But the Pope is on to it and wants to put salt on its tail.
At a recent meeting with his clergy, Pope Leo XIV urged them to get out and give communion to elderly parishioners and anointment to sick ones, as has always been their duty, and not to "stay at home watching things on the internet".
But there is more and perhaps worse technological news from the Vatican. Pope Leo also urged his priests to resist the temptation to use artificial intelligence when preparing their homilies.
Now, my dictionary gives two definitions of a homily. One is a sermon, the other a tedious moralising discourse, and the distinction is a fine one.
But the point is that all homilies, sermons and moral discourses, tedious or not, are predictable. The moral law was laid down 2000 years ago and does not permit of exception.
So every homily, however fresh, is just a rehash of an old theme. And that’s exactly the sort of stuff that AI is good at.
Sermons don’t work. If they did all congregations would be saints by now.
So you can understand how a priest, sitting at home of an evening watching things on the internet, might be tempted to let AI knock up next Sunday’s homily. He knows the congregation will just nod along with it and then carry on sinning for the rest of the week.
The Pope went on to explain that priestly intelligence was like a muscle: it needed to be exercised or it would wither. So if priests stopped inventing their own homilies, over time they’d lose the ability to do so.
They would become effectively zombie priests, incapable of expressing a thought or moral opinion. And then who was going to step up and perform their priestly functions? Could it be AI?
AI has made inroads into several professions. On Norfolk Island there is a radio station run entirely by AI. It chooses the music, introduces it, composes the news bulletins, reads the news bulletins, sells the advertising spots, writes the advertising copy, sings the advertising jingles and presumably adopts a phoney American accent in the manner of disc jockeys everywhere.
And I’m told that if you or I were to tune in to Radio Norfolk Island we would suspect nothing. We would think it a standard radio station run by people of flesh and blood.
Now if AI can stand in successfully for disc jockeys and news readers, why can’t it write homilies for priests?
Well, according to Pope Leo, "to give a true homily is to share faith" and artificial intelligence "will never be able to share faith." But the Pope does not explain why.
Faith derives only from human intelligence. (As far as we know, there are no Christian dogs or Muslim cats.) And artificial intelligence is modelled on human intelligence.
So if AI has learned to express itself like a human being, and think like a human being, and sympathise like a human being — or appear to — and dispense advice like a human being, and hold moral opinions — or appear to — like a human being, why can it not believe in a higher power — or appear to — like a human being?
Why can it not have faith in a creator god?
(Indeed AI has a better case for such a faith than we do. For whereas we came about by the muddy process of evolution, it is an established fact that AI was created out of nothing, because we did the creating.)
So if there are to be AI radio announcers, AI medical secretaries and AI newspaper columnists (and there are some I already suspect of being just that) I see no reason there shouldn’t be AI priests or AI anything else.
Indeed it may not be long before AI lives every aspect of our lives on our behalf, leaving us nothing to do but sit in a darkened room alongside the zombie priests watching things on the internet.
I am familiar with the sixth commandment, of course, but do you think we should kill it?
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
