Faith Venture

I try to separate the two sides of my thinking. Sometimes the overlap is too tasty.

Our pursuit of spiritual formation and the rest we can find in the Spirit sometimes can be disturbed kind of like in one of the Star Wars original episodes where one character remarks, “I feel a disturbance in the force.”

Perhaps all the news items and speculation, for it’s all speculation and not news, regarding what might happen with artificial intelligence have caused a disturbance in your (our) spirit.

I can no longer write a computer program (without a lot of catching up) and my memory of all the probability math I was taught has mostly evaporated. However, I remember enough to read books and articles sent to me for my tech blog The Manufacturing Connection picking up ideas of what technologies are behind all the hype. I write often to calm people suggesting they look more realistically behind the marketing and journalism hype.

Then came this podcast of Tech Nation by Moira Gunn, who hosted a linguistics professor called Dr. Emily Bender. Bender had released a book with Dr. Alex Hannah, The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want. 

My interest was piqued when they mentioned a 2021 paper by Bender, et. al., on language models called Stochastic Parrot.

As one of the thinkers attempting some common sense to cut through the AI hype, I love that term. Much of generative AI and large language models are simply probability calculations based on learned text. In other words:

Stochastic—a random probability distribution that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely—plus Parrot—to repeat something said by someone else without thought or understanding.

There are writers on both sides of the hype divide—the doom sayers and the optimistic hype sayers—who have let imagination run amok. Shall we pull back a little and look for those applications where this will really help. Applications other than providing more words for marketers to stuff into a news release, that is.

Let this be an example of maintaining our focus on our spiritual development filtering hype from our awareness.

This entry was posted on May 23, 2025 at 4:23 am and is filed under Awareness, discernment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.