I have been enjoying Harvard Law Professor Roberto Tallarita’s Substack Mostly Footnotes.
Although Mostly Footnotes has a heavy focus on business and corporate law, he does have wide ranging and eclectic interests. A number of his posts have focused on various aspects of the rise of AI, to cite but one example.
In a recent post, Are We All Stochastic Parrots?, Roberto observes that he is “someone who spends too much time working with LLMs and pondering abstract philosophical questions” and admits that “each of these two habits is enough to annoy family and friends, but when combined they are even worse.” Despite that admission, he then brings them together to ask: “How exactly is human intelligence better than artificial intelligence?”
His answer poses yet another question:
My tentative and provisional view is that we humans might have been overestimating our intelligence. …
… if highly sophisticated software can digest trillions of words and recombine it in a way that looks like Reason, was there ever anything really special about us humans?
Genesis
My immediate response was to think about Genesis 1:26-27:
God said: Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness. …
God created mankind in his image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
You and I were created in the image of God. Claude was not.
Genesis provides further evidence of human exceptionalism. God created Man in His image, which differentiates us from the animals. Hence, God gave Man “dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the tame animals, all the wild animals, and all the creatures that crawl on the earth.” (Gen. 1:26) He commanded Man to “[h]ave dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that crawl on the earth.” (Gen. 1:28)
Pope Leo
In his marvelous encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person In the Time of Artificial Intelligence, Pope Leo XIV makes this very point (albeit far more eloquently):
At the heart of the Christian understanding of the human person lies the great biblical affirmation that men and women are created in the image and likeness (cf. Gen 1:26-27) of the Triune God. Created for relationship, every human person is planned and willed by God to enter into communion with him, with others and with creation. Human dignity does not depend on a person’s abilities, wealth or position in life, nor on the right or wrong choices made; instead, it is a gift that precedes and transcends each person, endowed by God as an expression of his unfailing love.
This leads Pope Leo to argue that:
[W]e must avoid the misconception of equating this type of “intelligence” with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. In doing so, they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields. Yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing. So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences.
Humans Were Made Exceptional to be in Relation with God
Why did God make Man in His own image? Saint Pope John Paul II addressed that question in his encyclical Dominum Et Vivificantem: On the Holy Spirit in the Life of the Church and the World:
To create means to call into existence from nothing: therefore, to create means to give existence. And if the visible world is created for man, therefore the world is given to man. And at the same time that same man in his own humanity receives as a gift a special "image and likeness" to God. This means not only rationality and freedom as constitutive properties of human nature, but also, from the very beginning, the capacity of having a personal relationship with God, as "I" and "you," and therefore the capacity of having a covenant, which will take place in God's salvific communication with man. Against the background of the "image and likeness" of God, "the gift of the Spirit" ultimately means a call to friendship, in which the transcendent "depths of God" become in some way opened to participation on the part of man. The Second Vatican Council teaches; "The invisible God out of the abundance of his love speaks to men as friends and lives among them, so that he may invite and take them into fellowship with himself."
Among the many threats that AI potentially poses is the risk that fallible humans will look to AI for relationship rather than God(or each other). Hence, Pope Leo warns:
The artificial imitation of positive human communication — words of advice, empathy, friendship and even love — can be engaging and at times genuinely helpful. However, for less discerning users, it can also be misleading, creating the illusion of a relationship with a real personal subject. When words are simulated, they do not build genuine relationships, but only their appearance. The artificial imitation of care or support can become particularly risky when it enters contexts where real relationships and emotional bonds are lacking. Here, the danger is not so much that a person may believe they are communicating with another person, but rather that they may gradually lose the very desire to form genuine human connections.
Conclusion
In Romans (8:38-39), Saint Paul assures us that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
AI is one of those future things.
The thing of which we must be careful, however, is that there is one thing that can separate us from God: ourselves.
No, the hand of the LORD is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear. Rather, it is your crimes that separate you from your God, It is your sins that make him hide his face so that he does not hear you.
This is the risk of which Pope Leo warns. It is the risk of which we must be ever mindful.