The Abuse of Language and AI

For the general public is being reduced to a state where people not only are unable to find out about the truth but also become unable even to search [sic] for the truth because they are satisfied with deception and trickery that have determined their convictions, satisfied with a fictious reality created by design through the abuse of language. This, says Plato, is the worst thing that the sophists are capable of wreaking upon mankind by their corruption of the word.

Joseph Pieper, Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, 34-35

There are five non-human speakers in Scripture: God, angels, demons, and two animals: the serpent and Balaam's donkey. One tempts man to assume a God-like role while the other decries the efforts of a man to ignore the will of God. Tradition likewise lacks miracles depicting animals or non-human objects speaking to man (myths and other cultures outside the West might not have this same tradition). With this sense in the Western-Christian culture that speech remains the domain of man (or higher creatures like angels/demons), artificial intelligence's ability to "speak" by generating text or sound based on prompts, data-training, and models marks a new era, one our minds struggle to grasp.

AI Generated

Speech is power - it and its closely related stepson, writing, is how we organize our thoughts, share them with others, and grow as individuals and groups. It is the clear basis of our civilization and "our power." Speech marks the ability that man has - in naming the creatures - that the rest of creation does not. Speech is how God himself creates in the traditional stories of creation from Genesis. Language is power.

Pieper released his essay examining language and knowledge in 1974. Like all deep literature and nonfiction works, its message resonates into our error-prone time. What was once concerns over newspapers, radio, and television are now concerns over social media and the internet. Of course, this cognitive offloading in place in acceptance of what is read reaches its zenith with the exotic mind-like entities known as large language models.

Pieper anticipates many of the dangers of AI in his essay - for the echo the dangers of the scientism. His call in "Knowledge and Freedom" to acknowledge the limits of knowledge applies to our own error in driving towards Superintelligence (45-46):

knowledge that envisions the totality of all there is, proceeding by and for its own inherent reasons and thus truly free-such knowledge can never be achieved completely and perfectly by any human being; it is never fully at the disposal of man; it is, therefore not something entirely within the human sphere, since human existence itself is subject and beholden to many and various needs and wants

What better describes computer science and transhumanism today but the drive to eliminate all the "various needs and wants" to reach "a knowledge that envisions the totality of all there is." Pieper later adds that this will be reached beyond this life - where eternal life is one spent in contemplation or as Aristotle phrases it "to behold the sun, the moon, and the sky" (48).

Mass media and modern education have been one march towards a stripping away of contemplation and an emphasis on regurgitation of facts and now replication of generated texts and outputs to demonstrate compliance. There is a role for all of these: mass media, facts, and AI are not going away - but we need to assign them to their proper role and place and be on guard to not lose the essence of what makes humans different and unique.

The stripping away of humanities from colleges and universities, the headlong rush into STEM, and the mass adoption of algorithm-driven content and AI-generated slop are symptoms of a society geared towards dehumanization and thus de-contemplation.

This is an opportunity for faith-based schools to promote what is truly human and to ensure that the next generation knows what intelligence actually is and how we embody while circuitry cannot. For many of us John Paul II's Theology of the Body is a call to understand the gift of sexuality and its proper ordering. TOB should also be a call to understand how an embodied intelligence is truly unique. The body is more than a vessel for rationalism and it is necessary for intelligence.

This post was inspired by my attempts to reckon with Josef Pieper's "Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power." I anticipate future posts seeking to connect TOB and our humanness with our AI moment.