Why Catholics can and should resist AI

In 2016, the legendary Japanese animator and filmmaker Hayo Miyazaki was invited to watch an AI-generated sequence, engineered by young computer animators. The images were of grotesque, writhing figures, which the creators imagined “could be applied to zombie video games.” Miyazaki looked on with concern, and he then began to discuss a disabled friend for whom even basic human motion is an ordeal. He explained, “Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is. I am utterly disgusted.” To the shock and dismay of one of the eager young techies, Miyazaki concluded, “I strongly feel this is an insult to life itself.”

Miyazaki’s concerns make sense to anyone who watches the video—the early AI creations are as risible as they are disturbing. But today’s technologists may chime in with a defense: “AI can do so much more now!” “It’s so much better now!” True. And for me, and I suspect for Miyazaki too, the fact that machines and software produce realistic material ought to disturb us more, not less. As AI improves, it sidelines actual human beings from writing, acting, or just being, and the insult to life itself grows into a zombie video game writ large.

AI’s ability to produce content indistinguishable from human activity was one of the major obstacles to the resolution of the Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes in 2023. Some people joked at the time that most modern movie scripts do not involve much humanity anyway. Likewise, how “real” are most Hollywood stars in an age of cosmetic surgery, the magic of stage lighting, camera filters, and body doubles? For casual onlookers, the idea that entertainers would strike because of computers smacked of pettiness and privilege. But the writers and actors were right. In fact, technology columnist Brian Merchant wrote persuasively in the Los Angeles Times that the strikes were “a proxy battle of humans vs. AI”—an emblem of the culture-wide struggle to preserve dignified work amid soulless productivity.

The eventual resolution of the writers’ grievances has ensured a minimum number of human beings in writing rooms—thereby staving off the complete takeover of scripts by generative AI. Likewise, for now, studios will not simply be able to scan and infinitely superimpose background actors or re-use the likeness of movie stars in perpetuity. In the long run, however, the march of technology is likely to prevail, because audiences simply do not care to stick up for humanity. Why blow the budget on the real Glen Powell when audiences would instead prefer the likeness of Tom Cruise—or Cary Grant, for that matter? And since complex story-telling is mostly a thing of the past, what does it matter if the script to the latest sequel to a reboot are churned out by a machine fed with old MCU plots? Again, the conversation is more likely to revolve around how good and realistic the phoniness is. It’s all just entertainment calories that end up in the same place.

The situation with music is just as serious.

As You Tuber Rick Beato demonstrates in his video, “The Real Reason Why Music is Getting Worse,” it has been a couple of decades since almost any popular music was made by simply recording voices and instruments and mixing tracks. From the autotune revolution around the turn of the millennium onward, the production side of music has already been dominated by artificiality. But with the onset of AI, the creation of music has likewise rapidly become a post-human endeavor.

In late June, the three major record label groups of Universal, Sony, and Warner, supported by the Recording Industry Association of America, announced they were suing two AI firms called Suno and Udio. Claiming copyright infringement, the labels argue that the tech start-ups have simply taken large music catalogs without permission and deposited untold thousands of songs into their AI machines to be used as learning tools. After all, how can a computer comply with a request like “Write me a song that sounds like Bruce Springsteen” if it hasn’t been fed Springsteen’s oeuvre? The machine must consume the human’s work so that its human audience can consume its post-human replacement.

Obviously, these AI companies knew they were taking a risk and they may lose their case. But the genie is already out of the bottle, just as it was with Napster at the beginning of the streaming era. In 2001, Metallica successfully defeated Napster in court, putting them out of the business of giving people a platform to share music with each other without paying for it. But it was a pyrrhic victory: one way or another, the old system of artists and royalties was over. Eventually, we would have access to everything, and we wouldn’t care if artists profited from their work—or indeed, if real artists were involved in “content” at all.

As Ted Gioia recently explained in an interview with Beato, music streaming services already produce vast numbers of their own AI-generated songs, which are particularly useful for filling out their highly popular, generic playlists. To add insult to injury, they even make up fake names for the “artists” of the AI-generated songs, so no one is the wiser. Like the tech start-ups in the crosshairs of the music studios, Spotify and other big companies may lose some copyright lawsuits; but in the meantime, they are filling their servers with music that will not just disappear when judgments are handed down. Perhaps more importantly, they are collecting subscription fees from users while saving the enormous sums of money formerly paid out as royalties to artists. Whatever may happen to Sunno and Udio, therefore, it is hard to imagine Spotify failing; and in this way, AI music is likely here to stay, no matter the legal situation. As Michael Hanby argues in his seminal article “A More Perfect Absolutism” from 2016, “Technology does not wait on politics. Even the state cannot finally contain the forces it unleashes.”

But what about the Church? Is there anything it can do now to resist AI?

At the beginning of his pontificate, Pope Francis expressed clear concerns about technology. In his first encyclical, Laudato Si, Francis was ridiculed by critics for his disparaging remark about “the increasing use and power of air-conditioning.” Even a Luddite like me finds it difficult to nod my head along with that one. Some of us, particularly in places like Texas, might rather identify extreme heat as one of the “countless evils,” which Pope Francis tells us technology has helped remedy. In any case, his larger argument is a welcome one, reminding us of the dangers of innovation detached from the Natural Law, or even just basic ethics. Rebutting the popular talking point of technology as just a tool to be used for good or ill, Pope Francis states, “employing technology as a mere instrument is nowadays inconceivable.” And the coup de grâce: “science and technology are not neutral.”

More recently, Pope Francis has pivoted to the pragmatic, attempting to use his influence in the waning days of his pontificate to broker ethical decisions about technology, and specifically AI. I remain skeptical—again, the genie is already out of the bottle, or, to use Jurassic Park as an analogy, the dinosaurs are already off the island. But maybe it’s worth a shot. Better to light a match than curse the darkness, as they say.

On January 24, 2024, Pope Francis used his annual message for the World Day of Social Communications to urge leaders to prioritize ethical and spiritual questions with regard to AI. He asked, “How can we remain fully human and guide this cultural transformation to serve a good purpose?” So far, so good. Warning against “disturbing scenarios,” Pope Francis clearly understands it is too late to call for a complete reversion to pre-AI conditions—alas—instead advocating for the use of technology as a means “to grow together, in humanity and as humanity.” I admit, this part hits me as empty jargon.

Writing about more practical concerns, however, the Pope strikes the right note, sticking up for people, and for reality: “How do we safeguard professionalism and the dignity of workers…?” And while the short document is ambivalent throughout—toggling between the inherent dangers of technology and the potential for its positive application—it ends with a clear-eyed challenge: “It is up to us to decide whether we will become fodder for algorithms or will nourish our hearts with that freedom without which we cannot grow in wisdom.” Perhaps it is not too late to take back some control.

Following the European Union’s hard-fought agreement on new AI rules in December 2023, Pope Francis called upon world leaders to agree to a binding international treaty. For some of us, these kinds of globalist governing ideals have become tiresome, if not altogether out of sympathy with the reality of national sovereignty. On the other hand, technology knows no national borders. In his call to action, Pope Francis tried to split the difference somewhat, saying, “The global scale of artificial intelligence makes it clear that, alongside the responsibility of sovereign states to regulate its use internally, international organizations can play a decisive role in reaching multilateral agreements and coordinating their application and enforcement.”

Maybe so.

Nonetheless, in key respects, binding agreements about technology may fix some problems related to AI—i.e. copyright infringement and workers’ rights issues—but they may also enshrine other uses of AI that are just as troubling. The EU law, for example, allows governments to use AI for facial recognition in public surveillance, while it supposedly “bans cognitive behavioural manipulation, the untargeted scrapping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage, social scoring and biometric categorization systems to infer political, religious, philosophical beliefs, sexual orientation and race.” Can we have confidence in the powerful people entrusted with policing these boundaries, assuming they even know how? Isn’t it disturbing that such assurances would have to be made at all?

Perhaps, as in Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film Minority Report, some near catastrophe or highly publicized but not-too-devastating miscarriage of justice will enable a much larger legal curb on technology than any proposed international AI treaty now imagines. But I begin to wonder if I am the minority of one who has really taken dystopian fiction seriously.

We have meandered a considerable way from concerns about AI and Miyazaki’s cartoons, but to me there is little space separating the abolition of man as artist and the abolition of man full stop. Indeed, C.S. Lewis’ prophetic work of this name, The Abolition of Man, begins with his concerns about the teaching of literature in the schools. And it does not seem to occur to Lewis, or Huxley or Orwell for that matter, to look primarily to government intervention to stop our worst nightmares of an inhumane existence from becoming reality.

I am no libertarian and I hesitate to sound the note of the primacy of personal responsibility on matters like AI that are to a large degree out of anyone’s control. It is increasingly clear, however, that the solution to the crisis of technology is in each human soul, extended well beyond our individual spiritual preferences, and expressed through our cultural artifacts and practices in what the late Roger Scruton dubbed “the soul of the world.” As Michael Hanby puts it, “There can be no renewal of the Christian mind unless we can liberate our imaginations from the tyranny of ‘use’ and rediscover something like theoria in the old sense.”

One by one, family by family, community by community—perhaps helped, ironically, by the connecting capability of the internet—man must simply say “no more.” We were made for something better. We want reality, and we must hope for it.

It is some consolation that Miyazaki recently came out of retirement to make another entirely hand-drawn feature film, The Boy and the Heron, which released in 2023. Likewise, the video game giant Nintendo announced it would not use generative AI in its game development, citing intellectual property concerns. And to keep with the Japanese focus here, one of my favorite recent films is Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days, which is the study of a Tokyo man who cleans toilets for a living and retreats home each evening to an analog life of reading Faulkner and listening to cassette tapes. Many international filmmakers like Wenders, along with a few American ones, continue to tell stories that reject the spectacles of computer-generated diversion.

In the music world, new artists whose music is not heavily produced by artificial means are unlikely to be well known to the general public. Likewise, it will be increasingly difficult to finance symphony orchestras and keep jazz clubs open. But a small, determined group of humans will manage as best they can to keep the candle of civilized creativity burning. We must support them. They will spend hour after hour perfecting crafts instead of looking at devices until the moment for a new movement finally arrives—when the pendulum has swung so far away from reality that it will be impossible to keep its renewal from demolishing the simulacra in its return path.

As a Romantic, I can dream, can’t I?

For Catholics, criticism of technology and rejection of anything “artificial” should be part of the character of what Pope Benedict XVI called “creative minorities.” Before his treaty-brokering days, Pope Francis described this lifestyle and this movement—again, in Laudato Si–in no uncertain terms. He wrote, “it has become countercultural to choose a lifestyle whose goals are even partly independent of technology.”

In this way, Catholics have a built-in capacity to lead the culture against a post-human future. Amid all the tired discussions of the “use” of technology in evangelism, the most important thing we can say is that being Catholic is simply impossible in any kind of virtual or artificial sense, or even with much reliance on technology at all. Until the God-man returns, his men will have to stand at his altars and sit in his confessionals. His people will have to present themselves, bodies and souls, to partake of his body, blood, soul, and divinity in person every seven days. They must bring their babies to the water of the font and the oil of chrism. They must open their mouths and use their tongues, first to utter their sins and then receive the Sacrament upon them.

There is no watching or multi-tasking or consuming or using. There is only the much-maligned Vatican II phrase “active participation,” which we must sublimate as our battle cry in the fight for the only thing that matters.

The real.

Catholic World Report