AI and Formation

I recently came across the podcast series called Silicon Spiritualities, hosted by Christopher Watkin. The podcast addresses the issue of what it means to be human in “the age” of ai. Here are my reflections after listening to episode 2 with Michael Keller (who I naively did not realize was Tim Keller’s son and thought it odd that he kept referring to his dad). I’m listening to Episode 2 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j45x3ZVFFnA&list=PLUMQNpCV-Crg&index=6) and reflecting how plain it is that an LLM is a statistical model that produces outputs using language that mimics conversation. And yet, so quickly and easily our imagination can take us to wondering if it is conscious, marveling at what it “knows”. It seems like we have been making the same fundamental mistake for the past 4 years ad nauseum of confusing the output of doing something with doing it. It is so easy to anthropomorphize these products and smuggle in qualities and conceptions of what the tech can do with our…