There is interesting debate about whether, and how much, LLMs were used to write parts of this encyclical. Generally encyclicals are written by a group of Cardinals and/or Bishops, with significant input from the Pope, so it seems possible that while the Pope's sections and speeches have been human-written, some of the other writers used LLMs in some capacity.
The argument boil down to: Pangram seems to flag some sections, some sections have tells or AI smell, and despite being written in a similar register, previous writings of both the Pope and previous encyclicals are not flagged.
I'm not sure that it's a disaster if parts have been AI assisted, but it's an interesting question to ponder, and would be interested in the HN view.
> The direction that AI takes is not written into the technology itself. It depends on our choices, on the institutions that host and underpin that choosing, and on our ability to manage innovation responsibly to serve the common good.
This is such a key point -- the problem is that the $T that are being poured into AI are doing so for one purpose alone: ROI
The choice has already been made, and it's the wrong one.
It's the correct choice according to the fundamental principles of capitalism, as set down by Milton Friedman.[1] and Lewis Powell.[2] Friedman set down the theory:
In an ideal free market resting on private property, no individual can coerce any other, all cooperation is voluntary, all parties to such cooperation benefit or they need not participate. There are no “social” values, no “social” responsibilities in any sense other than the shared values and responsibilities of individuals. Society is a collection of individuals and of the various groups they voluntarily form. ...
(But) the doctrine of “social responsibility” taken seriously would extend the scope of the political mechanism to every human activity. It does not differ in philosophy from the most explicitly collectivist doctrine. It differs only by professing to believe that collectivist ends can be attained without collectivist means. That is why, in my book “Capitalism and Freedom,” I have called it a “fundamentally subversive doctrine” in a free society, and have said that in such a society, “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”
Then Powell (the Powell who became a Supreme Court Justice) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce set out to change the rules of the game.
The 1971 "Powell memo" was written when the values of the 1960s had permeated society.
The objective of the memo was to turn that around. It's a battle plan to use corporate power to change government. When it was written, few companies had lobbyists. Now, corporate lobbying is huge, and effective.
The extent to which this well-funded project worked doesn't have to be described today.
What's worth realizing is that it wasn't always that way.
The U.S. Government of the Lyndon Johnson era ("Great Society", "War on Poverty") was organized to deal with something like the impact of AI on employment. The current government is not. It is permeated with people who think it the government shouldn't do anything about it.
This is the same position of Yuval Noah Harari in his recent Economist interview: The ones in power (Musk etc.) try to frame the bad AI future as inevitable, instead of shouldering responsibility. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNZhxTtOL-I
Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
You're quoting Wall Street (1987), but it's not clear whether you're in support of the sentiment or not. Plenty of people around here weren't born when that film came out.
Yeah. And the quality of AI will only get worse from here unless we can commoditize open weight models.
If Google and Anthropic and such are able to own access, they will enshittify it horribly. Because they are powerless to do anything but, in the name of profit.
I'd say that the outcome mostly depends on whether something resembling AGI is achieved since that would more or less inevitably end up leading to something resembling ASI ('super-intelligence') which in turn makes it questionable whether the resulting entity can be counted upon to 'serve the common good' - whatever that may be. The quest for ROI has at most a temporary influence on the direction if this path is followed unless it actually keeps AGI (and thus ASI) from being achieved.
That's the thing about modern chatbots--they are nothing new technologically. They're just taking the same old neural networks and brute-forcing everything with ridiculous computing power and energy consumption. Autonomous agents just feed everything back into a loop that's even more wasteful.
I think it's a matter of incentives. American billionaires are mostly highly financially exposed to AI, so are not really incentivised to say anything interesting about it except "it's great, you should buy it".
On one hand I appreciate the considerate scholarship on display, and since there are so many Catholics maybe some will even listen to their purported leader. On the other hand I find any talk of greed, selfishness, manipulation and degradation of humanity... really rich coming from a pope. Maybe I'm supposed to forgive, but I'm not going to forget that they spent decades abusing, hiding abuse, trying to force abortion to the margins along with birth control even when HIV became an obvious pandemic. I'm tired of the leader of an organization that owns a whole city preaching poverty to the masses, even if this particular leader has better PR than most.
Enough people have made these same points without the taint of that organization that I don't see this offering as necessary for the discussion, it mostly seems like a way to insert religion into something that simply doesn't require it. Faith can be a beautiful thing, personal and meaningful, but a giant organization with power and money is always going to be just that and should be treated with according suspicion.
The abuse, sure, but the birth control stance is really the only one compatible with the Catholic idea of sex only being appropriate in the context of a monogamous, lifelong married couple. I'm not really sure what you're getting at with that one, since there wouldn't be an HIV or STI epidemic in that world.
The most common form of male birth control also happens to be the primary recommended means to avoid HIV and other STI's: the condom. Sorry if I was unclear and made it seem like it was improperly related.
Is the Catholic Church against condoms being used for gay sex? It's my understanding that they're only against them because they're against purely recreational sex. If the sex can't result in a child anyway then I dont think they're going to treat it as a double sin.
I'm unsure how this relates to my comment, unless you're under the impression that HIV is exclusively spread through "gay sex" as you put. I certainly don't want to make the assumption about you though, given how archaic and bigoted that view is. If you could clarify what you mean I'd appreciate it.
Not exclusively but predominantly. Which makes me doubtful that the Catholic Church moved the numbers much on the HIV pandemic. Assuming of course that they weren't against condom use between men, which I'm not sure if they had or have a stance on.
Catholic nuns and religious were some of the first and only to help gay men during the AIDS crisis, so your moral pearl clutching is somewhat hyperbolical. Yes the church has particular moral beliefs you disagree. Join the club.
I'm disinterested in their beliefs, only their actions. Their actions overall speak much more loudly of a callous disregard for life (see: HIV in Africa) and the wellbeing of their most helpless charges (children). I'm not damning Catholics here, I'm talking about the central political and financial entity at the heart of it only.
There is interesting debate about whether, and how much, LLMs were used to write parts of this encyclical. Generally encyclicals are written by a group of Cardinals and/or Bishops, with significant input from the Pope, so it seems possible that while the Pope's sections and speeches have been human-written, some of the other writers used LLMs in some capacity.
The argument boil down to: Pangram seems to flag some sections, some sections have tells or AI smell, and despite being written in a similar register, previous writings of both the Pope and previous encyclicals are not flagged.
I'm not sure that it's a disaster if parts have been AI assisted, but it's an interesting question to ponder, and would be interested in the HN view.
Best post I've found arguing that there was LLM use: https://substack.com/inbox/post/199316613
Australian startup apparently verifying (without much detail) that it's not: https://www.proudlyhuman.org/news-room/media-releases/pope-l...
who gives a shit tbh, argue with the substance, not the style.
Always interesting to see older philosophical texts discussed here. Often find surprising parallels to modern tech ethics debates.
I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding you, but Magnifica Humanitas was published earlier this year.
> The direction that AI takes is not written into the technology itself. It depends on our choices, on the institutions that host and underpin that choosing, and on our ability to manage innovation responsibly to serve the common good.
This is such a key point -- the problem is that the $T that are being poured into AI are doing so for one purpose alone: ROI
The choice has already been made, and it's the wrong one.
It's the correct choice according to the fundamental principles of capitalism, as set down by Milton Friedman.[1] and Lewis Powell.[2] Friedman set down the theory:
In an ideal free market resting on private property, no individual can coerce any other, all cooperation is voluntary, all parties to such cooperation benefit or they need not participate. There are no “social” values, no “social” responsibilities in any sense other than the shared values and responsibilities of individuals. Society is a collection of individuals and of the various groups they voluntarily form. ...
(But) the doctrine of “social responsibility” taken seriously would extend the scope of the political mechanism to every human activity. It does not differ in philosophy from the most explicitly collectivist doctrine. It differs only by professing to believe that collectivist ends can be attained without collectivist means. That is why, in my book “Capitalism and Freedom,” I have called it a “fundamentally subversive doctrine” in a free society, and have said that in such a society, “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”
Then Powell (the Powell who became a Supreme Court Justice) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce set out to change the rules of the game. The 1971 "Powell memo" was written when the values of the 1960s had permeated society. The objective of the memo was to turn that around. It's a battle plan to use corporate power to change government. When it was written, few companies had lobbyists. Now, corporate lobbying is huge, and effective.
The extent to which this well-funded project worked doesn't have to be described today. What's worth realizing is that it wasn't always that way.
The U.S. Government of the Lyndon Johnson era ("Great Society", "War on Poverty") was organized to deal with something like the impact of AI on employment. The current government is not. It is permeated with people who think it the government shouldn't do anything about it.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...
[2] https://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/
This is the same position of Yuval Noah Harari in his recent Economist interview: The ones in power (Musk etc.) try to frame the bad AI future as inevitable, instead of shouldering responsibility. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNZhxTtOL-I
The whole interview is well worth your time.
I agree with your summary. Greed has won out over everything else.
Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
You're quoting Wall Street (1987), but it's not clear whether you're in support of the sentiment or not. Plenty of people around here weren't born when that film came out.
Greed is "good" for a few, clearly.
We must be greedy for justice, greedy for kindness, greedy for people taking responsibility for their actions...
There is no such thing as an evolutionary spirit.
Yeah. And the quality of AI will only get worse from here unless we can commoditize open weight models.
If Google and Anthropic and such are able to own access, they will enshittify it horribly. Because they are powerless to do anything but, in the name of profit.
I'd say that the outcome mostly depends on whether something resembling AGI is achieved since that would more or less inevitably end up leading to something resembling ASI ('super-intelligence') which in turn makes it questionable whether the resulting entity can be counted upon to 'serve the common good' - whatever that may be. The quest for ROI has at most a temporary influence on the direction if this path is followed unless it actually keeps AGI (and thus ASI) from being achieved.
I am afraid that anything created by humans will be, inherently, influenced in its ultimate development by human nature.
Therefore, whatever AGI looks like will be selfish, violent, and short sighted...
But our current crop of chatbots are not it. They're just parrots that happen to be pretty bad for the climate.
That's the thing about modern chatbots--they are nothing new technologically. They're just taking the same old neural networks and brute-forcing everything with ridiculous computing power and energy consumption. Autonomous agents just feed everything back into a loop that's even more wasteful.
It blows my mind that the Pope can say more relevant words about AI than American billionaires.
Saying relevant words is part of the Pope's job description. Not so for billionaires
I think it's a matter of incentives. American billionaires are mostly highly financially exposed to AI, so are not really incentivised to say anything interesting about it except "it's great, you should buy it".
On one hand I appreciate the considerate scholarship on display, and since there are so many Catholics maybe some will even listen to their purported leader. On the other hand I find any talk of greed, selfishness, manipulation and degradation of humanity... really rich coming from a pope. Maybe I'm supposed to forgive, but I'm not going to forget that they spent decades abusing, hiding abuse, trying to force abortion to the margins along with birth control even when HIV became an obvious pandemic. I'm tired of the leader of an organization that owns a whole city preaching poverty to the masses, even if this particular leader has better PR than most.
Enough people have made these same points without the taint of that organization that I don't see this offering as necessary for the discussion, it mostly seems like a way to insert religion into something that simply doesn't require it. Faith can be a beautiful thing, personal and meaningful, but a giant organization with power and money is always going to be just that and should be treated with according suspicion.
The abuse, sure, but the birth control stance is really the only one compatible with the Catholic idea of sex only being appropriate in the context of a monogamous, lifelong married couple. I'm not really sure what you're getting at with that one, since there wouldn't be an HIV or STI epidemic in that world.
>trying to force abortion to the margins along with birth control
Do you have some suggestions about the doctrines that Catholics should assent to?
> abortion to the margins along with birth control even when HIV became an obvious pandemic.
How are abortion and birth control at all related to HIV? I don't understand the connection.
Condoms prevents the spread of HIV.
The most common form of male birth control also happens to be the primary recommended means to avoid HIV and other STI's: the condom. Sorry if I was unclear and made it seem like it was improperly related.
My bad, I was thinking hormonal.
That's completely understandable and probably down to my hasty phrasing!
Is the Catholic Church against condoms being used for gay sex? It's my understanding that they're only against them because they're against purely recreational sex. If the sex can't result in a child anyway then I dont think they're going to treat it as a double sin.
Restricting the availability of the condoms restricts them for everyone.
I'm unsure how this relates to my comment, unless you're under the impression that HIV is exclusively spread through "gay sex" as you put. I certainly don't want to make the assumption about you though, given how archaic and bigoted that view is. If you could clarify what you mean I'd appreciate it.
Not exclusively but predominantly. Which makes me doubtful that the Catholic Church moved the numbers much on the HIV pandemic. Assuming of course that they weren't against condom use between men, which I'm not sure if they had or have a stance on.
Catholic nuns and religious were some of the first and only to help gay men during the AIDS crisis, so your moral pearl clutching is somewhat hyperbolical. Yes the church has particular moral beliefs you disagree. Join the club.
I'm disinterested in their beliefs, only their actions. Their actions overall speak much more loudly of a callous disregard for life (see: HIV in Africa) and the wellbeing of their most helpless charges (children). I'm not damning Catholics here, I'm talking about the central political and financial entity at the heart of it only.