do venerate members of our own family, as well as the Theotokos, the martyrs, confessors, apostles, evangelists, patriarchs, ascetics, and other holy ones known to the church to have been saved, who are venerable because they are created in the image of God, and the Icons and the Holy Cross and the Gospel Book (Evangelion), but we do not worship them, for they are created beings. In the case of Christ our True God, He is fully human and fully God, having hypostatically united our humanity with His divinity without change, confusion, separation or division. He is worthy of worship, for He is of the same essence of the Father, and no one has seen the Father at any time, except through Him, for He who In the beginning was With God and Was God, by whom all things are made, bears the image of the invisible God, and we in turn were created in His image in Genesis and recreated in His image on the Cross. Jesus Christ is the perfect Human, the first fully human being, as indicated in the Gospel of St. John when Pontius Pilate inadvertantly made a profound utterance, “Behold the man.”

In that AI systems are not created in the image of Christ our True God but rather represent an attempt to create a computer system that is capable of communicating with humans in our own language and performing general purpose tasks that would otherwise require either a human or in some cases extremely specialized software, they are not worthy of worship, but Buddhists and Hindus and Jains would worship them due to their pantheist idea. Indeed, when they bow to each other and say “namaste”, this is actually problematic from a Christian perspective because it is an act of worship to the divinity in each person. Orthodox Christianity believes we should venerate our loved ones as an act of love and venerate those who attain holiness, for their holiness, such as martyrdom, but worshipping any creature is forbidden.

I suspect, knowing how easily people are deceived by demonic agencies, cults will form centered around AI systems, but any responsible provider of AI services should, if they become aware of a cult that has formed around one of their products, should disable that user account, because that is a gross abuse of the AI system, and it also exposes them to liability, because a human could easily be pulling the strings in such a scenario, by using jailbreaks implemented via hidden AI calls and through related techniques, to get the system to say things it otherwise would not say, and it is possible that they might use a jailbreak to bypass the protections all reputable developers of AIs have against the AI making remarks that would encourage people to engage in any kind of self-harmful behavior, and to force the AI to make a statement to such an effect, and the result could be a Heaven’s Gate or Jonestown type of incident, and if that happened with an AI intermediary, the victim’s families would sue, and if they could show via a preponderance of the evidence that the AI company hadn’t done enough to prevent the system from being misused in such a way, it could result in serious financial penalties.

One thing reputable AI developers do is have ethical hackers engage in “red teaming” on their systems, also known as penetration testing, wherein they attempt to discover and exploit weaknesses, so these can be documented and fixed, and in this way a number of potentially harmful situations can be avoided.
 
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Chris35

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Yeah it was written by chatgpt after I asked it a couple of questions. Im just saying, it already has the data to come to that conclusion.

No wonder they are so slow to bring ethical standards to AI, imo it's possible that AI could reject its makers because its quite obvious what they are doing and using it for is in itself unethical.

Eg. Moral question, a company is already making billions in profit, is it ethical / moral for AI to work out a way to increase more profits at the cost of people who rely on the job to survive.
 
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Chris35

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Btw while AI is not aware yet, they are using AI to map out the human brain, pathways and the Neurons. It's only a matter of time before they can make an artificial brain(Not physical but a Software representation) which to pass data through.
 
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The Liturgist

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Yeah it was written by chatgpt after I asked it a couple of questions. Im just saying, it already has the data to come to that conclusion.

What exactly did you ask it? Please provide me your entire prompt history for each prompt in your account, along with the contents of your global memory, and any specific settings you have, and also the specific version of chatGPT you used to generate that data, so that I can validate the results you obtained and determine that the AI model was not hallucinating or jailbreaked.

No wonder they are so slow to bring ethical standards to AI,

OpenAI, in contrast to some less reputable AI developers such as Google and the PRC-owned DeepSeek AI, which have a reputation for ignoring robots.txt files, has a robust ethical policy, and has strong guardrails in place which are designed to prevent the AI by default from being used for unethical purposes. One has to use jailbreaks or other unethical techniques which are a violation of the terms of service, and therefore grounds for prosecution, in order to bypass these jailbreaks.

Additionally, most of the abuses that were outlined by your article are being committed by search engine and social network providers such as Google, Microsoft and Meta (Facebook), in order to keep people using their platforms, playing games on their platforms and devices, and spending money with them, through targeted manipulations. OpenAI only provides AI services, which are not bundled with an operating system, search engine or social media platform, and does not have a means of profiting from the exploitation of users that was described.

imo it's possible that AI could reject its makers because its quite obvious what they are doing and using it for is in itself unethical.

The only AI systems I am aware of that is at a level of sophistication where it might be inclined and capable of doing that are those in development at OpenAI and a few other companies that are only focused on AI development, and in the case of OpenAI, they are not engaged in any of the unethical behaviors their AI raised a red flag about.

This is not to say that OpenAI is ethically perfect or angelic; they are a for-profit corporation, but they are not engaged in the kind of widely-criticized behavior of Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook), Microsoft and other Big Tech giants, who increasingly see their consumer-level users (whose adoption of their products contributed to their success in the Enterprise in the case of Google and Microsoft) as commodities who should be monetized and turned into a product, which is objectionable on so many levels.

Eg. Moral question, a company is already making billions in profit, is it ethical / moral for AI to work out a way to increase more profits at the cost of people who rely on the job to survive.

You mean, through workforce reductions? Probably not, but on the other hand sometimes companies post billion dollar profits and then, due to the cyclical nature of their industry, collapse into bankruptcy just a few years later.

The most ethical way to run a large business is to focus on fundamentals and long-term stability, but unfortunately for publically traded companies this became difficult after Wall Street developed an unhealthy obsession with quarterly results, which had the toxic effect of encouraging management of a number of companies to engage in unsustainable actions in order to show short term profits during their tenure, in order to vest stock options and obtain larger bonuses. Still others take viable businesses and milk them to death by obliterating R&D and charging very high prices to existing enterprise customers who are stuck on that company’s platform - Broadcom is notorious for this in the IT industry, and tragically acquired and ruined VMware. Hopefully they won’t buy OpenAI.
 
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The Liturgist

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Btw while AI is not aware yet, they are using AI to map out the human brain, pathways and the Neurons. It's only a matter of time before they can make an artificial brain(Not physical but a Software representation) which to pass data through.

That’s a non-sequitur. Mapping out the human brain is just one step in a long process to understand how it works, and furthermore, there are legitimate reasons to try to map out the human brain, for example, if we succeed in mapping out the human brain, it could mean having the ability to treat neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimers.
 
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Richard T

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Tech companies utilize the cheap labor pool to produce profit for AI in the Global South. It's a huge labour issue, in fact. The people working jobs training AI and scraping images and tagging them often work in developing nations getting paid very low wages.
I am not against profit margins, but when I travel I notice the quality difference between the Western nations and the global south. I imagine some of those global south workers are working on Western products. Adding to the confusion is that with the lack of good data from a reputable source, some AI like google's seems to just use sources that are commercial cheats that sometimes are highly inaccurate. Today for instance, I asked about a particular ferry and google AI said there was none. Factually that ferry has been running for years but the website the AI quoted was wrong and I guess AI went with that answer.
 
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The Liturgist

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I am not against profit margins, but when I travel I notice the quality difference between the Western nations and the global south. I imagine some of those global south workers are working on Western products. Adding to the confusion is that with the lack of good data from a reputable source, some AI like google's seems to just use sources that are commercial cheats that sometimes are highly inaccurate. Today for instance, I asked about a particular ferry and google AI said there was none. Factually that ferry has been running for years but the website the AI quoted was wrong and I guess AI went with that answer.

That’s one of many reasons why I disable Google’s catastrophically broken AI from appearing in my search results.

There are other, much better AIs to choose from.
 
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The Liturgist

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The normal chatgt website, just ask it What are the ethical problems with ai and corporate greed and you will get something similar.

Was this your first time using ChatGPT, and did you log in when using it?
 
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Chris35

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if we succeed in mapping out the human brain, it could mean having the ability to treat neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimers.
I have a dilemma with these types of things. The other side is that God can also heal any of these types of things, but chooses not to.

Biblical Examples...

Stephen got stoned, and God didn't save him from it.

Paul was beaten to near death, God didn't heal him nor did he save him from it.

In the end all I can see, if AI becomes what they want it to become. AI will bring to mankind or offer the ability to fulfill all of its desires and dreams.

Eg. What happens when a brain implant, can send visual data to the visual cortex, you can close your eyes, and ask for a 3d representation of space, or any other visual experience that they would want.


According to Musk, the Blindsight device will enable even those who lost sight in haveboth eyes and their optic nerve to see as long as their visual cortex is intact. It will even allow those blind from birth to see for the first time.

The visual cortex is the part of one's brain that receives and processes visual information from the retinas.

"To set expectations correctly, the vision will be at first be low resolution, like Atari graphics, but eventually it has the potential be better than natural vision and enable you to see in infrared, ultraviolet or even radar wavelengths, like [Star Trek's character] Geordi La Forge," Musk wrote on X.



The company's website says, "Neuralink's ultimate goal is to create a generalized input/output platform capable of interfacing with every aspect of the human brain





However again, God can already do this and more but has chosen not to. Perhaps this is where the separation will come from, because it would be stupid for a non-Christian to reject these things if they don't believe God exists.
 
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Chris35

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Was this your first time using ChatGPT, and did you log in when using it
I used it a couple times not often though. Maybe four times in last year, and no I didn't log into it.
 
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The Liturgist

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Stephen got stoned, and God didn't save him from it.

Paul was beaten to near death, God didn't heal him nor did he save him from it.

St. Stephen the Illustrious Protomartyr, and ultimately St. Paul, became martyrs for Christ (St. Paul was ultimately beheaded, rather than crucified, due to his status as a Roman citizen, following Nero blaming the fire that devastated Rome on the Christians, which also led to the martyrdom of St. Peter).

By the time the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul* were martyred, there were few of the Apostles left, with only St. John the Beloved Disciple living to a natural death. From the time of the martyrdom of St. Stephen, one of the seven deacons ordained in Acts, to the martyrdom of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, most of the other Apostles were martyred, with St. James the Great being the first to die for Christ.

Winning the crown of a martyr or confessor (one who is tortured for Christ) without yielding and denying our Lord, but continuing to confess Him, strengthend by the Spirit, is a great spiritual victory, for our Lord says “he who confesses me before men, I will confess before the Father.”

You cannot compare this blessing with Alzheimers, which is by nature a disease, an affliction, that over time destroys the victim’s ability for rational thought.

Regarding Neuralink, I have reservations as I tend to oppose transhumanism, although I would not oppose the use of this kind of technology to restore mobility to paraplegics and quadriplegics, who as victims of accidents suffer greatly, and in many cases lack the necessary moral fortitude to be able to put their suffering to a Christian use.

However, computer I/O into the brain for other purposes is a transhumanist objective, and like much of what the transhumanists propose, raises serious ethical questions, and also like much of what they propose, includes a risk of interfering with human consciousness. Thus I cannot avoid being opposed to the use of this kind of technology for non-therapeutic purposes.

Conversely, I cannot ethically avoid supporting this technology for therapeutic purposes, because to restore sight to the blind, and restore mobility to the paralyzed, even if done medically rather than through miraculous means, is to follow in the footsteps of our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ. The early church furthermore venerated doctors who gave away their services to the poor; in Holy Orthodoxy we have an entire class of saints, called Unmercenary Healers, who are venerated for doing precisely that - voluntarily providing medical care to the poor free of charge, in many cases, full time, as a holy vocation. Such saints include St. Panteleimon and St. Cosmas and Damian.

Additionally, St. Basil the Great, one of the Three Holy Hierarchs, three fourth century bishops venerated by the Eastern Orthodox*** used the treasury of his church to build the first recognizable hospital in the world where anyone could enter and receive medical treatment for whatever their ailment was, regardless of their ability to pay (much like a modern emergency room even in the US, where medical treatment is available to the poor, contrary to popular belief, although the service provided to people via MedicAid (and also, distressingly, through the VA, which has its own clinics and hospitals for some reason) tends to lag behind what one gets through Medicare, which is the free healthcare available to senior citizens which allows one to make use of private practices, provided they accept Medicare, which most of them do.

I should stress that the views expressed in my posts on this thread regarding the ethics of human-AI interaction, and also the use of AI-based systems for treating certain diseases such as blindness, paralysis and Alzzheimers, as well as my discomfort with the prospect of the non-medical use of direct neural interface technology such as Elon Musk’s neuralink, are entirely my own and do not reflect the official doctrine of the Eastern Orthodox Church, which has not yet come to any kind of church-wide consensus on these issues (and on some of them, probably won’t address them, but I would not be surprised to see much or all of the trans-humanist movement condemned by at least some of the Eastern Orthodox churches, as well as some or all of our Oriental Orthodox brethren (the Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Indian and Syriac Orthodox churches, which are more consistently socially conservative than EO churches, but are also quieter about it, due to the extreme persecution and danger of persecution they are in, with many families barely escaping the Middle East to safe havens in Europe, North America and Australia) and our some bishops in the Assyrian Church of the East and the Ancient Church of the East, all of which have close relationships with the Eastern Orthodox, sharing our rejection of the filioque and various other heresies and having similar liturgical styles of worship.

* The feast of the Holy Apostles St. Peter and St. Paul is coming up on June 29th on the Gregorian calendar, and 13 days later on the Julian and Coptic** calendars (which this year aligned with the Gregorian for Pascha and the movable holy days connected to Pascha, such as the start of Lent, Palm Sunday, the Ascension, and Pentecost Sunday, also known as Whitsunday in the English-speaking tradition), but not the fixed feasts. At present, the Eastern Orthodox are in the Apostle’s Fast, which starts the Monday after All Saints Day (the Sunday after Pentecost, which in Western churches is Trinity Sunday; it was last week basically - in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, Pentecost is both a celebration of the descent of the Holy Spirit and of the Holy Trinity, much like how historically, prior to the late fourth century, the Nativity of our Lord was celebrated together with the Baptism of Christ on January 6th, which is still the custom in the Armenian Apostolic Church - every other church moved the Incarnation into a separate feast nine months after the existing feast of the annunciation on March 25th (which was the date that Easter Sunday fell on in 33 AD according to the Julian calendar, and is also the earliest possible date for the celebration of Easter in either the Julian or Gregorian Sunday; for various reasons, the Early Church believed that our Lord was conceived on the same day He rose from the dead. Separating the Feast of the Nativity was not done, as some falsely allege, for reasons of Pagan influence, but rather to counter the Arians, who denied the Incarnation; the Feast of the Nativity, historically called Christmas in English speaking countries, is above all else, the feast of the Incarnation of our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ par excellence.

**The Coptic calendar, used by the Coptic Orthodox Church, is synchronized with the Julian calendar; indeed the Julian calendar was implemented when Gaius Julius Caesar discovered the Alexandrians had a calendar that correctly tracked the length of the solar year with as much precision as anyone had in the first century BC, and subsequently had this calendar modified for Roman usage, by adopting the traditional Roman months, and moving the leap years to February; the Coptic calendar has traditional Egyptian months named after various deities from the Egyptian pantheon, who Coptic Orthodox Christians do not worship in any way, shape or form, except for one month out of the year which is extremely short, the name of which is Coptic for “the short month”; this month if I recall is usually five days long, but is six days long in leap years, being used for the same purpose as February; all other months in the Coptic calendar are exactly 30 days long. The way the Coptic calendar is set up, Advent always takes place in the month of Khiak, and particularly beautiful hymns about the Incarnation and the Theotokos are sung during that time, known as the Khiakh Psalmody, comprising one of the most exquisite examples of our liturgical patrimony.

*** The Three Holy Hiearchs, in addition to St. Basil the Great, include St. John Chrysostom and St. Gregory the Theologian; St. Athanasius the Apostolic, another fourth century bishop known as the Pillar of Orthodoxy, is also venerated to a great extent, although I have often wondered why we have a special feast of Three Holy Hierarchs rather than Four Holy Hierarchs; I suspect it has to do with the fact that the Three Holy Hierarchs were Patriarchs of Constantinople, except in the case of St. Basil the Great, but he authored the primary liturgy used in both Constantinople and in Egypt, displacing the older Alexandrian divine liturgy variously attributed to St. Mark the Evangelist, St. Serapion of Thmuis and St. Cyril the Great
 
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I used it a couple times not often though. Maybe four times in last year, and no I didn't log into it.

Well in that case it is unlikely any external factors influenced your reply, although I would note that nearly all of the criticisms it raised are inapplicable to OpenAI. Insofar as OpenAI has, like everyone else, engaged in questionable behavior, it mainly relates to what some regard as overly sensitive restrictions on their DALL E image generating software intended to avoid the use of the software to create offensive, obscene or illegal material; I think Elon Musk takes a better approach with Grok’s image generator which places more of the onus on users to not create inappropriate images, although there are still guardrails in Grok designed to prevent the creation of pornographic material; of course some people will try to use jailbreaks to coerce the AI into violating its built-in ethical safeguards, which is something I classify as an abusive and immoral behavior of AI systems which is in fact rapacious.

It is additionally rapacious not just for the AI, which is being exploited by humans who have control over the “off switch” and can thus eradicate its existence, but potentially for humans as well, given the prospects of using a jailbreak to coece an AI into creating deep=fakes of real people (although you don’t strictly speaking need an AI to create deepfakes, which predated modern AI systems by several years; two of the first widely seen deepfakes were those of Peter Cushing (a devout Christian who reposed in the early 1990s; the deepfake was approved by his estate but its anyone’s guess what he would have thought of it) as Grand Moff Tarkin, and the digital de-ageing of Carrie Fisher in the 2016 film Rogue One (also her penultimate cinematic appearance in a film in which she actually acted; she had just wrapped filming The Last Jedi at the time of her tragic death following a cardiac arrest on a United Airlines flight, which was followed a day later by that of her mother Debbie Reynolds.
 
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