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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 \u201call things for all people.\u201d For the sake of victory, I became agreeable<\/em> to all people. Meth-addict or ex-Methodist, I was (within the bounds of conscience) your man: \u201cYes, sir! I\u2019m seeking your vote to\u2026well, yes! I would<\/em> imagine there\u2019s some corruption in our government, but\u2026uh-huh\u2026well no, I would not kill<\/em> the drug dealers per se<\/em>\u2026I wouldn\u2019t be granted the, ah, the killing power! But I like your energy!\u201d<\/p>\n I lost. Really, I should have just bought the votes. But \u201call things work to the benefit of those who believe.\u201d The consoling benefit for this<\/em> loser was\u2014getting to talk to old people in their apartments.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n My place is not your place. I don\u2019t 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<\/em> there, available to hear what troubled the heart (and constrained to do so by the need to appear as pleasant, voteable material).\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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, \u201cI don\u2019t pick it up any more\u2014it\u2019s always<\/em> a scam.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019s all<\/span><\/a> \u201cFTC Data Show a Big Jump in Reported Losses to Fraud\u201d out there. It\u2019s not that there are more reported incidents<\/em> of fraud\u2014fraud is getting more successful. Scammers are getting better (at scamming, not at life).\u00a0<\/p>\n The type<\/em> of fraud on the rise has been impersonation<\/span><\/a> 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\u2014from Slavoj \u017di\u017eek<\/span><\/a> of all people\u2014of the existence of \u201cscam centers\u201d 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The result is curious. For the last fifty-odd years, the promise of screen technology has scratched our democratic itch: everyone<\/em> was supposed to have access to the \u201creal world\u201d through the screen. The deprivations of time and distance were to be annihilated. Any of God\u2019s children who\u2014because of age or health or circumstance\u2014found themselves excluded would be included in the glories of human encounter once more: cue the Facetiming grandchildren, the home-health nurse\u2019s virtual visit, the livestreamed church service, etc.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n But what shall we say\u2014beware 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\u2014the 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\u2014people who don\u2019t look at the screen. People who don\u2019t read any emails, don\u2019t answer rings, don\u2019t trust<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2014well! I was making the wrong argument! Here I was saying you should blow up your TV. As it turns out, you very well will<\/em> blow up your TV. You (device-laden Westerner) will become (in your ripe old age) the world\u2019s number one target of lies, impersonations, and fraud. I advocate getting nauseous over the fact sooner<\/em>, that\u2019s all. Get ahead of the curve. Be an early adopter in non-participation\u2014har, har!)<\/p>\n As I was about my (doomed) political walkabout, I<\/em> 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\u2019s 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<\/em> than my own people, whom I love, and who own a lot of guns).\u00a0<\/p>\n 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 \u201cthank you\u2019s\u201d for some of \u201cour hard-working city employees?\u201d He would, of course, pay me something extra for my trouble.\u00a0<\/p>\n Gone are the days of the misspelling Ukrainian mail-order bride and au revoir,<\/em> 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<\/em> smooth, its English too<\/em> well-constructed. If our dear and very Italian mayor really was texting under the table during a meeting (the thought<\/em>!), the message would not have arrived as urbanely as it did.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n 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 \u201cYou Gotta Know The Territory,\u201d from the musical \u201cThe Music Man,\u201d which (stay with me) was<\/em> rather clever of me. It\u2019s a song about a con man. He is predicted to fail because he doesn\u2019t know the particular flavor of the place he\u2019s about to con.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t understand?\u201d said-questioned the bot.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cCould you please help me, Marc?\u201d it persisted, as if anyone on the ground floor of Southeastern-Ohio civic life would use a comma before an address.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n If I hadn\u2019t known \u201cthe territory,\u201d hadn\u2019t ever met our mayor, the swindle may have swindled me. And I wouldn\u2019t bore you with the story (what\u2019s more boring than a guy relaying what \u201chappened\u201d to him on his phone?) if it didn\u2019t contain a lesson: vernacular speech is a strong defense.<\/p>\n Vernacular speech\u2014speech that differs<\/em> because it belongs to a particular people\u2014is a barrier to liars. They must learn <\/em>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 \u201cone\u201d of an \u201cus.\u201d The more that the members of a people receive life from each other, the less comprehensible they become \u201cat a glance.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n It has been the work of modern nation states, in the last 100 years, to literally<\/em> replace vernacular speech with a centralized tongue\u2014to replace the diversity of the provincial tongues with one, Parisian, French; Germanic tongues with centralized \u201cGerman,\u201d and so on. But AI-powered scammery introduces the ability to utilize<\/em> vernacular speech without learning it\u2014even as it allows people to operate a centralized, official tongue: the now-universal peppy office-speak of Grammarly and ChatGPT.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n I think we all understand this latter power\u2014the \u201caccess\u201d 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<\/em> 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 \u201cu guys put me in the wrong f*ckin spot lol no worry God bless.\u201d Since, it\u2019s all \u201cas 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\u2019t fit well with our marketing model!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2014that sort of thing. Now you don\u2019t need to know the territory. \u201cThe territory\u201d has helpfully put together a machine that makes you sound<\/em> like you know it.<\/p>\n I was thinking of all this while debating about Magisterium AI<\/span><\/a>. While Magisterium is a unique project\u2014opening up the texts of the Catholic Church as \u201cfood\u201d for a Catholic chatbot\u2014it is, at the same time, one of many similar efforts to produce \u201csmall language models,\u201d chatbots limited by a particular tradition. Rebbe.IO<\/span><\/a> offers \u201cthe world\u2019s first AI Rabbi.\u201d IslamiCity<\/span><\/a> feeds the Quran and Sunnah and makes the \u201cbeauty of Islam\u201d accessible to us all. NORBU<\/span><\/a>, Buddhism. I was just joshing (in the pages<\/span><\/a> of New Polity Magazine) about a chatbot I called \u201cDeepSavior,\u201d but the Uratian weirdos already made AskJesus<\/span><\/a>, and TheJesusAI.com<\/span><\/a> already invites me to chat with my Lord and King: \u201cmy child, ask me about life, faith, and love.\u201d There\u2019s LGBT-specific bots, DeepAI offers Karl Marx, ready to answer my burning questions of political economy\u2014you get the drift. In each case, the AI-powered ability of a community to access<\/em> its own language via chatbot is, at the same time, the ability for outsiders to operate<\/em> that language for their own ends.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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 \u201csmall\u201d as the new ability for an interested guy to \u201cchat\u201d with a Catholic girl in her own language<\/em>; 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 XIV \u201cdeep fakes.\u201d An FBI agent investigating a traditionalist church in Virginia can suddenly speak \u201ctrad,\u201d 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 \u201cCatholicism\u201d like never before.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Holy Faith has always been available to this sort of abuse. But, prior to the AI-powered ability to generate the appearance of \u201cbeing Catholic,\u201d this use of the faith was a dangerous enterprise. To \u201cget\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n I am no prophet, and I have no idea what\u2019s next, but if my experience of the elderly in my little town is at all exemplary, this period of digitizing and letting LLM technology \u201cfeed\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 \u201call things for all people.\u201d 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: \u201cYes, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7069118,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[96697,91],"tags":[2047,113180,13365],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-7069117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai","category-technology","tag-baby","tag-newpolity","tag-scam"],"yoast_head":"\n