A teacher of our Colegio Agustiniano San Martin de Porres told me that she had prepared a Stations of the Cross with specific material for teachers and asked me if I thought it would be a good idea to close Lent with the teaching and administrative staff. Of course I think it is excellent,” I said. To which he added: “But it is made with artificial intelligence”. Indeed, the school has extensive instruction and practice in the use of Chat gpt in teaching. I skimmed through the three pages of the modern educational road map and saw it… right, exactly right. But I was left wondering… Will I be able to vividly pray this Way of the Cross, or rather, will those words slip away from me like inert voices? What man, what woman has written those prayers, who has previously felt those ideas? In what human shelter have they been engendered? Do they come from a heart or from the Cloud?
But, on the other hand, we must admit that the messages seem accurate, the information is truthful. And, besides, we all know about songs, programs, doctoral theses perfectly designed by AI. The Internet explains the first 45-minute mass created by AI and officiated by avatars. AI is exploring the supernatural. Faced with this dilemma, I no longer wonder what to do, but what to feel. A Stations of the Cross or a prayer make me throb with religious devotion. But can I feel emotion before a Stations of the Cross when I know that it has been elaborated by a machine obeying 0-1 algorithms? Can my soul tremble when I repeat some words compacted by a computer machine?
Reasoning, thinking, communication, prayer and everything related to human intelligence moves in an affective experience. Before human thought is directed toward something, there is a soul disposition, like a gravitational force that is what provides the capacity to bring together concepts and words with human meaning. Without this gravitational force of feeling, there is no organizing framework and words bounce and scatter empty, aseptic. Specifically, it is man’s affective-spiritual framework that makes reasoning, thinking and research human. The classics said that pathos, the affective warp, is the beginning of thought. On the contrary, AI lacks pathos, it has no passion. It only calculates. It lacks an emotional matrix that allows it to give birth to a human story, to touch the heart, to reach the sensitive fiber.
The novelist, the poet and the orator launch their thoughts towards the future because they glimpse a horizon. Human reasoning is a project and therefore it is not closed in big-data, it is not merely additive or a sum of previous information, but it creates a story of adventure and risk, it launches an arrow of cry and hope towards the future. This rational human path is full of affection, hope, and therefore also suffering and life. An artificial “thought” lacks suffering and pain. It is not cradled by maieutics. It is not born of a vital anguish such as that expressed by Hamlet in the face of his own indecision, nor is it born in the Frayluisian longing for a hidden wisdom. All this occurs only in the heart, in the human center of intellectual and affective relationships. Artificial intelligence has no heart, it only abounds in information, in data. Without this knowledge of the heart, how will it be able to make me palpitate a Way of the Cross written by an algorithm? Human intelligence produces novels, poems, dramas, myths, prayers and an emotional biblical psalter, all of them elements that contain the force of a creation with purpose, a story with transcendence, a vital drama. And why? Because they have emerged from the depths of a person, they have been engendered and passed through the sieve of man’s intellect. They are born from the creative passion of a person and that is why we can be passionate about them. But, I do not see how to “empathize” with a product without “pathos“, without passion, that the Chat gtp delivers to me in the tray of my printer.
The cross of the cross and the artificial intelligence are explained. And what about “goose bumps”? Let’s see: Before thought penetrates and photographs reality, it has already touched the thinking man and has bitten him in his mind and soul. The intelligence is shaken as it stands before reality. “The first affectation of thought is gooseflesh,” says Byun-Chul Han, and AI cannot think because it neither gives gooseflesh nor can it move the receiver by bristling his intimate fibers.
The idea, the prayer, the beauty and the psalmody only spring from an individual heart of flesh. After many decades, I still remember the emotion I felt when I read Michel Quoist’s “Prayers to Pray in the Street” in my adolescence.
I keep questioning whether or not the ordeal scheduled for the teaching staff will give me goose bumps.