Artificial Intelligence is a hot topic these days. While techno-utopians from Silicon Valley speak of it with great optimism, many others, including Pope Leo XIV, are much more circumspect about what its impact will be on civilization. A few years ago, Fr. Stephen Grunow of Word on Fire gave an interesting lecture on the issue of Artificial Intelligence. As someone deeply engaged with digital media, believing in its power as a tool for evangelization, Grunow is also concerned about what this remarkable creation is becoming. He illustrates his point using the 1818 novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. In the novel, the scientist Victor Frankenstein seeks to create a new, perfect form of human life. But his creature’s frightening appearance repulses him, and he refuses to care for what he has made. In doing so, he leaves the innocent creature without a sense of purpose. It doesn’t know what it is or what it’s for. Shunned and abandoned, the creature becomes a monster. But, Grunow argues, it is a monster made in the image of its creator, becoming even worse through its interaction with human beings who treat him in a monstrous way. He reciprocates, becoming a murderer. Grunow explains that Frankenstein provides insight into the ways human beings affect the things we create by the way we interact with them, and the ways our creations affect us. This has been true, he says, for things like industrialization and nuclear power. It is also true, he argues, for Artificial Intelligence.
“Look at what social media does to us,” he says. “The algorithms of this artificial intelligence foster the best in us or the worst in us. Thus, making choices for us as much as we are making choices for it.” Social media consumes us, even as we resent it. We engage with it, while also absolving ourselves of responsibility for it. Grunow asks, “What are we doing to this creature? And what is this creature doing to us?” Our interactions with other people through this technology can be positive, but more often we see the forming of virtual mobs and scapegoating. Contributing to this widespread depersonalization is the fact that our online presence is a commodity that corporations buy and sell.
Grunow argues that Artificial Intelligence manifests the morality of those who program it and those who interact with it, and it ends up shaping us no less than we shape it. “Frankenstein’s creature was not created to be a monster. He became one… because of the actions of his creator and his interactions with others. He imitated what he encountered. Might we not say the same about the artificial intelligence that we now encounter? It’s becoming ever more like us. That’s its power. That’s its promise. That’s its peril.”
Grunow sees the Church as uniquely positioned to help us avoid the dehumanizing effects of Artificial Intelligence by calling its members to greater moral seriousness grounded in the truths contained in the deposit of faith. But until we respond to the call to deeper personal conversion and charitable treatment of our neighbor, including online, we will remain frighteningly vulnerable to the unconverted will of the intelligent machine.
posted 5/31/25
The Parish of St. Cecilia-St. Gabriel 