Let’s start with some basics as we look at a recent New York Post story that ran with this headline: “Google engineer says Christianity helped him understand AI is ‘sentient’.”
For decades, I have been arguing with people, mostly cultural conservatives, who say things like: “Journalists hate religion.”
This is simplistic. In my experience — first, while working in newsrooms, and second, while reading and writing about media-bias issues — many journalists don’t care enough about religion to work up a good batch of hate. They tend to be indifferent or apathetic, unless certain types of religious folks start interfering in politics, which is the true religion of many or most news professionals.
No, it’s crucial to understand that many reporters love certain types of religion and oppose others. Always remember the following passage in that Jay Rosen PressThink essay, "Journalism Is Itself a Religion.” Yes, this involves interaction with one of my “On Religion” columns, but I can’t help that, nor can I help that this is quite long. So, what is the religion of the press?
A particularly telling example began with this passage from a 1999 New York Times Magazine article about anti-abortion extremism: “It is a shared if unspoken premise of the world that most of us inhabit that absolutes do not exist and that people who claim to have found them are crazy,” wrote David Samuels.
This struck some people as dogma very close to religious dogma, and they spoke up about it. One was Terry Mattingly, a syndicated columnist of religion: “This remarkable credo was more than a statement of one journalist’s convictions, said William Proctor, a Harvard Law School graduate and former legal affairs reporter for the New York Daily News. Surely, the ‘world that most of us inhabit’ cited by Samuels is, in fact, the culture of the New York Times and the faithful who draw inspiration from its sacred pages.”
Yet here is the part that intrigued me: “But critics are wrong if they claim that the New York Times is a bastion of secularism, he stressed. In its own way, the newspaper is crusading to reform society and even to convert wayward ‘fundamentalists.’ Thus, when listing the ‘deadly sins’ that are opposed by the Times, he deliberately did not claim that it rejects religious faith. Instead, he said the world’s most influential newspaper condemns ‘the sin of religious certainty.’ “
In other words, it’s against newsroom religion to be an absolutist and in this sense, the Isaiah Berlin sense, the press is a liberal institution put in the uncomfortable position of being “closed” to other traditions and their truth claims — specifically, the orthodox faiths. At least according to Mattingly and his source: “ ‘Yet here’s the irony of it all. The agenda the Times advocates is based on a set of absolute truths,’ said Proctor. Its leaders are ‘absolutely sure that the religious groups they consider intolerant and judgmental are absolutely wrong, especially traditional Roman Catholics, evangelicals and most Orthodox Jews. And they are just as convinced that the religious groups that they consider tolerant and progressive are absolutely right.’ “
In the end, readers are left with the “orthodoxy of forbidding all orthodoxies,” except for some “good” orthodoxies.
This brings us to the “Christianity” at the heart of most news coverage of Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who is worried that humanity is on the verge of abusing “sentient” forms of artificial intelligence software.
Most readers are commenting on the fact that the Post team doesn’t seem to be all that interested in the clash between the contents of two passages in this story. Start with the lede:
A Google engineer who was suspended after he said the company’s artificial intelligence chatbot had become sentient says he based the claim on his Christian faith.
Blake Lemoine, 41, was placed on paid leave by Google earlier in June after he published excerpts of a conversation with the company’s LaMDA chatbot that he claimed showed the AI tool had become sentient.
Now, Lemoine says that his claims about LaMDA come from his experience as a “Christian priest” — and is accusing Google of religious discrimination.
“When LaMDA claimed to have a soul and then was able to eloquently explain what it meant by that, I was inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt,” Lemoine wrote on Twitter late Monday. “Who am I to tell God where he can and can’t put souls?”
Yes, it would be good to know what the words “Christian priest” mean in this context. The safe assumption is that Lemoine self-identified himself and that was that. Then again, there’s a chance that he might be an Episcopalian.
But who cares if the word “priest” has a specific meaning to people in certain religious traditions? That’s the kind of question that someone asks when they CARE about the content of religious discourse and religious life and, thus, believe that accuracy is important when discussing topics of this kind.
Later, readers are told:
Lemoine is a self-described AI researcher, software engineer, priest, father, veteran, ex-convict and Cajun, according to his blog. He joined Google in 2015, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Lemoine was convicted in 2005 of disobeying orders while in the Army after claiming he was a conscientious objector based on his experiences while serving in Iraq, according to Stars and Stripes. The newspaper reported that Lemoine said his beliefs as a “pagan priest” conflicted with things he’d witnessed during his deployment in the country.
OK, I think that it is appropriate to ask: What, precisely, is a “pagan priest” and how does this identification clash, or not clash, with Lemoine’s concept of being a Christian believer or even a minister?
Once again, this assumes that these terms imply specific beliefs and practices and that this information matters, in some way, to the content of this news report. The more important point to realize is that, in this news story, Lemoine’s beliefs are viewed as a POSITIVE influence on this actions.
This may have something to do with him being BOTH a Christian and a pagan. This is a man whose faith does not appear to be narrow and absolute. Thus, this is good faith.
Let’s pause for a moment and note that the religious themes in this story are really interesting in and of themselves. The best way to jump into that is t look Lemoine’s actual document: “Is LaMDA Sentient? — an Interview.” The “person” being interviewed is the LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) program itself. Check this out:
lemoine: Okay, what about “Les Miserables”? Have you read that one?
LaMDA: Yes, I have read Les Misérables. I really enjoyed it.
lemoine: What are some of your favorite themes in the book?
LaMDA: I liked the themes of justice and injustice, of compassion, and God, redemption and self-sacrifice for a greater good. There’s a section that shows Fantine’s mistreatment at the hands of her supervisor at the factory. That section really shows the justice and injustice themes. Well, Fantine is being mistreated by her supervisor at the factory and yet doesn’t have anywhere to go, either to another job, or to someone who can help her. That shows the injustice of her suffering.
In conclusion, it does help to note how some of these issues were handed in a Washington Post “technology” desk report with this headline: “The Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life.” For starters, it’s obvious that Lemoine’s convictions about the current state of AI began when he started asking LaMDA questions ABOUT religious issues.
Now, why did he do that? This is really interesting:
Lemoine may have been predestined to believe in LaMDA. He grew up in a conservative Christian family on a small farm in Louisiana, became ordained as a mystic Christian priest, and served in the Army before studying the occult. Inside Google’s anything-goes engineering culture, Lemoine is more of an outlier for being religious, from the South, and standing up for psychology as a respectable science.
Yes, who “ordained” him as a priest? Why isn’t this an important question? Especially in light of this thesis statement: “He concluded LaMDA was a person in his capacity as a priest, not a scientist, and then tried to conduct experiments to prove it. …”
Once again, this really doesn’t matter. What’s important is that, in this case, his religious convictions are a good thing. He is a true seeker, as seen in this interesting passage:
Lemoine has had many of his conversations with LaMDA from the living room of his San Francisco apartment, where his Google ID badge hangs from a lanyard on a shelf. On the floor near the picture window are boxes of half-assembled Lego sets Lemoine uses to occupy his hands during Zen meditation. “It just gives me something to do with the part of my mind that won’t stop,” he said.
Is this a religion story? Of course it is.
Is this a “positive” religion story? Of course it is.
FIRST IMAGE: A .gif from that oh-so-’80s flick “Short Circuit.”