Is Artificial Intelligence being applied to Christian Doctrine and to Scriptural Interpretation?

Rather than following well defined programming, AI systems work by doing trial-and-error experiments and effectively adjusting their own programming without human intervention. This works by being given a general goal with a way of evaluating it as a single number, and using feedback to decide what improves a result and what makes it worse.

For instance, in social media platforms, AI systems have control over what articles and ads each individual user sees, and how they are presented. Their "goal" is to maximize the number of ad clicks, thereby maximizing company revenues.

The AI will select a few million test cases and try something different. If the results get better, it will then apply that change to all users. If the results get a lot better for some users and a not for others, it will analyze everything it knows about those users to determine what they have in common, how to recognize the type of user for whom the change worked, and apply the change to only that type of user. This all happens without human intervention or oversight.

The AI works entirely with experiments like these, random trial and error tests, and statistical results. Nothing like intelligence or understanding at all is involved: try it and if it helps, keep doing it.

While helping the companies to realize their goal (more money), the results are not necessarily better for anything else.

For instance, people that favour one kind of politics will end up being shown items that support their beliefs and not shown anything that might undermine that belief. Many of the people that favour one thing will be found to favour some other thing too. So everyone that favours the first thing, but not yet the second, will then be introduced to the other thing. UFO people will end up seeing many other conspiracy theory articles; skeptics will end up never seeing articles about things that only might be true.

Rather than the mostly balanced presentation of news that we used to get, the view of the world presented to us is highly biased, supporting our beliefs, making other views seem extremely wrong or rare, and enforcing our belief that anyone else that feels otherwise must have something wrong with them.

This effect is responsible for the extreme polarizations that we see in society today.

But when it comes to applying artificial intelligence to Christian doctrine, it's not at all obvious how that could be done.

AI needs a way of changing what it is doing, and an objective way of comparing two different results as a single number.

In terms of "examination of scripture" and "coming to doctrinal conclusions", the only thing I can think of is if it were already given a specific doctrine and asked to find presentations that increase its believability and convincingness.

The Enlightenment started with essentially philosophical insights spread by a new technology. Our period is moving in the opposite direction. It has generated a potentially dominating technology in search of a guiding philosophy.

We should be concerned about this, but not in the way most people think.

In the 1960s, Professor Marshall McLuhan warned about this in The Medium Is the Massage and other publications. Technological advancements often have side effects that far overshadow the original reason for their development.

In 1900, once every month or so, farm families typically spent a whole day riding their cart into town, loading up on supplies, and returning home. The invention of the automobile and truck was intended to make this process easier and faster: they could now do the whole thing in a couple of hours.

But that's not what happened. Instead they did the two hour trip every week instead of every month. And then several times every week. Meanwhile, teenagers discovered that they could use the vehicle for dating and other purposes. And look at the massive road and highway infrastructure that has developed since then.

In the 1990s, Professor Theodore Kaczynski warned us that any industrial society must inherently suppress human freedom and self-esteem, cannot be corrected by any means, and will continually worsen. (My own summary of this is in A Summary of "Industrial Society and its Future".)

To function effectively, any industrial society must have citizens that follow rules that make its mechanisms work more efficiently. The pressure of society will force individuals to follow society's conventions, and those conventions will be determined by what is best for the technology to operate. We will eventually all become slaves of the machine. Any that don't go along with this will of necessity be removed from society.

A trivial example of this occurs whenever one sits in their car waiting for a red light to change to green, even though there is no conflicting traffic in sight.

These kinds of things are potentially dangerous developments, and we can see evidence of them all around us. But they are simply side effects, not planned by humans, and certainly not by machines.

If AI ever does have a significant effect on Christian doctrine, it will be by accident, collateral damage, not because some human wanted it.

Although I have been unable to find any documented evidence that artificial intelligence is currently being applied to Christian doctrine, I found a source that makes some interesting points and asks important questions for Christian consideration:

Because AI systems learn from what they see in the world, they are likely to continue those patterns rather than adapt to changing conditions or values. For example, machine learning software that advises court sentencing in the US has been shown to reproduce unfair patterns of racial discrimination. The system was trained on data from biased humans. Likewise, AIs that specialize in language sometimes tend to promote stereotypes demeaning women, since they have learned from a long history of texts in many languages that devalue women’s lives.

Source: https://medium.com/ai-and-christianity/artificial-intelligence-in-christian-thought-and-practice-20ec8635a94f

From there, I found this article, from which I have extracted a small quote:

Christians already shape the uses of AI in justice systems. Early prototypes of surveillance and predictive policing focused on child protection, human trafficking and violence against women, areas of substantial Christian influence. In these areas, many people draw a sharp distinction between victims and perpetrators, categories they hope that AI systems can detect. Given Christian influence, we need theology and practice for a world where human justice is delegated to AI.

How should we understand acts of sin or harm against artificial persons?

What can Christians offer a world that expects machines to predict our moral futures?

As AIs increase the number of people observed and processed in government and for-profit legal systems, how might Christian thought on sin and justice shape them?

How can Christians circumvent or resist algorithmic constraints on religious freedom?

Source: https://medium.com/ai-and-christianity/how-ai-is-shaping-ideas-of-sin-justice-freedom-and-forgiveness-5204457926c5

I can see how artificial intelligence can be of great benefit when it comes to giving access to the Bible and to aid Bible interpreters and teachers. As for applying it to Christian doctrine, I think the jury may still be out....

A recent example of the use of AI to analyse scripture is this paper that applies machine learning handwriting analysis to the dead sea scrolls. They find that two individuals wrote the Great Isaiah Scroll. This demonstrates that these techniques can be used "as a new entry point to access this scribal culture."

The Dead Sea Scrolls are tangible evidence of the Bible’s ancient scribal culture. This study takes an innovative approach to palaeography—the study of ancient handwriting—as a new entry point to access this scribal culture. One of the problems of palaeography is to determine writer identity or difference when the writing style is near uniform. This is exemplified by the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa^a). To this end, we use pattern recognition and artificial intelligence techniques to innovate the palaeography of the scrolls and to pioneer the microlevel of individual scribes to open access to the Bible’s ancient scribal culture.