Articles
What Lies Beneath
What Lies Beneath
“Under the surface, the ship doesn’t swerve as it heard how big the iceberg is.” ~Lin-manuel Miranda
Last week’s article was a curiosity. The keen-eyed might have noticed that there was no author’s attribution at the bottom. Additionally, it was not published on the website, which is highly unusual. Regular readers of my articles likely clued in that I did not write it. The prose was sophomoric at best, there was no real flow of the ideas, and the depth of the biblical teaching was barely surface level. In seconds, a prompt was given to an artificial intelligence and that whole article was generated. After a few tweaks to the prompt, and a few generations of the article later, I put a title and tag line on it and sent the article.
Artificial intelligence is a milestone of human achievement. In ways similar to the wheel, writing, algebra, the printing press, the industrial revolution, and the internet have revolutionized our civilization, AI is quickly earning its keep among these huge leaps forward in technology. (Note the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry for solving the CASP “competition.”)
Watching AI learn and grow has fascinated many in the scientific world since the first AI learned to play checkers in the early 1950s. Within the past few years, it has exploded. How it is learning and understanding is not dissimilar to how humans learn and understand. Looking into I Corinthians 13, Paul describes how children look at and interact with the world:
“Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” (I Corinthians 13:8-12)
Paul is using the analogy of how children understand to how Christians of the day understood the law of Christ. They did not have the written scripture yet, or what they had was limited at best, such as this letter. The Holy Spirit was still imparting the Law which would eventually be written down, as discussed in the articles two and three weeks ago.
Children learn and grow in that learning. Think back to the time when you were learning to read. “See Spot run,” was a basic sentence to help you learn to read. It has no real meaning other than a surface understanding of the words, and a picture to accompany the sentence of a puppy running on the lawn. Those who are learned do not speak that way once they have grown up.
In the same way, AI is currently just a little past, “See Spot run.” Initially when I asked Grok to draft the article in the style of a Truth Magazine article based on Philippians 2:3, the article it produced had a different focus. It focused on, “warning against selfish ambition [and] how the pursuit of personal gain undermines genuine Christian community.” (Grok’s words.) The AI did not have a deep understanding and only produced a surface-level response.
Both children and immature Christians are the same way. Children see the world through the lens of ignorance, and immature Christians see the world either through ignorance as well, or into that mirror, dimly. A reflection that, in common mirrors of the day, would have been blurry, dull, and dark; having difficulty understanding and refining all the features.
Just like AI and children, we must all continue to learn and grow. There’s always new understandings and scriptures reveal those to you the more you study and the more you pray and ponder. To stop and accept the surface is to fall into the trap Satan has set of complacency where self is just big enough to take the place of God, but not big enough to notice.
Lance Byers
February 22, 2025
- What_Lies_Beneath_2-22-25.pdf (27.09 kB)
