Angelus News | June 30, 2023 | Vol. 8 No 13

students per teacher. They can do oral
exams. But in some public schools the
ratio is 1 to 50, 1 to 60 students per
teacher. As AI proliferates to essays and
standardized tests, there will be opportunities
for students to leverage that to
do better.
Vukov: I agree with Justin. I’ve started
making sure that students understand
what exactly a large language model
is and how machine learning works,
and in light of that, helping them to
understand what its limitations are.
ChatGPT can do a really good job
constructing boilerplate, B-essays. It
can’t do a good job of including robust
citations, or bringing someone’s personal
experience into the essay. I think
once students understand this, it clicks
that AI can’t do the same thing they
would do in an essay that they actually
want to write.
It’s a sea-change moment in education.
It’s forcing me to think more
about what we’re teaching students,
just like the internet made us think
about the value of memorizing gobs
of information. We can ask if students
need to be synthesizing information
into four- to five-page essays.
AI is not particularly good at evaluating
meaning or ethics or religious
frameworks for viewing the world or
bringing personal experiences to bear
on big ideas. I’m wondering, how can
we prepare students in such a way that
they’re bringing what’s distinctively
human about themselves into their
education and work?
Ureneck: The Surgeon General recently
released a report detailing the
“loneliness epidemic” in our nation.
More than 75% of adults reported
experiencing loneliness. We already
know that teens’ mental health is
abysmal. Some have proposed that AI
robots might offer some relief. How
do you see AI affecting our human
relationships and well-being?
Vukov: I’d start with the Turing test,
named after Alan Turing, who’s considered
the father of computer science.
Basically, the test says that if you can’t
tell if the thing you’re interacting with
is a computer or a human, that thing
is conscious or sentient. That concept
has led to functionalism — one of the
A fake image of Pope Francis in Balenciaga generated by Midjourney AI. | PABLO XAVIER/MIDJOURNEY
leading ways of understanding who we
are as psychological beings today.
Functionalists believe that what humans
are is the functions that we can
perform. So if you can build a program
that can reproduce and replicate the
function, that’s as good as you need to
be to be a human being. This is why
we tend to anthropomorphize AI. We
call them Siri and Alexa. That’s the
trickle-down of the Turing test. We’ve
reduced what a human being is to our
psychological function.
I watched the congressional hearings
with Sam Altman (CEO of Open AI)
on regulation, and one thing they kept
on coming back to is that we need to
know if the thing we’re interacting
with is AI. The worry here is that we
can’t tell the difference anymore. And
that worry is predicated on the deeper
assumption that AI is not a person.
Of course the Catholic tradition has
tons to say about this.
Humans have souls; humans are
embodied; humans are made in the
image and likeness of God. We’re more
than our functions. And that’s why we
think, “Even if it can act like a human
being and paint like a human being
and talk like a human being, it’s not
the real deal.”
Welter: Will AI replace human
relationships or solve loneliness? I don’t
see it. I think it’s important to emphasize
the word “artificial” in artificial
intelligence. One of the things that we
as Christians understand is self-sacrifice,
dying to ourselves within love
and all that that entails. I just don’t see
that happening with an algorithm. To
really have an interaction with or to
14 • ANGELUS • June 30, 2023