Artificial Attention

Okay, I’ll admit I was curious and I used ChatGPT. Not for this article! I used it for a homily. That sounds worse. Let me explain. It was not a real homily and it was never given. I had just attended Mass on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe and the thought occurred to me, “I wonder if a priest could get away with an AI-generated homily.”

The commands were simple. I used the word “homily,” and asked for approximately 300 words, because you have to keep those non-solemnity homilies brief, and included a focus on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe specifically. This probably took me less time to actually do than to explain the process here. It took just a couple of seconds for AI to generate that homily.

It was not a great homily but it was not completely off either. A priest in a pinch could get by using it as it was without getting any reaction from the congregation. He could probably get away with it every Sunday.

I’ll be honest I thought it was going to need more editing than it did. I was expecting the rhetorical equivalent of those “cursed” AI-generated images where the person has feet for hands and a smile that gives you nightmares.

I was surprised at how little I had to do to “humanize” it. It explained the story for the feast and gave a “so what” for why it mattered. I guess it was missing a “call to action” at the end. I’ll have to include that in the next prompt.

So much of the criticism of AI I had noticed came from the angle of its lack of humanity, which I still acknowledge. Though, as I noticed in my homily experience, one could probably get by and get away with it if it was in small doses like mine was. It would be so tempting for an already-overworked priest to see this tool as a way out of the work of thinking through another homily day after day after day.

This is not the angle with which I want to approach this topic. It opens itself up too much to the “well someday we’ll just come up with better technology” retort when the Church takes a moral stance against some form of technology. A less painful execution method or a more efficient IVF treatment come to mind as examples. This misses the point of the Church’s objection to these new technologies.

The reason why priests need to be present to the Scriptures when writing a homily, the reason a doctor should be present to her patients, and the reason why I must be present to my students, is not actually the result that comes in these scenarios but the attention given to the object. This reality is similar to the common, popular call for our desire “to be seen.”

However, the connection between attention and love is not just secular sentimentalism but grounded firmly in Catholic tradition. Scripture often says throughout the Old Testament that God “remembered” His covenant with Israel. It is not that God, who is omniscient, forgot for a while, but that the promise is now present to God's attention and will act on it. More recently, there is the work of philosopher Louis Lavelle, who defined charity as “pure attention to the existence of another person” in The Dilemma of Narcissus.

A moment of pure attention and love - https://www.flickr.com/photos/lifeisaprayer/3394376756/

Both of these examples illustrate that our call to love as Christians is a call to attention. What an AI takes away from both the priest and us is the attention that is paid to God’s Word. While we only experience the result, the homily itself, the entire process is actually more important because that is where the priest is attentive to the readings and to us as he must be thinking of us in his crafting of the homily.

The importance of attention as love has become more apparent as I have become a parent myself and as the supply and demand for attention has been thrown so askew.

Many parents have recognized this phenomenon when holding their infant children who demand we remain in the standing position. Just holding them is not enough. We must remain standing. I think this need speaks to the relationship between attention and love. When we hold them standing, our arms remain taught and the resistance is greater as we work against gravity. Our presence is felt more strongly to the child and they are more secure. Our attention must remain even as our exhaustion encroaches. The child literally feels the love by our greater attention in holding them.

During Lent, we are called to spiritually refocus ourselves through sacrifice. Consider, this sacrifice, whether it is chocolate, or meat on Fridays or food in general between meals, is meant to refocus our attention on our spiritual need for God. It is to move our attention from “bread alone” to “every word that comes from the mouth of God” (cf Matthew 4:4). We sacrifice in order to move our attention because that is how we love more fully.

The Church is right to connect love and sacrifice, and attention is a great sacrifice. It is one that is becoming even more valuable as undivided attention becomes more scarce. Whether we are priests writing a homily or a parent really watching when our kid says, for the 500th time, “Watch me!” we are making a sacrifice that is, as 1 John 4:7 says, motivated by a love that is “from God…born of God and knows God.”