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Pope Leo: Do Not Build The Torment Nexus
Techbros (as usual): how dare you suggest I'm a bad person for wanting to kill everyone in order to build the torment nexus? Don't you know how much money Jeff Bezos has?
That's a long read. I grew up Catholic, went through a pretty devout few years in my early adulthood, but ultimately I have decided that it is not for me. I send my kids to a Catholic school though (it is deeply tied to our culture), so I guess in that sense it is still worth my time reading it in full.
EDIT: Few paragraphs in, it is beautifully written.
Has someone done an AI generated summary ;-)
Why downvote this? The Holy See has an opinion on Artificial Intelligence? This is a fascinating document, and everybody should read it, and form their own opinions. The world currently seems to lack moral leadership, and who better to lead the cause of humanity than the Catholic Church?
Bullshit.
How many Catholics will put the encyclical to be summarized through an LLM?
it's a shame that the vatican didn't bother asking whether or not the crusades would make humanity better before causing the death of 9 million plus people.
..or whether or not hiding all those pedophiles was the right.
and to be clear ; i'm not equating AI to those things -- i'm saying that I don't care about the opinion of a group with such a sordid history regardless of how shined up the PR is now.
I'm as happy we have a non-crazy pope as the next liberal, but as someone who isn't religious I think it's very important to be skeptical of any opinion given by a religious leader. As such, they've declared they are rejecting the best tools for understanding humanity, culture, and the physical world, and have deeply compromised judgement.
No one who needs to read this will ever read it again.
Reading is a trained skill. Requiring years, even decades, of training. It too shall fall to AI.
It makes me angry that people are taking this seriously. Reading this screed would require having to continually parse out the generally loathsome Catholic ideology and dogma from whatever insight it might contain. I have no desire to even try.
The Catholic Church is not anywhere close to being a neutral institution who will be writing something like this in good faith (no pun intended). This is an organization based on prejudice, subjugation and outright delusion built on literally millennia of persecution. All of their observations will be made from the standpoint that their worldview is the only correct one, which is unacceptable in every way.
For example, ChatGPT will quickly and efficiently answer all your questions about how and where to get a safe abortion, including pros and cons, history and other specifics. This is something the Church is vehemently opposed to on principle. Anything else they have to say on the topic is therefore irrelevant.
I guarantee that whatever AI doom they're warning about will never be anywhere close to the damage the continued existence of the Catholic Church causes and will continue to cause in the future.
Anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't know history nor read the headlines of the past several decades.
Hey, I love it when Bob from Chicago tells Trump to go to hell, but beyond that I couldn't care less what he or the truly horrific religion he leads thinks about anything, let alone new technology.
Pope Leo is a Marxist, news at eleven.
I'm glad he published it of course, but I was disappointed on two counts:
1. He's not at all careful with his argumentation. Frequently he'll colocate two points that aren't really connected, not bothering to justify one before moving on. I've been a massive fan of his persona ever since I heard he was planning to be the AI pope, but it's a shame to find the philosophical output of the actual man to be around the level of a decent blogger.
2. He refuses to make the Kantian or Hegelian move of basing the discussion of empirical matters on evidence. I understand that faith (aka 'belief without evidence') is a huge part of their whole deal--and likely an inextricable part of humanity's indomitable spirit--but it's just a waste of time to build arguments about technical and political matters upon such foundations.
In other words: there's no point in really talking about AI with someone willing to justify claims like 'no machine could ever think' with 'god says so'. All you can do is try to manipulate them into a prosocial position (read: your side).
Hopefully it's obvious that the majority of the letter isn't really about AI but rather about lessening the harms of capitalism, nationalism, and climate change, which hopefully we can all agree on! The commentary above is focused on the AI specific (esp. Chapter III and parts of I).
Great message from the Pope (I never thought I'd write those words). I'm glad he recognizes what's going on with AI (LLMs, really) as one of the highest areas of concern for humanity and the Earth and is using his influence to encourage things like renewable energy investment. It's a shame he isn't in a position of "real" power and we're still at the mercy of the worst U.S. president in history.
One thing that isn't talked about enough is how so much is going into AI but not much is coming out of it. The rhetoric from tech bros is still that AI is "going to" change the world. Hasn't really changed the world yet, except driven up everyone's utility bills and put hundreds of thousands of people out of work.
I encourage people, especially software engineers here, to remember the previous "new hotness" tech advancements - blockchain and NoSQL DBs being two recent examples. In both instances there was a flood of VC money into startups that have mostly failed because each was supposed to change the world (or at least change software). I spent a lot of my free time in those days trying to "find a problem" for blockchain and NoSQL to solve. I remember thinking I must be a lousy software engineer because I just wasn't getting the hype. Now I know it's because whenever something new comes out, people talk about how it can do X Y and Z, and there's a disconnect between what a technology CAN do, and what it SHOULD do. I can use blockchain for all sorts of things, but in most cases it wouldn't be the best option. Same for NoSQL DBs. Same for LLMs. The more you understand blockchain, the more you realize it's only good as a globally-distributed, immutable ledger - and currency is the only practical application of that in our society today (e.g., Bitcoin). NoSQL is the same way - yeah you can use MongoDB for whatever app, but it's going to be a bad time maintaining and scaling when you're storing relatively simple and consistent records. A CRUD app usually doesn't warrant a NoSQL DB.
LLMs are the same. I'm finding they are good at search-type tasks, where frankly not much "thinking" is involved. Therefore, with respect to writing software, they are best suited for simple, internal tools. Even then, I have to baby it, especially with today's LLMs. Claude Opus has been nerfed (most-likely quantized) to make space in the datacenters for Mythos, and eventually Mythos will be bad too for the same reasons. The question becomes, as it always has, "will LLMs rise up to the challenge" and history tells us "no." These things never live up to the hype. When you understand how LLMs work, you understand why ChatGPT 3.5 isn't that much worse than GPT 5.5, artificial benchmarks be damned.
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@dang Is this item getting a lot of negative votes? I've no way of knowing, other than seeing my kharma increasing only slightly after all the points the story collected.
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So the guys at Anthropic convinced the Pope to write a hype piece for them. Next-level grifting right there.
Why does the onus fall on the engineer for creating a better tool and not on the people who use that tool in evil ways?
We've been having the same argument since the dawn of mankind. AI is the new AR.
What kind of regulation is Leo the alignment expert proposing exactly? Occam's Razor says this is Anthropic trying to build a regulatory moat by leveraging some halo effect.
Maybe Leo should focus on finding a way to disconnect western society from their current cult-of-progress delusions? Could be a better use of the infallible man's pulpit?
What kind of regulation is Leo the alignment expert proposing exactly?
Occam's Razor says this is Anthropic trying to build a regulatory moat by leveraging some halo effect.
Maybe Leo should focus on finding a way to disconnect western society from their current cult-of-progress delusions? Could be a better use of the infallible man's pulpit?
Impressive. Very nice.
Now let's see your views on homosexuality, promiscuity, contraception, abortion, drug use, and all the other things the target audience of this "I SUPPORT THE CURRENT THING" proclamation also feels strongly about.
The Pope is making a fundamental mistake here: His advisors told him that AI works and needs to be managed.
He does not address plagiarism, the fact that AI is mostly a surveillance and IP laundering tool, the fact that AI hasn't achieved much so far. You could say it has achieved nothing if compared to the whole history of human ingenuity, certainly not in CS.
He should have compared AI to the golden calf.
His criticism is lukewarm, does not address the criminal aspects and technological failures and is as such industry compliant. He can now say "I have tried" without harming the industry in the least.
This text is not what our current situation demands, but I hope that priests will augment and amplify it in their sermons and go a bit deeper.
It would be better on the original latin.