Sam Kriss Will Come to Your House and Kill You
If you use AI to do your writing. He'd be doing a public service. Pope Leo would agree.
When you bump into a friend on vacation, it's a coincidence.
When the Jewish prose whiz Sam Kriss and the Catholic pontifical whiz Leo both publish lengthy exegeses about AI on the same day, it's a coincidence on steroids.
And when Pope Leo then refers (repeatedly) to AI as the "Tower of Babel" and Kriss offers extensive examples of AI's incoherent prose, it's gotta be divine intervention.
You thinkin' there's no way Leo would condone Kriss coming to your house and killing you for using AI to write your stuff?
Well, you'd probably be right.
But Leo and Kriss are fellow-travelers, make no doubt about it. They express themselves differently: Kriss, rabidly, to a fault; Leo, mildly, to a fault.
Me, I prefer Kriss' rabid approach: I know he's going full-on screed to make a point, and I'm (pretty) sure he's not really going to kill half the "writers" on Substack.
Leo's encyclical is good, but his style is too mild for what he clearly believes is an existential threat. When there's a fire, you scream it, not gently beseech the lambs.
Leo takes aim at the digital oligarchy and even implicitly channels that Catholic convert and daily communicant Marshall McLuhan, who relentlessly pointed out that technology has effects regardless of its content. "The medium is the message," said McLuhan. If you said technology is neutral and just depends on its content, McLuhan would've come to your house and killed you, maybe even f'ing killed you.
Leo nods: AI is not morally neutral. AI, he points out, cloaks itself in the characteristics of those who control and use it. The digital oligarchy wants us to think smartphones are neutral (you can use them to watch porn or to read papal encyclicals . . . you make the moral call), but the oligarchs know that's specious. The phones themselves are the message, and the message is, "We own you, you idiotic consumer."
And the message of AI is even clearer: "We will destroy you, you idiotic consumer."
Leo pairs the Tower of Babel image with the rebuilding of Jerusalem's walls after the Babylonian Exile. Nehemiah assigned each family a section of the wall to rebuild. Everyone had to do their part, and for the love of Yiddish, no one would be allowed to tear down the wall in their section, or Nehemiah would've come to their houses and f'ing killed them.
Everyone needs to do their part and rebuild the walls of human intelligence. This starts with not tearing down our section of the creative world by using AI to do our work. And honestly, why would you? The act of creation is enjoyable. Delegating it to AI is like delegating sex to a robot (more on "robot dick" later).
We're in Vichy France, and we need to resist the Nazi occupiers. Don't be Philippe Pétain. That's what Kriss is saying and Leo agrees, telling everyone they need to do their part and use AI responsibly, starting with not passing off AI writing as their own. That, I think in retrospect, will be considered Basic Morality 101, right up there with not setting cats on fire and loosing them in a crowded theater.
Do Kriss and Leo fear a robot apocalypse if we do? The heck if I know. I just know Leo has made it pretty clear that over-reliance on AI might soon be cropping up in those booklets for the examination of conscience.
Kriss? He's just fed up with the "dickless" prose AI spits out. To a man of Kriss' stylistic exactitude, AI prose is like all those times you're enjoying a Netflix series and then a homosexual storyline is introduced. AI prose is as jarring to Kriss' discerning reading habits as two dudes kissing on the screen is to a sane person.
That's why Kriss will come to your house and kill you if you write with AI. His prose is (way) more strident than Pope Leo's, but the point is the same: If you use AI to do your writing and thinking, you're part of the problem. Maybe Kriss shouldn't come to your house and kill you, and Pope Leo isn't remotely close to excommunicating folks for writing with AI, but I wouldn't blame either if they did.
Sam Kriss