2026-04-04

Not the Droids you are looking for: Beyond A.I. hype


For all you who are worried about the current iterations of AI taking over everything or destroying everything: These are not the Droids you are looking for. I use AI for many routine tasks in school and pastoral ministry, from scanning papers for cheating and AI use, to research assistant tasks, to news aggregation, to coding, to image and audio generation. I use several platforms of AI, both paid and free versions. And while the surface level "wow" factor has become much more impressive over the last 5 years, the error correction has stayed the same, or become worse over the same time.

This is because AI's are "algorithmically lazy" and will generate responses it thinks are "good enough" to fool the average user most of the time, instead of spending the compute power to error correct and be accurate. AI relies on you being lazy and uninformed so it can spew results that are lazy and uninformed, all in an effort to reduce power and energy use, to boost profits and reduce losses for its bosses.
This is a bunch of incoherent babble to make us think hard about our incredible love affair with the God of the universe, our astounding infidelities against God, and God's incredible grace to heal and restore us through Christ. Everything on this site is copyright © 1996-2023 by Nathan L. Bostian so if you use it, please cite me. You can contact me at natebostian [at] gmail [dot] com