The Age of Artificial Intelligence (Guest: Dr. Eugene Gan)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is dominating the news, particularly with the release of ChatGPT. But what is AI and should Catholics embrace this technology or be wary of it?

Crisis Point
Crisis Point
The Age of Artificial Intelligence (Guest: Dr. Eugene Gan)
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Guest

Dr. Eugene Gan is faculty associate of the Veritas Center and professor of interactive media, communications and fine art at Franciscan University of Steubenville. He is the author of Infinite Bandwidth: Encountering Christ in the Media, a guide for understanding and engaging media in meaningful and healthy ways in daily life. He has been involved with artificial intelligence for more than 30 years.

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Transcript

Eric Sammons:

Artificial intelligence or AI is dominating the news recently, especially because of the release of ChatGPT. What is AI though, and should Catholics embrace this technology or should we be wary of it? That’s what we’re going to talk about today on Crisis Point. Hello, Eric Sammons, your host and editor-in-Chief of Crisis Magazine. Before we get started and introduce my guests, I just want to encourage people to smash that like button, to subscribe to the channel, let other people know about it. That really helps. Also, you can follow us on all the different social media channels, @Crisis_Mag. Okay, I want to jump in this because I will admit I’m geeked up about this. This is something I’m very interested in. Yes, I did watch Star Trek as a child and I was a computer programmer, so this is the type of stuff I love.

So my guest today is Dr. Eugene Gan. He’s a professor of communication arts at Franciscan University of Steubenville. Actually, the more full title, I couldn’t fit it on the screen, is Professor of Interactive Media, Communications, and Fine Art at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. He actually helped launch Franciscan University’s multimedia concentration that prepares students for careers, designing digital content ranging from video games, special effects, and animation to websites, videos, and educational software. He’s also the author of this great book, Infinite Bandwidth. I have it right here, Infinite Bandwidth, Encountering Christ in the Media. He and his wife, Cindy, reside in Steubenville with their four children. Welcome to the program, Dr. Gan.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Thank you, Eric. It’s great to be with you again.

Eric Sammons:

Yes, and I will say I left out the most important thing about your bio is you are also a professor of my daughter in the communications program at Franciscan University and she loves you, by the way. I’m not just saying that because we’re on air. She really does. She speaks very highly of you. When I told her that I’m going to be interviewing on the podcast, she said, “Oh, that’ll be great. He’ll do so well, he’ll be great.” So no pressure or anything.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

No pressure, yeah.

Eric Sammons:

So I will get into your experience with artificial intelligence in a little bit. You wrote an article for Crisis Magazine about a month or so ago about artificial intelligence and it really is something. I mean everybody’s talking about and just like every day, there seems to be more news about it. I was doing a little research before we went to record about artificial intelligence and it’s just like… Oh my gosh, you get overwhelmed with everything. So why don’t we just start though, very basic, and why don’t you just explain what is artificial intelligence? What are we talking about?

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Well, right now when we say artificial intelligence, people associate it with ChatGPT, they associate it with BingAI, Midjourney, all these different AI tools that allow people to just type in what they want, a question, and have this computer address it onto them in very natural sounding language, or they would type in some text and it would be converted into this beautiful image that they could use. That’s what people are associating it with. I would actually contend that nobody has an actual definition for artificial intelligence. If you get a group of us together, with doctorates, into a room and us says what artificial intelligence is, you’re going to get as many answers as there are people there, and none of us are going to agree about it. If you try to do a search, you’ll find that the situation. I think the very fact is that even the word intelligence itself is such a vague term. We’re suddenly thinking about intelligence, human intelligence, and we want to try to limit it here to human intelligence as opposed to animal intelligence.

But even within that, there are all sorts of categories. Are we talking about emotional intelligence? Are we talking about creative intelligence? Are we talking about academic intelligence? So there’s a lot of this. And so there has even been a push by some in the industry to drop the word artificial from the word intelligence in reference to these computers and programs. And I would not recommend that at all because already people are starting to idolize AI and I don’t know how far off track I’m going off here, but there’s so much to that phrase, artificial intelligence, what is it?

Eric Sammons:

Yeah, and we’ll get into that a little bit more. I definitely want to go there a little bit. I remember I was in a systems analysis program in the early 1990s, and I remember we talked about artificial intelligence, AI a little bit, and the way we thought of it back then was instead of just simply the programmer inputs information, says, “Okay, here’s what the computer can do,” and that’s all it can do, and there’s nothing else it can do. Artificial intelligence, as we saw, it was kind of like, okay, the computer itself is able to, I don’t know if I would use the word learn, but it’s able to do things that the programmer did not explicitly program it to do. Does that kind of grasp a little bit of what some people mean by artificial intelligence?

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Absolutely. In fact, one of the models that I worked on some 30 years ago was sort of a statistical model. We considered these nodes, we wanted to build it off of what we thought a human brain works. In other words, you have these neurons and they have all these network connections. And so we were saying, “Okay, what if we had all these different nodes and they were all networked and connected and we trained it?” I know you said you didn’t want to use the word learn, but yeah, we do use the word train. We trained this artificial neural network to do certain things. So in my case, for instance, as you said, I’m also teaching fine arts because I do have both this interest in technology and art, and I wanted to train that network, that AI to create artwork. And so I had this training.

I spent many late nights and early mornings just training the system, and after multiple iterations of that training, it was able to create artwork at least in a very narrow sense because art again is a very broad term. I had it create artwork that looks like big abstract pieces that you would see in a lobby. I actually don’t paint those myself. I prefer the realism like the image in the background that you have there. But I was able to train this neural network to create artwork that was very similar to what I would consider at least good art that you would place in a lobby of a big organization, a big corporation. And it was kind of scary and sort of surreal at that moment because it was churning out these images that were what I might have done, if I created that artwork on a regular basis, and I thought, “Did I just upload a version of myself to this machine so that it has a version of me in there, a portion of me in there, a small portion, albeit, but a portion of me?” It was just a very surreal thought.

Eric Sammons:

It really is because as a computer programmer, I could see programming something with some type of mathematical algorithm that would create something that looked very beautiful because it would be using some type of mathematical algorithm. But that’s not what you’re saying. That’s not the same thing, right? You’re saying it’s… One of the thing funny things is our vocabulary is very difficult because I want to say the word learn, I want to say the word think, and I want to say these things, and yes, it’s true, but there’s problems with it too. But almost like it thinks, you’re saying it kind of thinks like you did.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Right.

Eric Sammons:

The way you programed it was to kind of think you would in designing it, not just a strict mathematical formula.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Correct.

Eric Sammons:

A little bit broader than that, correct?

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Correct. I started with a mathematical formula in order to create a parent image as it were, and that it would generate eight other child imagery. Those are the terms we use, and from those eight other ones, I would select what I would consider to be the best of those, and it would take notes of what that was, and then it would learn from that in order to generate the next parent based off of that and then generate other children. And this process would just go through iteratively until it gets a sense for what it is I like. The way it gets a, quote, sense is that those nodes I was talking about earlier on, half, almost we can say, a probabilistic number attached to it, a statistical number so that different pathways, as it were, would be strengthened and other pathways would be weaker.

And so it’s just like muscle memory. We talk about muscle memory or it’s not quite muscle memory, but as we do a sudden action over and over again, the neural pathways, we know, forms a thicker myelin or whatever that’s called. I forget right now, not being a biologist, but it forms a thicker pathway and it strengthens that pathway so that we’re able to perform that action almost without thinking as it were. So it’s a facsimile of that with regard to the neural network. It’s forming a pathway that is more akin to what it’s been trained on.

Eric Sammons:

Okay.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

That’s what it’s doing. Since you allowed me to geek out a little bit there.

Eric Sammons:

Yeah, please geek out as much as you can here. We love it. So you have experience with creating art, and that’s one of the big things today, that things that are called artificial intelligence is creating art. In fact, I think about a year or so ago, it started getting big on the internet where you’d see these artificial intelligence artwork that really were disturbing because when they first started being made popular, they were clearly human, but yet inhuman somehow.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Right.

Eric Sammons:

They didn’t capture what human… A good artist, when they paint somebody, they capture the humanity somehow. But these were somehow not. Now I think it’s already gotten better in the past year, but I mean, what does that say…? I’m not a big art person, I admit, but I was fascinated by this. So as an artist, how do you see these images that are being created of artwork of particularly when they’re doing humans? I feel like they look disturbing. I mean, I don’t know about you, but they seem to be.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

A lot of them are somewhat, I would call it dark in its vibe. It’s been trained, and again, we have to consider what it’s been trained on. It’s been trained on a lot of the, quote, popular artwork available out there, especially a lot of CGI, a lot of the computer generated imagery out there, and a lot of that tends to be dark. So I’m not surprised at all that the AI does that. I have tried to type in descriptors for icons, to have it create icons just on a whim, just to see what it would create and the icons it created were just dark and almost evil in certain ways it would portray. And the eyes, they would look angry almost. And there was a complete lack of symbolism.

Eric Sammons:

I mean, because iconography, of course is a whole… I mean, it’s almost beyond artwork because really you’re writing the icon… A good iconography, it’s all based in prayer. You’re spending all this time in prayer and you’re following strict rules, but yet it’s all very prayerful. And of course, AI can’t pray.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

That’s right.

Eric Sammons:

And so the icon that comes out, I could see it. That’s interesting that you did that because I bet that was a little bit stark in looking at what that would look like, an icon made by AI.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Yeah, absolutely. And I hope I’m not going too far off field here, but you just said that the AI cannot pray. To be clear, I completely agree with you on that, but at a recent presentation that I was giving, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be neat if I had AI create an avatar that would introduce me, since I was a speaker, and have it generate its speech via AI and say a prayer?”

Eric Sammons:

Oh, interesting.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

And I actually had the avatar introduce me and pray a prayer, because I would pray a prayer before every one of my presentations, and that is me. So I had the avatar lead us in a prayer. And it was very interesting to watch because as it was leading us in prayer, I was noticing people, they weren’t sure, “Do I make the sign of the cross? Do I follow along? Do I…?”

Eric Sammons:

Right, right. Right, yeah. Yeah. There’s just something about that. It’s interesting. That reminds me about a week or two ago, I got on ChatGPT, and I said something to the effect of, “Write a Catholic homily,” or something.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Right.

Eric Sammons:

And it generated a homily, it sounded a lot like a lot of homilies you hear. I mean, it was almost dead on. It had one or two… One thing, it kept saying the word righteousness, which a Catholic priest rarely says that word. A Protestant is more likely to say righteousness in their sermons in a Catholic way. But other than that, I mean, it was very much very close. And I was just like, “Whoa.” It wasn’t that deep. Which unfortunately, like times when Catholic homilies aren’t that deep. So it was similar to what you’re saying. I was kind of reading it like, “Okay, it’s kind of calling me to repentance a little bit, but should I be listening to it? It’s calling me to that.” I mean, yeah, we’re going a lot of places there. We so now, other than art, we’re talking about art, but what are some other things that… And we’ll hold off on ChatGPT for a second because I want to talk about that in a minute. But what are some other things that AI is really being created for and being used for today?

Dr. Eugene Gan:

It is already impacting a whole slew of careers. I would contend that the first area, discipline, as it were, that it would affect are the hard scientists. You know why? I’m going to ask this question. I already know the answer, but I’m just going to throw it out there for now. Why would anybody need to go through a computer science program to learn how to program if you could just type in into the AI and say, “Write me a program,” for fill in the blank and it does it for you in seconds? I did that just to test it out. Before I could finish writing in my code, before I could finish writing in first line of code, it had written the entire code and it was completely error free. And I think you know too, having been a system analyst, that when we write code, there are always bugs.

Eric Sammons:

Never error free.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

I was just aghast. It was just having line after line. In seconds, it engraved the whole thing. It was error free. It even gave the instructions for how to use the code, how to compile it, where to place it. It was handwritten.

Eric Sammons:

Okay. Here’s my big question as a former computer programmer, did it also put comments in the code because no humans do that?

Dr. Eugene Gan:

No, it didn’t put comments in the code, but it did comment before and then after.

Eric Sammons:

Okay.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

So it commented after for how to use the code. And for these hard scientists, it’s really easy to do that. I mean, right now, we already heard the news that it could pass a bar exam. I know that’s an hard science, but the fact is it could pass an exam. If it’s a hard science where the answer is very clear, mathematically this or this, it’s going to do a pretty good job passing an exam. I mean, we haven’t even talked about the humanities or even some of the other things that I’m doing in design, some of the things that it’s doing or creating movies. It could create movies now. Today’s news about, and again, if I’m going too far, just pull me back because we could go on talking about this, today’s news was on how the NVIDIA, one of the companies that produces video cards, GPUs, graphic processing units, is teaming up with all these other companies such as Adobe, where you could type in the description of the movie you want to create and it takes it through the process and creates the movie for you.

It creates video for you, or it creates 3D objects for you. So right now, 3D is a big aspect. It’s found in games, it’s found in interfaces, it’s found in movies. Previously you would use a 3D application, and I teach 3D as well. And you would spend some time modeling, creating all the different facets, adding textures to it, adding lighting to it, setting it up in the scene, adding reflections, et cetera. You could just type in right now in text, “Create a model of,” fill in the blank, and it generates that 3D model for you.

Eric Sammons:

Yeah. What’s interesting is, I feel like… Okay, two things you’ve mentioned. I think here’s where I see a difference in what AI can do. So when we talk about generating a computer program, I can definitely see there’s a lot of computer programs that I’ve written in my past that an AI could write faster, better, more error free. I mean, it could create a shopping cart program, for example. It could create an online database, things like that. And so I can see that definitely replacing people. But then you mentioned movies.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Yeah.

Eric Sammons:

And I’m sure it can create a movie, but can it create a good movie? Can it create one that really touches the heart, that really has a story behind it, or is it just having figures up on the screen doing stuff? I mean, maybe it can, I don’t know. But I think that gets to the heart of the difference between that leap AI would have to do to on some of, like you said, we were talking about the hard sciences, but the arts. We were talking how disturbing sometimes the artwork is. But the same thing would be true of a movie. Does it have a heart, so to speak? And what you’ve seen so far, does it fall short of that? Is it going towards that direction? Or what do you think?

Dr. Eugene Gan:

I’m thinking it’s going to a direction right now, the clips that they’re showing at the conferences for the unveiling of this NVIDIA platform, DeepFake, Unreal Engine, all these are the different players, some of the major players and more, they’re creating imagery that is realistic, hyperrealistic. You can also tweak it so that it looks more cartoony, animated. It really is up to the person typing it in and typing in with good descriptors. But here’s the thing. I tried typing into ChatGPT… Albeit I did it back in version 3. Version 4 has come out and it’s orders of magnitude even more in terms of what his capabilities are. But I’m using a free version being on a professor’s pay. So if you have the paid version, there’s a lot more you can do. And we could even talk about that and how it affects the haves and have-nots.

At some point, those who have access to the AI and pay for it, you can have a lot more ability and capabilities versus those who haven’t. But pulling back here, just to creating a movie, I had it write me a script. I actually typed it and I said, “Write me a story just like how Rod Sterling would in Twilight Zone with a twist ending about a character going into a coffee shop,” or something like that. And it just spat out this story. It was surreal just watching it write the story. These lines were just appearing, not in minute, in seconds. And then when it reached the end, it had this twist ending. I could even at that point say, “Okay, I’d like to hear more about this story. Go on.” And it would continue the story from that point on so that it would always be a chapter two with yet another twist ending.

Eric Sammons:

And in reading this story, were you engaged in it? Did you feel like this is a story that you were interested in reading? Or was it a little bit…? I mean, how good was it, I guess?

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Very good. That’s a good question. It was not good enough by my standards. However, I do acknowledge that because this was rather… It caught me… I don’t want to say it caught me by surprise because I’ve been doing this for a while now. What really surprised me was the speed and the variety that it started to introduce into the story, that it was a creative… Again, I’m cautious about using the word creative. There was a variety involved in that because philosophically, we can make the distinction between what it’s doing, which is regurgitation, versus what humans being do, which is discovery, creation. But again, coming back to the story, the interest, I guess, I was engaged to the extent that it was just writing it out for me even faster than I could read it. And it was doing exactly what I told it to do. That was what intrigued me. But if I stood back for a moment and just thought about the story, it was okay. A young teenager could have written that.

Eric Sammons:

Right.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

For big blockbuster, perhaps not. But then we’re talking about the infancy of this particular version and the next-

Eric Sammons:

We’re all excited about it, but it really is very new. I mean, we’re at beta level still on most of this stuff now. And that gets me to ChatGPT, which is the thing that everybody’s talking about. I know there’s other ones and whatnot. Now, how is that one? I feel like that one can only exist because of the internet, right? Because it can grab all this information. I’ve noticed a few times when I’ve put things into it, I felt like all it was was a kind of advanced Google search. When you ask information, it really isn’t that much better than Google search. But like I said, when I put in, “Okay, write me a Catholic homily,” then all of a sudden it was like, “Ooh, this is a little bit spooky,” because it can actually do that.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Yeah.

Eric Sammons:

So talk about a little bit how the internet really has allowed artificial intelligence to leap forward beyond from when back in our day from when it first was getting going.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Yeah. Well, here’s the thing. I would actually contend that AI itself has been around already. Like I said, 30 years ago, I was working on this. AI has been around. What’s really changed is the way that we train it and the interface that is usable by any average person on the street with no computer science knowledge. I think those are the two things that really have made this leapfrog. In terms of the interface, I think we all know that. We don’t need to speak about that because anybody can go in there, register themselves, type something in, and see the results of this. And in that very visceral experience, they’re experiencing this, to them, amazing entity. But on the other end, when I trained that AI, I had to do it manually. I had to say, “Okay, I like this image. Choose this image. Let’s go through this process iteratively.”

Now you can set up an algorithm that’s sitting right next to the AI and say, “Go online and here, the world’s your oyster. Go learn. Go train yourself on all these different data sets,” as it were, okay? Which is why it’s now also pulled up all these issues in law. In terms of the imagery, for instance, there’s a plagiarism in terms of how it’s taking things from what other human artists have created. So we’re on a cusp of news. As we speak, things are being developed. So for instance, right now, in today’s news, the organizations creating AI were saying, “Okay, let’s go to those other organizations that have stock imagery or stock video, or stock footage, and whose enterprise is to sell that footage and imagery and all that. So they are royalty free, they have different tiers. Well, why don’t we train the AI on those that are already set up to be sold and then sell the AI as well?”

And so everybody, all those corporations, all these large corporations start making money on that. What a way to do it! What a to circumvent the whole, “Well, you’re copying all the stuff that we’re doing!” So that’s the difference. It’s being trained on the web. GPT-4, right now, version 4, allows you to even go online, the internet itself. A GPT-3, it says, “Well, we can’t go online,” or the GPT itself. The AI says, “I’m not going to be accessing online,” even though it kind of does.

Eric Sammons:

Yes.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

But GPT-4 is saying that it can write programs, upload, and download. That’s just a whole bunch of red flags up there. I would even go so far as to say that from this point forwards, everything that we see, we need to be vigilant, we need to verify. Is this truly Dr. Gan? Is this truly Eric?

Eric Sammons:

Right.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Because you could take an avatar, deep fake it, Unreal Engine it, and sample a couple of seconds of voices, and it’s there. People have already made images of Biden speaking to-

Eric Sammons:

Well, that’s what I was going to bring up was we cannot believe our eyes and our ears anymore.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Correct.

Eric Sammons:

It used to be if you get a video of something, you’ve proven your point, you’ve proven the person’s guilty or whatever the case may be. But now, I mean, there’s no way a normal person… Maybe there’s some programs that could figure out. But here’s a almost funny example. Somebody uploaded a photo of Pope Francis wearing a big parka, like a Michelin man type parka. And everybody thought it was real, and people were kind of laughing about it, stuff like that, but it wasn’t real. It was a deep fake. It was AI that had basically created this.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

That’s right.

Eric Sammons:

A little more seriously, last week, there was a very realistic image of former President Trump being arrested where the police are dragging him. And of course there was all talk about him being arrested. So a normal person who just gets online, sees that photo, thinks, “This really happened because I heard he was going to get arrested.” And think about what that can cause, something more serious like that, if you are thinking the presidency. And I think Biden had… Talk a little bit about how do we navigate that then if we can’t even believe what we see or what we hear anymore.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

I am just calling for all our viewers and listeners from now on, everything that we’re looking at, we need to take it with prayer. We need to take Jesus. And I’ve already been saying this even before AI, we need to be prayerful, very prayerful, aware of our Lord’s presence as we go online. Whether it’s to acknowledge that there is a human being at the other end, or now with AI, to discern, to ask, to beg our Lord for the spirit of discernment. “Is what I’m reading truthful? Is it inspiring to the true, good, and beautiful? Is this truly real?”

Eric Sammons:

And it’s funny because that was one of the… Of course, this was before AI got popular, but your book, Infinite Bandwidth, which… How long has this been out? About 10 years now, hasn’t it?

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Yeah.

Eric Sammons:

But that’s what you’re talking about here. In your book, you’re already kind of sounding the alarm of when you’re online, that is the challenge for all Catholics online is that there is a real person, at least we always thought there was a real person, behind it. But now is there a real person? I mean, okay, here’s a funny story. I tweeted this week because I’ve been thinking about this. Getting ready for the interview, I tweeted something like, “Artificial intelligence is an oxymoron because only a human being can have intelligence.” An AI bot responded to me. And what was interesting is his response is… Whatever. It’s response was more rational than a lot of the replies I get on Twitter from real people. I was like, “Oh my gosh,” because it asked you a question. “Oh, do you mean only the human can have an intellect?” I was like, “Oh my gosh, this AI was actually better,” because it labeled itself an AI bot or something like that so I knew it was an AI.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Right.

Eric Sammons:

What I’m saying is we need version two of your book. How do we now interact as Catholics online, not only because we’ve always been supposed to be putting people behind the avatar, but now there might not be a person behind the avatar? So what are some practical ways we can navigate that as Catholics?

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Since you brought up my book, I will say this though, and you brought up version two. Technically speaking, we don’t need a version two because those same principles in the book were called from scripture. What does it mean to be human and to communicate? The word communication to a typical, I guess, secular communications professor, the definition of communications is, “Okay, I’ve got a message, and it’s how I transmit that message from me to you or to the masses, one to many or one to one.” So that’s a typical communication. And sometimes you use the analogy of a pipe. So if I have a pipe, I can push through so much information. The bigger a pipe is, the more information I can push through. But is there such a thing as an infinite pipe, a pipe that is so large I could push a whole bunch of things through? AI, imagery, video, rich media content?

Well, I would contend that in the physical world, universe, there is no such thing except for one. And that is prayer. Because by definition, we are communicating, we’re talking with an infinite God, with the infinite God. And by definition now, communication with Him would therefore be infinite. So that is the true infinite bandwidth as it were. So therefore, the title of the book, Infinite Bandwidth, Encountering Christ in Media, could really be read as prayer, Encountering Christ in the Media. How do you encounter Christ in the media? It’s through this constant prayer, the constant communication with our Lord. So this brings up how do we deal with AI right now? It sounds so trivial to say, but it’s so important to say, before going online, to have that experience of our Lord, to be speaking with him, to be begging for that spirit of discernment as we’re online to what we’re seeing, what we’re hearing. As we’re conversing, as we’re interacting with different things online to be asking our Lord, “Lord, do I continue watching this? Is this something you want me to do and to see?”

People will be saying, “Well, how do I know I’m hearing God’s voice?” Well, scripture clearly says, “My sheep hear my voice.” So if we’re his sheep, we’re hearing his voice and how do we hear his voice? It’s through the prayer. The more we hear someone’s voice, the more familiar we are. When I first met my wife, if I had to pick her voice out of a room full of women, I probably would’ve had difficulty doing that. But with time, I could pick my wife’s voice out and likewise with our Lord. As we pray, we’re going to be hearing our Lord’s voice, recognizing our Lord, recognizing Jesus. And we can be asking him, having that constant conversation. That’s what St. Paul talks about in the scripture, to be continuously praying. And so like I said, it sounds trivial, but no, I really think that that’s the solution right there, that intimate love for our Lord on his chest, constantly hearing, “Lord, do I watch this? Do I engage this? Do I read this?”

Eric Sammons:

Right. And I think that gives you a sense of discernment so when you’re hearing something, you can kind of sense it’s a little off, something about it, even if it sounds good in a lot of ways, but it gives you that sense of discernment. I think that’s a great point.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

That’s right.

Eric Sammons:

Speaking a little-

Dr. Eugene Gan:

And there are times in which-

Eric Sammons:

Go ahead.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

I was about to say, and there are times in which even if something is good, our Lord would say, “No, don’t spend time looking at this right now,” for whatever reason. With experience, I found that sometimes it’s because our Lord is saying, “Look, you don’t have to watch this. It’s not going to be a good use of your time. If you do this other thing, it would be a much better use of your time.” So sometimes it could be a good thing too, and our Lord will say, “No, do something else.”

Eric Sammons:

Yeah. Speaking a little bit more about these dangers, I just saw this week, this article, headline was, “Elon Musk and others urge AI pause, citing risk to society.” And this was a significant group of people. I mean, obviously Elon Musk is a big one.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Yes.

Eric Sammons:

I mean, these are some pretty… I’m going to read just the beginning, you can comment on it. It says, “Elon Musk and a group of artificial intelligence experts and industry executives are calling for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI’s newly launched GPT-4,” which you were talking about, “in an open letter citing potential risk to society and humanity.” They basically said, “Powerful AI systems should be developed only once. We are confident that their effects will be positive and their risk will be manageable.” What do you think…? I mean, first of all, do you think that that’ll actually happen? And what are their concerns and why do they want to put this pause on, these people who are obviously technologists? These aren’t Luddites.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Yeah.

Eric Sammons:

These are technologists who are saying this.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Right. I’m glad they’re doing this. I’m really hopeful for this. There have been concerns online. For instance, some people are concerned that, “Well, wait a minute, we put this moratorium on us here in the states, China doesn’t care. They’re going to continue developing the AI.” In fact, Putin was quoted as saying that he who… I’m paraphrasing here. You can Google it and find the actual quote online, but Putin said that, “He who controls AI controls the world.” I mean, think about military technology and instituting AI in that. I mean, it took an F-16 jet and put an AI in that, and it’s flying all over the place with AI. If it’s a human being in there, it’s not going to be able to stand the G forces. Okay, we can continue on that.

Eric Sammons:

By the way, you know everybody right now is thinking of Terminator as soon as you say that.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Terminator, that’s right. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Oh, now you got-

Eric Sammons:

Okay, now, when we talk about dangers, it’s one thing to create bad art. It’s another thing to create something that’s controlling bombs and nukes and things like that without human interaction.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Right.

Eric Sammons:

And like you said, okay, let’s say America decides we’re not going to do that, but that doesn’t mean China won’t, Russia won’t.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

That’s right.

Eric Sammons:

North Korea or whatever won’t. And then all of a sudden you really do have a Terminator type situation where you have robots against robots, so to speak. You have AI versus AI.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Yeah. It’s no longer an arms race. It becomes a suicide race.

Eric Sammons:

Right, yeah.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Who’s going to die first?

Eric Sammons:

I mean, I am glad to see that people who are really… They get geeked out about the technology, but they realize there is something more than just, “Who’s the first to develop something?” And, “How cool can we make it?” That there are some real negative consequences that could come out of this. We don’t have a good history of people pausing when it comes to technology, when they should be pausing.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Well, think about it. Think about it. You take any technology that has potential to impact as negatively. We have regulatory boards for those. Take nuclear power. You need some kind of regulation for that. You need a third party to go check if they’re doing it. But at the same time, there are going to be countries that are not going to allow that. North Korea, for instance. They’ve got this nuclear program, but are they going to abide by the regulations? Right now, it doesn’t seem like they are. I think not. Or even the simple thing as a car. We have regulations for that. Why? Because, yeah, we need a car. It’s going to serve its purpose. We have utilitarian needs for it, but it could harm people. So we have regulations surrounding that. So likewise with AI, it has its purpose.

It has its place. It certainly is a potential for taking over a lot of jobs. They were talking about over 300 million jobs at this point in time, and probably going to increase as the versions of AI increases. But should there be some regulation on it? Absolutely. I think that there should be some level of transparency that says, “This was created by AI. This was produced by AI. This was made…” Versus fully human. There has been other talk also in the different technology forums that this six month moratorium is actually a more political move so that these corporations would not be sidelined with regards to the technology. They can be caught up with some of the other bigger players.

Eric Sammons:

Right.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

So it could be a political move as well.

Eric Sammons:

Yeah.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

I’m hopeful. I like to try to see the good in things. And so I’m hopeful that no, in fact, this is setting up some good regulations.

Eric Sammons:

It would be nice where you almost had to have a watermark or something like that on anything online that was generated and created by AI so you know that that happened. So obviously there’s some scary things about it but what gets you excited about AI in a positive way? Do you see some ways in which it can make our life better, or is it mostly just real scary? Does it just keep you up at night?

Dr. Eugene Gan:

No. No, it doesn’t keep me up at night. No, there is no fear because fear would be from the enemy. And so I want to be able to be always close to our Lord and trusting him that he’s in control. He knows all this that’s going to take place. In fact, it just reminded me of a Pope Benedict homily, and don’t remember the date off the top, where he talked about artificial intelligence with regard to Babble. Are we creating a new tower of Babble, essentially? But back to your question there, what excites me is how it can supplement our learning. For instance, I typed in a simple thing for math. I said, “Teach me about trigonometry.” And it creates a curriculum with the introduction about trigonometry. And it did it in such a smooth way that I was kind of taken aback.

This could be a great teaching tool for a young student. And then if you don’t understand something there, I just write it up, “Explain to me what you said when you said…” And I just copy it and paste it. “When you said that, what does that mean?” And it did this explanation. Imagine then putting that into a avatar bot that could then speak with you in a natural way and imagine the learning possibilities there. Yes, it will affect education. Perhaps there might even be a loss of jobs. I’m a professor, but it will change education and the way we know it. Just as when the internet first came to be and people were concerned, “Oh my goodness, how do I even teach a class when students could just go online and Google something?” Right now, Microsoft is already with Bing, it integrated OpenAI, so ChatGPT stuff developed by OpenAI. They’ve integrated into Bing. Now Google is kind of worried about that so they’re trying to get on track with that. But when you’re now combining the search engine, it intelligently knows how to give you responses that are more natural sounding, generative language.

Eric Sammons:

It is interesting because I’ve often been a critic à la social media and things like that, but it is amazing, for example, how much I’ve personally learned, skills I’ve learned stuff from YouTube.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Yes.

Eric Sammons:

That I’ve learned so many things, because what I’ll do is I’ll get interested in a topic, I’ll do a deep dive into it, and it’s almost all at YouTube because I can just basically teach yourself about this. And it’s great. I know there’s a lot of dangers of YouTube. I’m not unaware of that. However, I do feel like my life has been improved by my ability to learn that. And so when you painted that picture of learning trigonometry through it, that really rings a bell for me. Like, “Wow, somebody could be a learner for their whole life. They could learn new subjects.” Obviously there’s a danger of putting people like you out of work, but I don’t think that’s anytime soon. But I can see that being a very positive thing where… YouTube’s great for learning stuff, but you don’t have the interaction.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

That’s right.

Eric Sammons:

If you can add the information you can learn at YouTube, but also add the ability to say, “Wait a minute, what did you mean by that?” And all of a sudden it can answer you-

Dr. Eugene Gan:

That’s right.

Eric Sammons:

That’s huge. I mean, now you’ve got a personal tutor for any topic you want.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Absolutely. My kids are learning how to play different musical instruments, for example. One of them, Benedict, he learned how to play the piano, the keyboard completely via YouTube. And congratulations to him. He just won the Valley’s Got Talent.

Eric Sammons:

Wow.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

For playing a piece.

Eric Sammons:

So it works.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

It works. And he learnt it all on YouTube. And what you’re saying there, I don’t think also that a lot of us who are… We’re not going to lose our jobs so long as… How do I even phrase this in a way that does not allow us to idolize AI? I want to be careful about the language here. I don’t think that people who are losing their jobs are losing it simply because they’re simply being replaced by AI. I think it’s more to do with the people who are keeping their jobs are learning how to integrate this technology into what they’re doing in a way that is healthy, in a way that upholds their dignity as human beings. So that needs to be done on an individual basis or at least per profession.

So for instance, as a teacher, I’ve got no qualms about my students going online and learning things there to supplement what we can do in class so that what I do in class does not simply repeat YouTube. I’m doing in class what only a human being can do. I’m helping them discover. That idea of discovery is not something AI at any point in time can do. I would even argue that there’s no way we can program an AI to discover, because discovery in my definition has to do with the soul, the spark of life that only God can give. No AI has a soul. And we can talk about this as Catholics.

Eric Sammons:

Actually, this is great because this is what I wanted to segue into.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Oh, great.

Eric Sammons:

This idea of intelligence and what the intellect is. So for example, let’s just take the first thing. There’s a famous test called the Turing Test. For those who don’t know, Alan Turing, a great mathematician. He helped break a bunch of codes during World War II and whatnot. A troubled man and died very early in life, unfortunately. But he created what he called the Turing Test. Basically the idea in a nutshell was that a computer would pass this test if you could interact with it and not realize it’s a computer. So let’s say there was a wall between you and the voice you were hearing and you interacted with it, you were talking to it, and you did not realize it was a computer. That would “pass” the Turing Test.

Now, the Turing Test is very important, and I feel like ChatGPT is getting there, very close to that. But I found a lot of technologists take that to mean almost like then it has sentience or it has consciousness or something like that, which is a real fundamental misunderstanding of what that means. So how would you then look at the Turing Test and intelligence and the fundamental difference between a machine and a man, a bridge that can never be crossed?

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Well, first off, I will say that as much as the Turing Tests is brought up, especially in the mainstream media, there are a lot of contradictions or a lot of loopholes, a lot of weaknesses in the Turing Test. A whole bunch is popping in my mind, I don’t even know which one to bring. Okay, Searle’s Chinese Room experiment, for example, where essentially it’s this idea that if somebody was slipping the notes under the door and they were all Chinese characters, and let’s say I did not read Chinese… Actually, I took 10 years of that, so some other language there, Arabic or something, all right? If I didn’t read that language and I took that and I put it into a computer program, that it could understand the symbols and then it could regurgitate a response.

I could write that program and say, “Regurgitate a response.” I still didn’t understand the symbols. I took those symbols and then slipped them back under the door to the person outside. Would they know that I didn’t understand any of that? Would they believe that I understood everything? I was able to give them their response. And that’s the same thing with the AI. It may be able to convince the human being that it it is human as it were. But just because it’s successful in convincing does not mean that it actually understands the meaning of what it’s regurgitating.

Eric Sammons:

I think that’s the key point. It can respond, but can it understand, understand in a way that we really mean to understand something? Like for example, if you put into the computer, “What is two plus two?” The computer will immediately say four much faster than you ever could.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Right.

Eric Sammons:

It doesn’t understand why two plus two equals four, which a human can understand conceptually because it can have this concept of two, a concept of four without even having apples in front of it or whatever, and counting it. But a computer, it just responds with four. It doesn’t necessarily understand it. Is that kind of what you’re saying as far as a fundamental difference?

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Absolutely. And even more so than that. For whatever reason, that movie, the Pursuit of Happiness just popped into my mind. There was a scene in that movie where the main protagonist, he was poor, he didn’t have any of this money, he was trying to get a job, and here’s his boss asking him, “Can you lend me,” I don’t know what it was, “five bucks?” It doesn’t seem like a lot of money to this rich boss, but to him, five bucks was everything. I mean, you are using numbers two plus two. So does the computer understand that one of those numbers, maybe that two means so much to one person because they don’t have that two bucks. There’s a meaning behind the different things that we speak about, but that meaning may not be understood, is not going to be understood by the AI. Even if we provide it with context, there are emotions involved, there is emotional intelligence involved, there’s creative intelligence involved, and these are the different aspects of intelligence that the Turing Test does not encompass, does not take into account.

Eric Sammons:

Yeah. I think fundamentally, one of the errors we have here, and I wrote about this actually this week at Crisis, is that a lot of scientists being athe… A lot of them are atheists. And so they’re materialists.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Yes.

Eric Sammons:

They believe the only thing in existence is a material world. There is no spiritual world. And so for them, we’re basically just computers essentially. And so they would say our talk of understanding on some deep levels is just still brainwaves.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Yes.

Eric Sammons:

That’s all it is. And so you could just recreate that in the computer. And that’s where I think the real differences… When I read a lot of things talking about artificial intelligence in the technology media and whatnot, I think that’s where I feel like they’re really missing the boat. They really do think a computer one day… All we got to do is be the big enough computer as good as our brain, because our brain is all our mind is.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Right.

Eric Sammons:

And that’s just really a very poor understanding of the human person. And so as Catholics, how would you say we should respond to that and engage the people who are kind of saying that?

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Well, as Catholics, as Christians, we know from scripture, from the words that Jesus, that God himself has given us, we know that we worship in spirit and in truth. Going back to that example of me creating an AI avatar that would introduce me with a beginning introductory prayer, yes, it could, as you said, when you typed it in, it could create a prayer that could kind of sound like a prayer. And it may be true. So there’s truth there. But is that worshiping in truth, but is it worshiping in spirit? I would contend not. And to worship in spirit requires the spark of life. And that spark of life can only be given to us by God.

Eric Sammons:

Right. And that is a fundamental teaching of the church that the human soul is only created by God. It’s not an evolutionary process, for example, or anything like that. It’s not a material process. Now, okay, we’re going to wrap up here soon because I could go at least five more hours, but we’re not going-

Dr. Eugene Gan:

We could.

Eric Sammons:

I do want broach one more subject though before we end.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Okay.

Eric Sammons:

And that’s the idea of this trans-humanism, the combination of humans and Ai, where basically… I guess I just have to ask. As a Catholic, do we feel like that’s somehow against the dignity of the human person? Let’s say there was an ability to almost, like the Matrix, integrate some type of AI into our brains that communicate with our brains directly so that, for example, we go somewhere, download this is how you dance or this is how you can do this, or something like that. Is that going against the dignity of the human person to do something like that?

Dr. Eugene Gan:

The example that you brought up, there are a lot more gray areas that we need to clarify because we need to be really careful of our definitions. For a moment, I will just reverse that and I’ll come back to what you said. What about uploading our consciousness? You talked about downloading. What about uploading our consciousness? That whole idea of uploading our consciousness, we want to look at the intention behind it. Ray Kurzweil just, what, yesterday or the day before, there was this whole news article where he predicts that by 2030 we would all be immortal with the use of technology. That’s a scary thought. What’s the intention behind uploading our consciousness? It’s just this desire to be immortal. I would contend that if you really wanted to be immortal, go to church, go be with Jesus, receive him in the sacrament of Eucharist. Jesus is telling us he’s the true source of immortality, eternity with our beloved.

Eric Sammons:

It is interesting because God has put in us a desire for eternity.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

That’s right.

Eric Sammons:

And so that’s a natural desire. It’s a good desire. And so what’s happening is some people, technologists and others who don’t have that belief in God, they still have that desire for eternity.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

That’s right.

Eric Sammons:

And so they’re transforming it into immortality here on earth rather than the eternity with God in heaven, which is what we’re actually designed for.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

That’s right. So I think it’s really Satan’s response, the enemy’s response, to try to use this desire but twist it in a different way. It’s just a counterfeit version, artificial version of that, okay? So to go back to what you were saying, what about the downloading of all this information into us? Well, think about it. On our phones, we could set up something so that we would learn that. But when it starts to get to the point of thinking, “Okay, well what if we hook it up to our brain so that it’s now connected to our neural networks?” And the recent World Economic Forum, they were already talking about that. So this is not something in the far future.

 We already have the technology now to do this. It’s that whole bionic man thing, “We can make you more powerful, stronger, faster,” and all that kind of stuff. That whole transhuman thing? They can do it now. Would I want a chip in my brain just so that I can access this? Personally, no. Why? Because with technology, it’s always going to be up. You need some kind of update. Do I want to have them reinsert different things every time I want an update? No way. Do I want them to use radio waves to do that? Yeah, I really don’t think so. I would really like to shut that off at some point. I mean, I’m thinking all of Twilight Zones episodes.

Eric Sammons:

Yeah, yeah. I was going to say, where they can basically then also send you… I think there’s a Doctor Who episode about this or something where they can send you basically a message to have a certain calmer personality, kind of change who you are, make you more subservient to the people who run the technology, and things like that.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

So it goes back again to what is the intention? Just as the intention to upload so that we can go into the consciousness is for immortality, well, what is the intention to be downloading all this? The key question is does it uphold our human dignity? Which goes back to the keys of my book. It’s really not version two because it’s all based off of scripture. It’s, in fact, a summary of what scripture is saying, what the word of God is saying, and the word of God is for all times and all people. So our Lord has foreseen all this. He knows what’s happening and what’s going to happen. He’s seen all this. So he’s saying, “These are my words.” It’s eternal truth. And so that whole idea, “Does it uphold my dignity? Does it uphold my dignity to download all that? Does it uphold my dignity to upload?” Where is it at a point where we can find that silence, be still and know that I am God?

Eric Sammons:

Yeah. Most books related to technology are obsolete within a year. Yours has seemed to hold the test of time a little better than most of the ones that are put out there because it’s based upon the eternal truths that we find in the sacred scriptures and tradition and everything.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Right.

Eric Sammons:

Okay. I think we’re going to wrap it up here. So first of all, I just want to tell people, Infinite Bandwidth, Encountering Christ in the Media, I will put a link to it in the show notes. Emmaus Road Publishing, which is a great organization, they put it out. But how can people find out more about the work you’re doing? And I know you’ve done some other interviews on this, I’m sure people would like to see those as well. So where can people find out about the stuff you are up to?

Dr. Eugene Gan:

I guess they could go onto my website, Eugene Gan, G-A-N, eugenegan.weebly.com and I try to put some things up there. I don’t spend too much time trying to do that because I really want to be with people. I want to be with my students. I want to be with my family. I want to be with God. I just want to be with Jesus.

Eric Sammons:

That’s a good priority list right there.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Actually, I would reverse it. I want to be with Jesus first and then with my wife and then the kids, and then all my students.

Eric Sammons:

And I’ll put a link to your website in the show notes as well, but if you’re a younger person and looking at colleges and you’re interested in this type of information, this type of study, I would definitely recommend looking at Franciscan’s Communications program. It’s very solid. Like I said, my daughter’s about to graduate in it and-

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Congratulations.

Eric Sammons:

What I love about it is my daughter’s there and she’s getting Communication Arts degree, but she’s also double majoring in Latin. I feel like only at Steubenville you have that combination of that classical, traditional Latin learning, but also state-of-the-art video production and stuff like that. There’s not a lot of places where I think you can get both of those at the same time.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Yes.

Eric Sammons:

And I know a lot of that is thanks to you and all the work you’ve done with the communications program.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Yeah. It’s very important to me that I’m forming the whole human being, the whole human person, holistic education as I would like to call it. I almost like to think of it, not so much as academia, I like to think of it almost as a modern version of a renaissance master-apprentice, that human interaction. Yeah, you can learn all the tools and techniques on YouTube, but really that human interaction for how do we discover and develop and treating each person as an individual, not teaching to the middle of the class, but really honoring that God has placed that particular person before you, my younger brother or my younger sister.

Eric Sammons:

And that’s something an AI teacher could never do.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Amen.

Eric Sammons:

That’s the human touch right there. Well, thank you very much, Dr. Gan. I really appreciate you being on the program. This has been great. Like I said, I could geek out for hours, but I think this gives people a taste of the most important issues. So just keep up the good work and keeping us informed on what’s going on with all this.

Dr. Eugene Gan:

Thank you, and thank you for the opportunity to speak truth, goodness, and beauty to our listeners and viewers.

Eric Sammons:

Great, and God bless you. Until next time, everybody, God love you.

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