The speed with which AI is introduced into everyone’s uses is favored by the fact that it comes in the form of conversational agents. Interactions are all the simpler when they take place in the language we speak on a daily basis.
The encyclical Magnifica humanitas immediately points out the risks of what the pope calls “the artificial imitation of human communication”, namely “the illusion of being in relationship with an authentic personal subject” which, in ultimate forms, can lead to “the loss of the very desire to meet the other” (n. 100).
A flesh that speaks
In fact, the methods of interaction with conversational AI blur the fundamental and decisive difference for humans between the words that one subject addresses to another and a sequence of words put end to end by calculation of probabilities. This confusion invites us to rediscover the vivid awareness of what we engage in when we speak.
It is significant that the encyclical opens and ends with a reference to the prologue of the Gospel of John: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14). The pope thus summons all the biblical reflection on the word which he recaptures in one of his most decisive statements. From its first lines, the biblical story affirms that the divine word is the source of life.
God desires the existence of the living, he calls them and this call arouses them in their singularity. The movement of this word of life, John affirms, culminates in Jesus. He is the divine word which takes flesh to share human existence even in the drama of death and open to all access to the fullness of life. It is the heart of the Christian experience of faith that is revealed here, an experience where the Incarnation and Resurrection of the Word of God outline the path to a fully human life.
We could consider the Christian proposal as a radical taking seriously of the vital character for humans of being flesh that speaks. And if this taking seriously is deployed theologically, it is also a statement on what it means to be human.
Learn language through experience
It is enough to see a child learning to speak to perceive that, in the effort and joy of the first words, the child’s relationship to his body, to the world that affects him and to others is at stake in the relationship with which he is born to language. We know that a child who is not spoken to enough has more difficulty accessing rich relational interactions. It is not enough to make him hear sequences of words for him to develop language.
With these words, we need the voice that pronounces them, the eyes that seek his and encourage him, the hands that carry him and caress him or that designate the object that the child is trying to name. And it is all this experience, of oneself, of others and of the world, which is expressed in the little one’s jubilation when, finally, he can say “clouds”, “ear” or “sorrow”.
What emerges in the epiphany of the beginnings continues to be at work, often without our knowledge, in our most daily conversations. Through the words exchanged, the elaboration of the experience, recognition of the other, acceptance of their existence takes place. Language exchanges always express much more than the simple information they transmit.
AI and the simulacrum of speech
The wound inflicted by a silence of indifference or contempt is yet another sign. Because to speak is to speak “to”, and address is a form of commitment, of responsibility. The word here is to be taken in its most literal sense, as the ability to respond to the words spoken, to recognize oneself as engaged in it as a subject, to be able to account for it and assume its consequences.
Conversational agents interact in our languages, we question them, they answer us. They resemble the statuettes whose inanity the psalmist denounces: human in form, they are nevertheless absent from the world, outside of relation, they who have feet but do not walk, ears but do not hear, a mouth but do not speak. The psalmist denounces the illusion in which those who pray find themselves, expecting an object to respond to them.
If we have made objects that use our language, they do not speak to us any more than these statuettes. A prompt is not addressed to anyone and the words that respond to it were neither thought nor spoken by anyone. They do not exist as words, they are simulacra. It is important for our humanity not to let the ease that is taking hold make us forget it.
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