Fuck AI

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/47956348

Here is an excerpt of of David Gerard and Amy Castor's post about it:

So what does this mean? What follows from this?

An encyclical isn’t a set of religious directives. It’s a position paper. The Pope has not charged Catholics worldwide to burn down the data centres. Cool as that would be.

Catholics probably can’t go into work and claim a religious exemption from Claude Code. Though the encyclical does give Catholics who hate AI an excellent set of talking points to answer that AI bro who just doesn’t stop.

The encyclical does not have direct consequences. Functionally, this is just a letter. But it’s a letter that’s in every newspaper this week. It’s going to be influential.

The Pope calls for government regulation to stop AI abuses. And up against that, we have a ton of money. But the encyclical will still give politicians a bit of think tank input on things they have to consider politically.

Even the rich tech bros are treating this encyclical as a threat. The AI companies lobbied the Vatican quite hard in the leadup to the encyclical. We’re not sure they got a lot of what they wanted. [Politico]

But again, an encyclical is just a letter. Pope Francis did a quite good encyclical on climate change in 2015. Then he followed that up in 2023 annoyed that nothing much had been done. There’s only so much a letter, even from the Pope, can do in the face of the money.

This encyclical will help swing the vibe against AI, however. Maybe J.D. Vance will excommunicate the Pope. You know he wants to.