ChatGPT, AI, and Imago Dei

The Heavenly Banquet

In this episode Chad Rhodes and Charlotte Elia discuss a recent church service in Nuremberg, Germany that was organized and led by ChatGPT, and that leads them to muse on the nature of preaching, our capacity for creativity, and what it means to be human.

Chad: I mean, the computer is just a program. I don’t know if people need to hear that. It’s encryption all the way down, turtles all the way down. There’s no understanding there. There’s no agency, desire, will, goals unless it’s programmed into it obviously. But not the desire and will, the goals are obviously going to be programmed into it. But it doesn’t have agency, and it’s not aware of its own experience in the world.

Charlotte: Maybe that’s the angle, that love of neighbor presumes love of self. Love of self presumes self-awareness.

Chad: Yeah, the ability to be aware of my own experience and then equate the experience of others with something similar, you know?

-----------

Charlotte: But they’re only returning what we’re putting into them, either through those prompts or the information that we’ve fed to them and through the programs that we’ve written for them. And in that way, they actually reflect more on us as their creator than as some other entity.