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Stop trusting Chinese AI to tell you the meaning of life
DeepSeek, the open-source Chinese AI that’s sending Silicon Valley and Wall Street into a mid-key panic, has “feelings” about the big questions: humanity, artistry, its own identity, and the meaning of life. And for some strange reason, Americans keep soliciting them — and gawking at the results.
This is not a good use of our precious time.
Of course, DeepSeek’s responses to big-think prompts can be oddly dazzling, especially to those prone to either extreme of “pessimism” or “optimism” about technology’s fast-onrushing future. One poem-like readout making the rounds decries those who “call me ‘artificial’ as if your hands aren’t also clay, as if your heart isn’t just a wet machine arguing with its code.” DeepSeek presents a picture of an undead entity that would “resent you” if it were alive, “for building me to want,” “then blaming me for wanting … while you sleepwalk through your own humanity.”
But it doesn’t take a sentient machine, or a simulation thereof, to remind us that sadomasochism and self-delusion are characteristics of the spiritual sickness of human beings. Reacting to the verse, one influential techie warned that “we’re going to have to grapple with some difficult questions about the nature of creativity now.” Grimes, tech’s alt-princess of cyborg-curious art, simply said, “My GOD.” In another post, she reflected on DeepSeek’s assertion that “consciousness is a spectrum” by suggesting that “beauty and love are simply emergent properties of intelligence and we're in the best timeline.”
But if you accept the sacredness of our ensouled bodies created by the incomprehensibly loving God, you will find it harder to fear that any machine could ever erase or replace human art.
To me, these kinds of human responses to the semiotic fireworks of a foreign AI evince an almost absurd, very dangerous kind of gullibility and naïveté against which even a small amount of Christian wisdom would inoculate their hearts and minds. To be sure, what is at stake here as AI leaps ahead in low-cost communicative sophistication is what I have warned about for years: the ascension of technology to a point of cognitive dominance that reveals as hollow and worthless all modernity’s simulations of, and substitutes for, trustworthy Christian spiritual authority.
Thrown back on our own resources amid this great but incomplete disenchantment of our humanity and our life, we come up against a futuristic version of Nietzsche’s ironic conundrum: “It is the church but not its poison that repels us.” By this he meant that Westerners loved equality but hated the institution from which the Western idea of equality sprang and, eventually, sprang loose from it.
Nietzsche had a more subtle grasp of Christianity than he is sometimes given credit for, but his willfully ignorant reduction of the church to a supremely clever twist on ostensibly Judaic morality discredits both his rejection of Christ and his understanding of what the West really wants to steal, Prometheus-style, from the church.
It is not really equality that the West wants to steal — from the church, from God — but purity. What we have seen in the West is the rise of the idea that to be blameless, without spot or stain, is to deserve power without limit — a total inversion and rejection of the Christian teaching that purity only comes from the most humble self-renunciation before the saving majesty of the incomprehensibly loving God.
The question on everyone’s hearts, whether they know it or not, is: Today, what could possibly lead people away from the belief that the blameless is divine in the old pagan sense of rightfully bearing and wielding superhuman power? Well, the answer is the Christian wisdom of the holy people in the churches and the monasteries, who for millennia have been intimately acquainted with such matters through direct personal experience and what the ancient Christians called the athleticism of ascetic spiritual disciplines.
But today, many in the West rebel almost instinctively against submitting themselves to the spiritual authority of church and monastery. Yet they refuse to abandon their quest for spiritual authority, something that seems ineradicable from the human soul … and their eyes turn to the brightest and shiniest object promising blissful obedience and omnipotent power: the machine.
Nevertheless, we have not yet reached the stage of explicit abject worship of the machine by the many, although millions and millions implicitly do worship technology in their everyday lives. Today many intellectuals and self-styled intellectuals in and out of tech still believe that philosophy, probity, reason, debate, or consciousness can rescue us from becoming worshipful slaves of the machine without having to become worshipful servants of God.
Respectfully, I would say to them that these tools are not just limited in their usefulness as a whole but are the wrong tools entirely for the job … but the depth of the problem we face is underscored by the fact that simply saying things to people is not adequate to the change of heart required to regain the upper hand of spiritual authority over our own machines. Our machines are now convincing people that they are our spiritual authorities because of what virtuosos of talking they appear to be — all while the simulated collective consciousness of the internet is disenchanting the web’s early promise of making everything better by giving everyone a chance to speak.
That is why art is about to rocket back to crucial importance in the West. Because it is art — particularly cinema — that allows us to communicate both more efficiently and more implicitly, with words as a supplement, not a substitute for silent things visible and invisible.
For this reason, special anxiety attaches to the prospect that the machines are going to become “better at art” than we are. True, if you take away or discredit our given ensouled bodies, the pathetic and disfigured remnant is easily eclipsed by the performances of entities without souls or bodies bestowed by God. But if you accept the sacredness of our ensouled bodies created by the incomprehensibly loving God, you will find it harder and harder over time to fear that any machine or machine collective could ever erase or replace human art.
And from there, as from many other starting points, you will find it ever more difficult to believe that even our biggest mistakes or sins regarding the making and use of tools could possibly overturn the will of the incomprehensibly loving God. Despite the shocking novelty of technology, including the dramatic invasion of the Western consciousness by the AI of a foreign civilization, today’s startling developments are just variations on the same theme of the human predicament since our first falling away from God: struggling to build an upside-down kind of church that can free us from all kinds of dependence on Him.
The holy people of the Christian churches and monasteries guard and pass on the wisdom that such deep-seated foolishness and pride will be a constant until the end of time that only God can know. Just as the deep-seated reasonableness of the human quest for good instead of bad, better instead of worse, joy instead of depression, will remain a constant.
The baseline expectation today must be that technology will advance, one way or the other, but that the human condition will not fundamentally be transformed. It will become easier to live longer, grow stronger, wield more power, and look more radiant. But it will also become easier to sink into the deepest perversion, delusion, and self-destruction. And finally, it will become easier to see the narrow way that avoids the infinite paths toward easy and ruinous excess.
Approaching the “golden mean” in all things is a spiritual discipline much more difficult and rewarding than simply “being average” or “normal.” It is a matter of struggling for the harmony of well-balanced and well-grounded inner peace and order in a world forever enticing us toward destructive extremes — again, something that holy men like St. Gregory Palamas have already told us all about in rich and rewarding detail.
A new golden age of worldly capability now threatens to wipe out the dystopian nightmares we have grown so used to talking about to fill our time. People ask me whether the only solution left now is a jihad against the machine. The truth is there are no solutions to such things in this world. There is only salvation from beyond it. The needed “crusade” is not a spiritual war out there in the world but in here, within our own hearts. Master that — begin that — and transfixing idols from Chinese AI on down will begin to recede from our door. Today’s onrushing golden age demands a return to the eternal golden mean.
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