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by vivekd 520 days ago
I understand the author's conserns but I wonder of his standard of "true" is a bit unrealistic. Maybe the standard should be "less false than the average human produced work."

Yes a human expert who is devoted to uncovering and communicating truth will do much better than an llm. But that is not what most of the content in the world consists of.

Most content is written by people with questionable expertise who write with goals like fame or viewership numbers or advertising dollars. Most content on the internet or in the world does not seem to be written with the goal of uncovering truth.

To create a more truthful world AI doesn't have to be as accurate as an expert. It just has to be more accurate than average. And in many areas, that's a very low bar.

To choose a less controversial area than religion, I think adding AI to nutrition advice on the internet will be an improvement. It's true you will inevitably get inaccurate advice communicated with confidence, but any AI trained on any kind of credible scholarship for will still be miles ahead of Internet nutritional advice that is often filled with zany pseudoscience.

Yes it will produce inaccurate results but on average the information will be more accurate than what already exists and what is currently being perpetuated

5 comments

If you literally believe that getting an answer wrong can send someone to hell, then I think the stakes are a little more dire than bad nutritional advice.

Like imagine if this were a baby-care bot, dispensing advice on how to safely care for your baby. That would be pretty stupid, and would likely eventually give advice so incorrect a baby would die. For someone who believes, that is a less tragic outcome than being led astray by an apologetics bot. It takes an incredible level of conceit to build one anyway.

chat GPT and Gemini both provide advice on how to care for babies. I think in the end you have to have faith in people to also use their common sense, discretion and not blindly believe or act on everything a bot tells them.

I think the same is true for an AI giving religious advice - you have to exercise a bit of faith in the readership and, perhaps in this case , also faith in the ultimate guidance of the divine. Faith that they're not going to make serious mortal or religious decision by unquestioningly following a chatbot

If we take this thinking to its logical conclusion we should put all our efforts as a civilization to getting rid of all misinformation that may harm babies whether online or spoken. And every religious person should do nothing but have flame wars and censorship campaigns about any flase religious information that has any chance of affecting a person's salvation.

The author seems to be in a purity spiral and seems to be taking an overly hardline interpretation of the religion

> Maybe the standard should be "less false than the average human produced work."

I don't think so. Lots of people blindly trust LLMs more than they trust the average human, probably for bad reasons (including laziness and over-reliance on technology).

Given that reality, it's irresponsible to make LLMs that don't reach a much better standard, since it encourages people to misinform themselves.

If you genuinely believe that failure to believe in Christ means an eternity of punishment, anything that might feasibly turn off a potential believer - like an AI hallucination posing as a religious explanation - is fundamentally worse than murder.
In religious communities we would call such an attitude scrupulosity. It refers to a sort of religious OCD, a paralyzing fixation on the rules and a demand for unrealistic standards of perfection.

According to Christian teaching, such an attitude comes from a lack of faith. A lack of belief that God is ultimately in control, and an understanding that for all the imperfections and flaws that we as humans inevitably bring to the table, god can still work through those imperfections.

I'm not sure there's an existing "Christian teaching" on "should I use an AI chatbot that's highly likely to make shit up as a proselytizing tool"?
Humans are also "highly likely to make shit up". Should everybody stop making and consuming any religious works other than the "original bible"?
That is indeed a pretty common doctrine - that the Bible is the only source that can be trusted - for that very reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_inerrancy

you can just google scrupulosity or scrupulouness and find writing on it by various apologetics.
I get the concept. I don't find it compelling as an argument here.

This is a common mistake by apologetics.

The article addresses this exact argument.

In some domains "good enough" or "the ends justify the means" are acceptable. In this domain the author clearly feels there is a significant moral requirement to satisfy.

> I understand the author's conserns but I wonder of his standard of "true" is a bit unrealistic.

In the case of religions it is definitely unrealistic.