Jim Morin on AI and the church: A Disembodied Gospel

This seems quite reasonable to me. As someone who uses LLMs daily for my coding work, I have been intrigued by tools like Magisterium AI and Truthly AI for study and research. Morin comments:

And in some cases, engagement with other sources may even promote a kind of remote communion with their authors. Perhaps a priest could use A.I. in this way, without slowly abdicating his personal vocation to preach the gospel as an act of love. I doubt it. Power and comfort have long been the enemies of the priesthood.

I’m not preparing or delivering homilies but this caution about a “slow abdication” of vocation or, in my words, personal agency, is a real fear. I feel it creeping up on my in my coding work even though I have almost 30 years of experience in that endeavor. Why wouldn’t it sneak up on me when I’m engaged in an activity with which I have much less experience and much higher expectations?

For now, I keep the faith-focused LLMs at a long arms reach. Occasional use for very specific research questions mostly to point me to primary sources where I can continue using my brain to read and engage with the topics I’m studying. Is it little more than a friendlier search engine? I don’t know. It feels dangerous and that’s why I’m wary.