Oh, you should have seen me scuttle about, begging for votes last Fall. I, a mockery of Saint Paul. For the sake of Christ, he became “all things for all people.” For the sake of victory, I became agreeable to all people. Meth-addict or ex-Methodist, I was (within the bounds of conscience) your man: “Yes, sir! I’m seeking your vote to…well, yes! I would imagine there’s some corruption in our government, but…uh-huh…well no, I would not kill the drug dealers per se…I wouldn’t be granted the, ah, the killing power! But I like your energy!”
I lost. Really, I should have just bought the votes. But “all things work to the benefit of those who believe.” The consoling benefit for this loser was—getting to talk to old people in their apartments.
My place is not your place. I don’t know how the old people are doing in Normal, USA. Here, they have a hunted, deer-in-November sort of look. I was often the first unaccounted-for door-knock they could remember. I learned quickly that there was no clear border separating politicking from just being there, available to hear what troubled the heart (and constrained to do so by the need to appear as pleasant, voteable material).
Some of their sadness, I could have guessed: children and grandchildren too far away to visit, the Good Lord killing all their friends before getting to them, the bus stop not placed in sight of the road so you never know when, exactly, the bus is about to arrive. But I didn’t know the complete lack of trust they have in the world as it comes through their phones. As one lady (in one uncomfortably warm sitting-room) said, “I don’t pick it up any more—it’s always a scam.”
I had heard that Americans have lost record amounts of money due to increased fraud in the last couple of years. Looking it up, yes, it’s all “FTC Data Show a Big Jump in Reported Losses to Fraud” out there. It’s not that there are more reported incidents of fraud—fraud is getting more successful. Scammers are getting better (at scamming, not at life).
The type of fraud on the rise has been impersonation schemes: someone impersonates your kid, in jail and in need of bail; a government agent, demanding you move cryptoassets into this or that account or face immediate seizure. I heard—from Slavoj Žižek of all people—of the existence of “scam centers” in Myanmar, in which criminal gangs coerced thousands into scamming Westerners out of cash (an easier task than it once was, thanks to AI tools for gender- and voice-impersonation). Go figure it would hit home in my little town.
The result is curious. For the last fifty-odd years, the promise of screen technology has scratched our democratic itch: everyone was supposed to have access to the “real world” through the screen. The deprivations of time and distance were to be annihilated. Any of God’s children who—because of age or health or circumstance—found themselves excluded would be included in the glories of human encounter once more: cue the Facetiming grandchildren, the home-health nurse’s virtual visit, the livestreamed church service, etc.
But what shall we say—beware of gods bearing gifts? And Trojans with free wooden horses, available if you just send them a Visa gift card to cover the shipping cost? The tech that makes the world available to the elderly also makes the elderly available to the world—the consumer is at once the prey. One of the surprising results of our society-wide investment in increasingly effective imitations of personal presence via screen has been to produce—people who don’t look at the screen. People who don’t read any emails, don’t answer rings, don’t trust.
The fear and nausea of our scammed elderly negates the convenience the smartphone might otherwise bring them. For some of my old people, it may as well still be 1982. (As someone who advocates for getting rid of your smartphone, deleting your social media, and otherwise burning what calories you store in your fat on building up the broken social institutions that smart-devices purport to augment and (actually) replace—well! I was making the wrong argument! Here I was saying you should blow up your TV. As it turns out, you very well will blow up your TV. You (device-laden Westerner) will become (in your ripe old age) the world’s number one target of lies, impersonations, and fraud. I advocate getting nauseous over the fact sooner, that’s all. Get ahead of the curve. Be an early adopter in non-participation—har, har!)
As I was about my (doomed) political walkabout, I got scammed. It seems to be one of the consequences of doing anything, signing up for anything, or registering oneself in any way, that one’s data drip is immediately siphoned off to Indians or Russians to make something out of (which is not to cast shade on these noble races: given the choice, I would rather scam them than my own people, whom I love, and who own a lot of guns).
I got a text from our Mayor (properly named), who was in a meeting (plausible), and would call me soon (less plausible, but still) but needed a big favor (which, in my temporary state as Candidate Agreeable, I was motivated to grant). Would I be so kind as to purchase a few gift cards as “thank you’s” for some of “our hard-working city employees?” He would, of course, pay me something extra for my trouble.
Gone are the days of the misspelling Ukrainian mail-order bride and au revoir, sweet Nigerian prince, whose garbled promises of riches were (I guess) the best the bots could come up with. I knew the mayoral message was a scam because it was too smooth, its English too well-constructed. If our dear and very Italian mayor really was texting under the table during a meeting (the thought!), the message would not have arrived as urbanely as it did.
As I trudged down from the ambiguous voters of Polish Hill to the startled voters of Seventh Street, I sent the bot/person what lines I remembered of the song “You Gotta Know The Territory,” from the musical “The Music Man,” which (stay with me) was rather clever of me. It’s a song about a con man. He is predicted to fail because he doesn’t know the particular flavor of the place he’s about to con.
“I don’t understand?” said-questioned the bot.
“Could you please help me, Marc?” it persisted, as if anyone on the ground floor of Southeastern-Ohio civic life would use a comma before an address.
If I hadn’t known “the territory,” hadn’t ever met our mayor, the swindle may have swindled me. And I wouldn’t bore you with the story (what’s more boring than a guy relaying what “happened” to him on his phone?) if it didn’t contain a lesson: vernacular speech is a strong defense.
Vernacular speech—speech that differs because it belongs to a particular people—is a barrier to liars. They must learn a particular form of speech in order to fool those who speak it. The closer the friendships, the greater and deeper the in-jokes and idiosyncrasies, the harder it is for an outsider to appear as an insider, as “one” of an “us.” The more that the members of a people receive life from each other, the less comprehensible they become “at a glance.”
It has been the work of modern nation states, in the last 100 years, to literally replace vernacular speech with a centralized tongue—to replace the diversity of the provincial tongues with one, Parisian, French; Germanic tongues with centralized “German,” and so on. But AI-powered scammery introduces the ability to utilize vernacular speech without learning it—even as it allows people to operate a centralized, official tongue: the now-universal peppy office-speak of Grammarly and ChatGPT.
I think we all understand this latter power—the “access” all of us morons now have to the standard formulations of effective bureaucratic communication. I still remember the day, (tragic, cursed, infamous day) when the Ohio guy who regularly communicates with me viz barbeque wings at our local street festival found out that he can use Grammarly. Oh, but it was like losing a friend. I mark that email like a war memorial. Prior, it was all “u guys put me in the wrong f*ckin spot lol no worry God bless.” Since, it’s all “as small business owners, we take great pride in the visibility of our operations. We were upset to find that your team had placed us in a location that doesn’t fit well with our marketing model!”
RIP, BBQ guy. But the other power large-language models offer is the power to scam: the ability for anyone to speak the language of a community without really knowing or loving them. It’s tragic, but obvious. Previously, tyrants needed to modify the territory in order to know it: map it, reduce it into legal terms, ban the proliferation of diverse languages, customs, laws, and habits—that sort of thing. Now you don’t need to know the territory. “The territory” has helpfully put together a machine that makes you sound like you know it.
I was thinking of all this while debating about Magisterium AI. While Magisterium is a unique project—opening up the texts of the Catholic Church as “food” for a Catholic chatbot—it is, at the same time, one of many similar efforts to produce “small language models,” chatbots limited by a particular tradition. Rebbe.IO offers “the world’s first AI Rabbi.” IslamiCity feeds the Quran and Sunnah and makes the “beauty of Islam” accessible to us all. NORBU, Buddhism. I was just joshing (in the pages of New Polity Magazine) about a chatbot I called “DeepSavior,” but the Uratian weirdos already made AskJesus, and TheJesusAI.com already invites me to chat with my Lord and King: “my child, ask me about life, faith, and love.” There’s LGBT-specific bots, DeepAI offers Karl Marx, ready to answer my burning questions of political economy—you get the drift. In each case, the AI-powered ability of a community to access its own language via chatbot is, at the same time, the ability for outsiders to operate that language for their own ends.
For the Catholic, doctrines once irrelevant and obscure to outsiders can now be seamlessly wielded by the enemies of the Church. This may be something as “small” as the new ability for an interested guy to “chat” with a Catholic girl in her own language; as weird as the ability to generate an image associating some political campaign with a holy saint; as grotesque as all of those Pope Leo XVI “deep fakes.” An FBI agent investigating a traditionalist church in Virginia can suddenly speak “trad,” an atheist journalist can whip up an article on the American Church, pronto, and a marketing company can brand whatever they are required to brand with “Catholicism” like never before.
The Holy Faith has always been available to this sort of abuse. But, prior to the AI-powered ability to generate the appearance of “being Catholic,” this use of the faith was a dangerous enterprise. To “get” Catholics, you had to listen, read, and think. To speak into their world, you had to study, learn, and experience it. To infiltrate them, you had to come to know their ways. The truth of the faith waits like a wolf in the shadows for such people: in pretending to be like them, you may well come to like them, and in learning their convictions you may well become convinced. Offer up our tradition via chatbot, and the wolf is tamed: men are able to use, operate, and deploy the Catholic vernacular without having to understand it; are able to reference the teachings without having to learn them; are able to use its history without knowing it; are able to put on its aesthetic without ever really imitating it.
I am no prophet, and I have no idea what’s next, but if my experience of the elderly in my little town is at all exemplary, this period of digitizing and letting LLM technology “feed” on the Catholic tradition will produce, first, a period of increasingly effective scamming. It will be followed by a period of nauseous non-participation of the faithful in the life of the screen. Then comes the end.