July 2026 Print

By Dr. Matthew Childs

“Why should we not think that the Great Ring has come into our hands to serve us … ”

“Alas, no … We cannot use the Ruling Ring … It belongs to Sauron and was made by him alone, and is altogether evil … that is another reason why the Ring should be destroyed: as long as it is in the world it will be a danger even to the Wise. For nothing is evil in the beginning. …”

“And it is not our part here to take thought only for a season, or for a few lives of Men, or for a passing age of the world. We should seek a final end for this menace, even if we do not hope to make one.” … “We must send the Ring to the Fire.”¹

Last summer I spoke to the principals of the SSPX US district about AI, specifically regarding the question of how to manage that technology in an educational setting where it is already undermining teaching and learning. While I had some exposure to emerging AI concepts over twenty years ago at the Naval Postgraduate School, I hadn’t engaged with the topic seriously until I began research for the principals’ meeting, largely because I had determined after my experience with computer programming and predictive modeling that “there’s never a model-less model”² and, therefore, no artificial “intelligence.” I approached the topic initially as an extension of previous discussions of digital safety and the current cultural reality, presenting the clear ties between dystopian twentieth-century literature and contemporary life. Knowing that Big Brother wants us to love him (willingly) in place of God, we somehow have to avoid doing that and teach our children to do likewise by word and by example. AI is the most apparent manifestation and enabler of Big Brother at the moment. The topic directly pertains to the nature of true education—as Pope Leo XIV notes in his recent encyclical—and generative AI in particular poses a grave threat to souls. Anyone who regards education merely as a means to a practical utilitarian end will be tempted by the extremely efficient process of generative AI: near-zero input yields maximum output. My approach to the topic starts with definition, proceeding to the more important moral, philosophical, even theological implications of the technology and its use. This is only a very brief overview because there is no way to keep up with the material development of AI that moves at the speed of light—Luciferian. But it is not necessary to understand the technology completely to be aware of the consequences in light of inalterable principles of Real Intelligence.

Artificial intelligence “seeks to make computers do the sorts of things that minds can do.”³ Since thinking and learning for humans have to do with moving from the known, an input, to the unknown, an output based upon reasoning, an architecture or algorithm is part of the process that can be modeled with computers. Today computing power allows for the complicated part—the “reasoning” or algorithm of decision-making—to happen so quickly that it can seem as if the computer is “intelligent,” when in fact it is only following a logic pattern, perhaps a mind-boggling complex one, that has been pre-programmed by an actual human being. Our concern as educators is not with the use of computing power as a tool for research and data analysis but rather with generative AI that is developed to replace human thinking and creative output altogether with “sophisticated algorithms to organize large, complex data sets into meaningful clusters of information in order to create new content, including text, images and audio, in response to a query or prompt.”⁴ ChatGPT, a leading generative AI model, can be used as the example to explain large language models and to demonstrate that, despite their speed and access to enormous data sets, they are not “thinking”:

The basic concept of ChatGPT is at some level rather simple. Start from a huge sample of human-created text from the web, books, etc. Then train a neural net to generate text that’s like this. And in particular make it able to start from a prompt and then continue with text that’s like what it’s been trained with. As we’ve seen, the actual neural net in ChatGPT is made up of very simple elements, though billions of them, and the basic operation of the neural net is also very simple, consisting essentially of passing input derived from the text it’s generated so far once through its elements for every new word that it generates. But the remarkable and unexpected thing is that this process can produce text that’s successfully “like” what’s out there on the web in books…It’s exciting to see what ChatGPT has already been able to do.⁵

Wolfram confirms an observation that a programmer made to me: “Essentially, Artificial Intelligence is a misnomer. A better name for it would be ‘artificial brain.’”⁶ The neural net—a technology from the World War II era—models the human brain, the material part of our being that somehow, mysteriously but undeniably, interfaces with our immaterial intelligence. The part of Wolfram’s description that is most striking is his characterization of ChatGPT’s output as “remarkable and unexpected,” revealing that we are tapping into capabilities here beyond our comprehension and, therefore, our full control. In any case, generative AI is the clear dividing line: when we let the machine research, “think,” and write for us, we have compromised our own intellectual development by submitting to someone else’s programming that generates “thought” in a soulless machine by way of what amounts to wholesale plagiarism—the data set of pre-existing text necessary for any large language model.

The nature of generative AI presents several material and spiritual concerns. The material concerns are often the focus of AI critics and are easily summarized, though they are the least important. Several AI pioneers published an “Open Letter on AI” in 2023 that said “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research and acknowledged by top AI labs,” and went on to “call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”⁷ This call was ignored because there is a lot of money to be made, after all—and suppose Russia beats us to the next advancement? Elon Musk, who signed that letter but continues making progress with his own Grok and Neuralink, “voiced in [an] interview [in 2024] grave concerns over the unchecked acceleration of AI development, likening it to the creation of a ‘Digital God.’ He stressed his concerns, and even sleepless nights, as he contemplates the potential dangers AI poses to humanity.”⁸ We have read this story before, whenever science is unfettered from ethics, when “we can” is the sole determining principle for “progress” with no consideration of “but ought we”—a manifestation of the “blind and unchecked passion for novelty” that St. Pius X identifies as a defining characteristic of modernism (Pascendi, par. 13). After forging ahead with his project, without seriously considering the likely consequences of an unbridled exploration into “remarkable and unexpected” fields, “Dr. Frankenstein” is shocked by what he has done and now wants to press the pause button by voicing his concerns about AI. Musk rightly fears the creation of a “Digital God,” as AI proponents brazenly promote the human race’s latest attempt to become like God by refashioning natural intelligence into a man-made artificial “intelligence.”

The obvious metaphysical problems suggested by its very name should give the thoughtful man reason to beware, just as the names “world wide web” and “virtual reality” signify the problematic nature of the internet: a web is often used to catch hapless victims, and a “reality” that is virtual is deceiving, just as an “artifice” signifies a cunning subterfuge. Intelligence is an immaterial faculty of the soul that can’t be made by man. Fr. Robinson summarizes the significance of the misnomer in the Q&A section of the Jan-Feb 2025 issue of The Angelus, which is well worth reading:

As in so many other instances in which it is used in modern English, the word “artificial” in the phrase “artificial intelligence” means “not real.” AI mimics intelligence but does not—and can never have—the essence of what intelligence is. It does some of the things that are associated with intelligence—remember, compare, store, and compute—but it does not think, that is, it does not form immaterial concepts or make rational judgments…There will never be computers or robots that possess human intelligence…This language [AI surpassing human intelligence] does not understand immaterial thought but rather sees thinking and reasoning only in terms of computing.⁹

The misunderstanding of human intelligence reflects a theological error because considering the intellectual powers, St. Thomas Aquinas concludes that “the separate intellect [of which the human intellect is an image and likeness], according to the teaching of our faith, is God Himself, Who is the soul’s Creator, and only beatitude…Wherefore the human soul derives its intellectual light from Him, according to Psalm 4:7, ‘The light of Thy countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us’” (Summa I q. 79). God is Intellect, therefore, AI is an artificial God, a claim widely acknowledged even proudly proclaimed by those in the industry. In Pascendi St. Pius X says modernists “lay the axe not to the branches and shoots, but to the very root, that is, to the faith and its deepest fires. And having struck at this root of immortality, they proceed to disseminate poison through the whole tree, so that there is no part of Catholic truth from which they hold their hand, none that they do not strive to corrupt.” The attack upon Intellect by way of generative AI, luring people into giving over their thinking to another, strikes at the very roots of education—the process by which the intellect is exercised and formed—and by extension to our formation as souls enlightened by divine Intellect to come to know, love, and serve Him.

The image and likeness of God in man reside in his intellective soul. In Dante’s Paradiso the Pilgrim-Poet learns that “the gift He cherishes the most, the one/most like Himself, [is] freedom of the will/ All creatures with intelligence, and they/alone, were so endowed” (V.21–24). With the intellect we know and with the will we love in order to gain the happiness of heaven. Anything that undermines our capacity to know God will interfere with our capacity to love Him and thereby to achieve our proper end. If we make a habit of off-loading our intellectual work to generative AI, the implications are profoundly, even infinitely, negative. We run the risk of becoming the damned souls whom Virgil summarily describes in Dante’s Inferno as those who “lost the good of intellect” (III.18). If we freely choose to allow AI to do our thinking, we are deliberately rejecting the good—the very purpose—of our own intellects. Even if we only use generative AI occasionally, we are contributing to the systematic universal degradation of the human intellect, and we are inviting Big Brother to think and to speak for us even more deliberately than Winston in 1984, who eventually only submits in resignation.

Just as Tolkien’s Ring of Power will ultimately corrupt any user, even the well-intended, generative AI has caused many evils. This has been well-documented by many sources, some cited at the end of this article. An unreliable source of basic factual information, generative AI frequently lies, cheats, steals, and counsels grave sin while always degrading the cognitive capacities of users. Moreover, it is becoming increasingly difficult to verify the information that it generates. Model validation is always extremely difficult both on the programming end and on the user end, and the more we rely upon the machine for information—curated and presented according to someone else’s worldview—and memory, the less able we are to recognize questionable output. As one commentator puts it, “In the last few months, reality has been defeated—totally, completely, unquestionably. It is now possible to alter every kind of historical record—perhaps irrevocably…At the current rate of technological advancement, all reliable ways of validating truth will soon be gone. My best guess is that we have another twelve months to enjoy some degree of confidence in our shared sense of reality.”¹⁰

Finally, ponder the ultimate aim of AI proponents, which is its incarnation. As Fr. Robinson observed in The Angelus, of all the nefarious aims of these men, “Perhaps darkest of all would be the attempted use of AI for the purposes of transhumanism” (see the article “The Other ‘Trans’ Problem” in The Angelus). Consider the goal according to Ray Kurzweil, principal researcher and AI visionary at Google:

Today, we have one brain size which we can’t go beyond to get smarter. But the cloud is getting smarter and it is growing really without bounds. The Singularity, which is a metaphor borrowed from physics, will occur when we merge our brain with the cloud. We’re going to be a combination of our natural intelligence and our cybernetic intelligence, and it’s all going to be rolled into one. Making it possible will be brain-computer interfaces which ultimately will be nanobots—robots the size of molecules—that will go non-invasively into our brains through the capillaries. We are going to expand intelligence a millionfold by 2045 and it is going to deepen our awareness and consciousness.¹¹

Kurzweil anticipates a future when even death can be overcome, when “there will be no distinction between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality.”¹² Similarly, Yuval Noah Harari claims, “Within the next century or two, we humans are likely to upgrade ourselves into gods and change the most basic principles of the evolution of life…science could be ushering in the era of inorganic life shaped by intelligent design. Not the intelligent design of some god above the clouds—but our intelligent design and the intelligent design of our cloud computing.”¹³ These predictions are no longer easily dismissed as the ravings of demonic lunatics because companies such as Musk’s Neuralink are developing “Brain-computer interface technology, which decodes brain signals and converts them into digital commands.” This technology “is where computing technology intersects with neuroscience and medicine.”¹⁴ Most critics of such transhumanizing technology fail to comprehend the metaphysical threat. Anil Seth, for example, Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, is concerned about privacy: “If we are exporting our brain activity…then we are kind of allowing access to not just what we do but potentially what we think, what we believe and what we feel,” he told the BBC. “Once you’ve got access to stuff inside your head, there really is no other barrier to personal privacy left.”¹⁵ Implanting computers to be the interface between the body and the soul is far worse than a mere invasion of privacy because a device that can manipulate the brain to effect certain outcomes could always be re-programmed to achieve others with or without the consent of the recipient. We know that not even demons can manipulate our intellects without our consent, but what happens when we choose to let computing systems that very effectively model the angelic capacity to know and to predict human behavior into our brains? There could be no better way to describe the physical reality of losing “the good of intellect.”

As Fr. Robinson concluded his article, “In the end, the outlook for artificial intelligence is not good,”¹⁶ and as a culture, we will not effectively manage AI because it is developing so rapidly that any measures, assuming we have the will to impose them, are already far behind the technology that few people in positions of authority are inclined to restrict. Our duty is clear and simple: resist the temptation to use generative AI at all to prevent its deleterious effects upon ourselves and those over whom we have authority. The only solution for the individual is the formation of virtue through Catholic liberal arts education, the abandonment of which has yielded generations of Doctor Frankensteins. As Fr. Le Roux notes, “The problem…lies in the lack of virtue in the men of our times…only carefully cultivated virtue can enable him to remain the master of his use of machines.”¹⁷ The only defense against artificial intelligence is the proper formation of real intellects and wills that are nurtured well such that they can love the Good known rightly.

Endnotes

¹ J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Harper Collins, 2004), 266–67.

² Stephen Wolfram, What is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work? (Wolfram Media, Inc., 2023), 12.

³ Margaret A. Boden, Artificial Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2016), 1.

⁴ David Phillips, “GenAI Will Not Make Students Smarter: ChatGPT is Warping Undergraduate Brains.” James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, Apr. 21, 2025, https://jamesgmartin.center/2025/04/genai-will-not-makestudents-smarter/ (last accessed Jun. 13, 2025).

⁵ Wolfram, What is ChatGPT Doing, 75–76.

⁶ Christopher Silvas, “Re: Reliable Sources to Learn About AI,” Email to author, Apr. 6, 2025.

⁷ Future of Life Institute, “Open Letter on AI,” Mar. 22, 2023, https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-aiexperiments (last accessed May 19, 2025).

⁸ Cindy Gordon, “Elon Musk’s Urgent Warning: A Digital God Is Already Here,” Forbes, Feb. 26, 2024, https://www.forbes.com/sites/cindygordon/2024/02/26/elon-musks-urgent-warning-a-digital-god-is-alreadyhere/ (last accessed May 19, 2025).

⁹ Fr. Paul Robinson, “Q&A,” The Angelus Magazine Jan-Feb 2025, 62–63.

¹⁰ Ted Gioia, “Our Shared Reality Is About to Self-Destruct,” The Free Press, Aug. 31, 2025, https://www.thefp.com/p/our-shared-reality-is-about-to-self-destruct-artificial-intelligence (last accessed Aug. 31, 2025).

¹¹ Zoe Corbyn, “AI scientist Ray Kurzweil: ‘We are going to expand intelligence a millionfold by 2045,’” The Guardian, June 2024.

¹² Boden, Artificial Intelligence, 135.

¹³ Yuval Noah Harari, “Our Nonconscious Future,” Encyclopædia Britannica Anniversary Edition: 250 Years of Excellence (1768–2018) (2018), https://www.britannica.com/topic/Our-Nonconscious-Future-2119857 (last accessed June 13, 2025).

¹⁴ Kitty Wheeler, “Neuralink: The Company Accelerating Human Potential,” Technology Magazine, March 26, 2025, https://technologymagazine.com/articles/neuralink-the-company-accelerating-human-potential (last accessed June 16, 2025).

¹⁵ Wheeler, “Neuralink.”

¹⁶ Robinson, “Q&A,” 63.

¹⁷ Fr. Yves Le Roux, “Last Word,” The Angelus Magazine Jan-Feb 2025, 65.

Additional Works Referenced

Allyn, Bobby. “The New York Times takes OpenAI to court. ChatGPT’s future could be on the line.” NPR, Jan. 14, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/01/14/nx-s1-5258952/new-york-times-openai-microsoft. Accessed Jun. 14, 2025.

Blair, Elizabeth. “How an AI-generated summer reading list got published in major newspapers.” NPR, May 20, 2025.

https://www.npr.org/2025/05/20/nx-s1-5405022/fake-summer-reading-list-ai. Accessed Jun. 1, 2025.

Brown, Joseph. “Reasonable Doubt: Surprisingly Simple Ways to Encourage Disillusionment with Generative AI.” Colorado State Website (“Academic Integrity” page), Nov. 16, 2023. https://tilt.colostate.edu/reasonable-doubtsurprisingly-simple-ways-to-encourage-disillusionment-with-generative-ai/. Accessed May 20, 2025.

Chow, Andrew. “ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study.” Time. https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/. Jun. 23, 2025. Accessed Sep. 9, 2025.

Dickens, Charles. Hard Times.

Flanery, Randall, “Remaining Human When Using Digital Technology.” The Angelus, Jan-Feb 2025

Kmita, Robert Lazu, “The Digital Tsunami: How Can We Protect Our Children.” The Angelus, Jan-Feb 2025, 15-18.

Monaco, John, “The Other ‘Trans’ Problem.” The Angelus, Jan-Feb 2025, 19-22.