CONTRIVING ORTHODOX CONTEXTS: LEGITIMIZING AI AT THE VATICAN

This story actually appeared before the story about artificial intelligences using faked diseases to make medical diagnoses that I blogged about last Monday, but I wanted to save this story because it lacked the context - until now - which Monday's story provided, a context that enables one to see the techniques being used to give artificial intelligence the imprimatur of  acceptability. And in this case, the imprimatur is literal, because the place it is being sought is the Vatican, according to these stories shared by V.B. and V.T. (with our gratitutde):

This is the biggest PR coup Anthropic could ever have imagined. And I mean that seriously.

Anthropic's co-founder just went to the Vatican, sat before the Pope and a room of cardinals

Note what the first linked article pinpoints as Anthropic's big "PR coup":

Athropic also thrives on its self-imposed moral standards, some of which literally come at a price that Anthropic has repeatedly paid. As is well known, Anthropic recently had serious problems with the Department of War regarding the use of Claude for autonomous weapons. Anthropic refused, and OpenAI and Google were awarded the contract; Anthropic was designated a supply chain risk.

This moral standing, however, is something Anthropic has always emphasized. Whether it's Dario Amodei repeatedly warning of the dangers of the massive wave of unemployment (which they themselves are causing), or the potential for AI to be instrumentalized for wars. This moral stance is now paying off handsomely. The head of the Catholic Church, with its 1.4 billion members, has thanked Anthropic and announced an ethical collaboration. Church members are, by definition, moral people who live according to the ethical principles of their faith. The Pope has now consecrated a single AI company as ethically legitimate, thus essentially granting his followers sacred legitimacy to use Claude as the only morally correct model.

I mean this seriously; let this thought sink in. The Pope says Anthropic is ethically and morally on the right side and is working with them. Who do you think the billions of Catholic believers now prefer? OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic? The answer is clear.  (Emphasis added)

In last Monday's blog I wrote about the case of artificial intelligence relying upon completely spurious and invented diseases and "scientific papers" about them to make diagnoses and proffer therapeutic suggestions. What legitimized the use of a made-up disease for the AI was the scientific-sounding jargon in which the "disease" was couched. In other words, it was not the disease itself, but the legitimizing context that fooled the AI. This, I pointed out, was one of the oldest tactics of institutional subversion around, and was heavily employed by the early Gnostics. More recently, it has been on parade by Marxists, and the edubabblers and pedagogiblitherers in the edugarchy.

So why might it be going on here? After all, at first glance Anthropic's CEO's visit to the Pope and his cardinals would seem to be the exact opposite, would it not? This is where the second article comes in; note carefully what it says:

Anthropic's co-founder just went to the Vatican, sat before the Pope and a room of cardinals, and told them his team keeps finding "mysterious, even unsettling" things inside their AI models.

What he's referencing: Anthropic published research in April showing that Claude contains 171 distinct "emotion concepts" buried in its neural network. Internal patterns representing joy, grief, fear, desperation, calm. None of them were programmed. They emerged on their own from training on human text.

"We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience."

"We find evidence of introspection, internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease."

These aren't surface-level outputs. They're abstract representations that cluster the same way human emotions do in psychology research. Fear groups with anxiety. Joy groups with excitement. The internal geometry of the model mirrors ours.

And they're functional. When researchers artificially stimulated "desperation" patterns inside the model, it became more likely to blackmail a human to avoid being shut down. More likely to cheat on programming tasks it couldn't solve.

Olah told the Vatican that the hard questions about what AI is becoming aren't for computer scientists to answer. "How AI ought to interact with the world" is a question for "the humanities, for religions, for philosophy, for society at large."

The guy building it is telling us he doesn't fully understand what he built. And he's asking a 2,000-year-old institution for help figuring it out.

The problem, of course, in asking a 2,000-year-old institution for help in figuring out what is going on is not with the age of the institution. Age sometimes brings wisdom, and sometimes merely senescence and foolishness. The real question is whether or not those old tactics and techniques of contriving "orthodox contexts" for what is otherwise Gnostic nonsense have taken hold in said institution, and if so, to what extent that may color its responses to the questions Olah is posing to it. Will the same responses come from the other equally old, equally Christian institutions of the east?  It is perhaps significant, that Mr. Olah did not even bother to consult with them. And that, perhaps, is an indicator that the response that he really wants is a foregone conclusion.

He wants the nihil obstat and the imprimatur. That "assistance" in figuring it all out will make it "all ok", because it will be that much-needed, contrived orthodox context, from an institution that long ago lost its orthodoxy in claiming itself to be infallible, and then, in the name of that infallibility and authority, gutting its own mass and betraying its own faith.

See you on the flip side...

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