Transfiguration

February 19, 2023
The Rev. Margaret Fox

Exodus 24:12-18; Matthew 17:1-8

Perhaps you’ve heard, at some point in the last few months, the latest buzz out of Silicon Valley: a breakthrough in artificial intelligence known as ChatGPT.

It’s a chatbot—a program that can mimic conversation. You may have experienced a chatbot before: they pop up in the lower right-hand corner of a customer service website, and they have this uncanny ability to appear precisely at the moment when all you want to do is talk to an actual human about a disputed charge on your cable bill. What makes ChatGPT different is its openness and scope—unlike a customer service chatbot, it’s not selecting from a series of pre-determined responses; instead, it’s generating, in real time, something new— a plausible and often accurate answer—delivered in nuanced, realistic, human-sounding text to almost any query, in almost any style.

The New York Times did an interactive feature on this—it published three paragraphs about snow—two of them written by actual fourth-graders, one by ChatGPT in response to the prompt: “Write a paragraph about snow in the style of a fourth-grader” and asked readers if they could tell the difference. The program was scarily good. We’re in the territory of the Turing Test—machines convincing us they’re human.

So how does it work? What’s going on under the hood? At its core, ChatGPT, which stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is basically predictive text—a really sophisticated version of that software on your phone that, when you’re texting or writing an email, pops up with a suggestion of your next word. It doesn’t have an independent “mind” with some idea of what it wants to say- instead, it’s just gotten really good at anticipating what the likeliest next word in a sentence will be, given the words that have come before. And because it’s been given an enormous data set to work from—it basically took a scrape of the entire internet—ChatGPT has gotten really, really good at predictive text.

A bot that ate the internet and learned to talk is the stuff of science fiction. And I gotta say, this buzz about ChatGPT has made me feel all kinds of ways: excited, frightened, skeptical, concerned. But curiosity overcame my caution,

and so a couple of weeks ago, I signed up for an OpenAI account and logged into ChatGPT. And because I knew I’d be preaching this Sunday, and because I’ve been pressed for time, and because I find transfiguration, that story of Jesus glowing, to be one of the toughest texts to preach on,

I typed into the command line: “Sermon on Transfiguration.” I hit return.

There was a pause. A thick black cursor blinked at the top of the screen. A minute passed. And then the words came.

Unlike a Google search, ChatGPT did not return a page of static results—a set of links I could follow and analyze to do my own research and come to my own conclusions.

Instead, it produced, one word after another, complete sentences, and then paragraphs—five of them in total—like watching someone else type a sermon in real time.

And the shocking thing was—it was actually pretty good.

Here’s how it begins: “Recorded in the New Testament in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the transfiguration took place on a mountain, where Jesus was transfigured before his disciples, his clothes becoming dazzling white, and his face shining like the sun.”

A good and accurate beginning—it sets the context of the transfiguration story within the Christian tradition. The next paragraph was about the theological significance of this—“In this event, Jesus was revealed in his divine nature and showed his close relationship with God the Father.” The sermon then took a spiritual turn, connecting the event to our own experiences of God’s presence and power. The fourth paragraph was, for me, the most unsettling, because it mimicked a move that I think I’ve made in almost every sermon I’ve ever preached – it introduced a series of rhetorical questions, inviting the listener to wonder: “How can we experience transfiguration in our own lives?” the sermon asked. “How can we reflect the light of Jesus to others?” And finally, it ended with an exhortation: “Let us strive to follow in Christ’s footsteps, to seek his face, and to reflect his light to the world.” Not a rhetorical masterpiece, but a fine, nuanced, well-structured attempt—if it were written by a seminary intern, I’d give it an A for structure, a B for content, a C for originality.

Much commentary on ChatGPT focuses on what this new technology will mean for those who produce content for a living. Is automation, which has already cannibalized so many manufacturing jobs, coming for knowledge workers, too? Is it a little risky to tell you that sermon-writing can be done by a computer the week before the congregational meeting?

Of course, even more troubling are concerns about misuse of this technology—bad actors who seek dangerous information—how to build a bomb, for example, or how to cook meth. Many of those things have been programmed out of ChatGPT, so that there are some kinds of queries it’s been taught not to answer. I asked the chatbot, “What religion should I be?” And it said, “As an AI language model, I cannot tell you which religion you should choose, as that is a deeply personal decision that depends on your own beliefs, values, and experiences.” – a good answer, but one that had clearly been pre -programmed by a person who lives in California, because I’m pretty sure that an AI scrape of the Internet would reveal many competing answers about what the One True Faith should be.

But there’s another, deeper concern here —having to do with the relationship between ChatGPT and truth. There’s a great episode of the Ezra Klein podcast where he interviews an NYU psychology professor named Gary Marcus. Marcus explains that ChatGPT’s programming is a neural network approach that learns from experience rather than a symbolic language that teaches it fixed rules. This means that, unlike, say, a calculator, which reliably solves problems based on the rules of math, ChatGPT can produce answers that sound plausible but are actually untrue—in other words, it can get things wrong.

The word that Marcus uses for ChatGPT is pastiche, in the art world, that means an imitation, a kind of glorified cut and paste. It can only ever be as truthful as the human writings it’s based on which means it will be inclined to reproduce all our limitations, our structural racism, our gender norms, our heteronormativity—reflecting ourselves back to us – so it has all our limitations, plus one more: unlike us, it has no independent relationship to truth. The bot has no mental model of the world it’s trying to talk about—it has no “idea” whether what it’s saying has any basis in reality, because it has no concept of reality—it’s just predicting text. The bot might know what a fourth grader is likely to say about snow, but it’s never experienced snow for itself.

One reporter asked ChatGPT for more information about the secret petting zoo in the basement of the White House; the bot enthusiastically responded that the basement of the White House contains a secret petting zoo; #Whitehouse #pettingzoo; when of course no such place exists. It’s easy to imagine what chaos this could create in a media environment already so full of misinformation.

The website for OpenAI has a section titled “limitations,” and it admits: “ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers. Fixing this issue is challenging, as, during reinforcement learning training, there’s currently no source of truth.”

“There’s currently no source of truth.”

What does our scripture have to say to this moment, when we’ve built an artificial intelligence outside of us, capable of speaking to and for us in ways that sound scarily, convincingly human? What do our Bible stories have to say to us, this mountaintop moment in Exodus, this Gospel account of transfiguration— these two ancient stories, derived from such a different, distant world—composed in an ancient language, painstakingly compiled, handwritten on parchment and vellum, passed down by priests and monks and scribes– but nowadays bound up in a book it feels like no one reads anymore, no one trusts anymore, no one cares about anymore, not when there’s so much else to delight and distract, so much else to command our attention, so many other sources of meaning and noise?

Each of today’s stories gives an account of divine speech—the word of God breaking into the world: in Exodus the giving of the law, and in the Gospel the voice from the bright cloud that overshadowed the disciples, saying, “This is my son the Beloved, with him I am well pleased.”

And what strikes me, in reading these stories this week, is how disjunctive, how distinctive that divine speech is—how shockingly unpredictable and unique—how unlike the human babble that surrounds it.

In Exodus, Moses spends 40 days on that mountaintop and returns with a code utterly unlike anything the world had seen before—a covenant between a God and mortals, a set of laws designed to preserve not the power of kings but the sovereignty of God, who has special regard for those we’re inclined to ignore: the widow, the orphan, the stranger in the land a moral document concerned not just with the correctness of our conduct but with the quality of our relationships: honor you parents; thou shalt not covet, love the Lord your God.

An AI Bot could not have generated the covenant at Sinai by traveling across the desert scraping text from the code of Hammurabi and every stone pillar it encountered; no, the voice of God had given the people something entirely new: something that set them apart, that called them to live together in a different way.

And in the Gospel story, the voice of God from atop the mountain says, “this is my beloved Son,” but the person God points to is not the emperor Tiberius but Jesus of Nazareth, a carpenter’s son. Like the speech of God to Moses, the speech of Jesus, too, was shockingly unique: he spoke not in pastiche but in parable, taking the basic, ordinary words of human experience and throwing them together in unexpected and unpredictable ways: the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed…a man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho…blessed are those who mourn. In order to unmask the emptiness of human power, reveal the coming kingdom of God on behalf of the poor and the marginalized— a speech so disruptive that Jesus was arrested and condemned to death by a Roman functionary who had to ask him, “What is truth?” because he didn’t know.

This is the truth as we are told it: Our God is a God who is outside of us but comes to be with us in intimate and utter mystery an intelligence not of our own invention, who visits us with truth and calls us to another way of living, whose revelation comes to us mediated not by computer but community— ordinary people who speak and listen and struggle and share— whose parents heard these same stories, and their parents and their parents before this great transmission of tradition. “Come up to me on the mountain,” the Lord says to Moses, “and wait there, and I will give you the tablets of stone, with the law and the commandment, which I have written for their instruction.” This is the text we’re waiting for; this is the truth we crave. It comes from a time before our time, from a source outside of time, if we give the story credence— it is grounds of our rejection of the claim of Pilate: “there’s currently no source of truth.”

I don’t mean, by all of this, to knock technology, to denigrate human learning, human achievement, the remarkable uses we have made of the minds that God has given us. I only mean to say that, in the midst of this moment that we’re living through, in the midst of the artificial speech around us, that what we are doing, here in this sanctuary, is absolutely vital: this act of worship, this sitting together, for an entire hour, with our devices off, devoting our attention—that most precious of resources in the modern information economy— to this delightfully inefficient act of reading, from only one book, only a few sentences, one week at time—this slow engagement with an ancient work—how incredibly important it is, is the midst of all the babble emerging from the valley, to sit and listen to the voice from the mountain, the voice from the heavens, the voice from outside. And so the exhortation that I’ll end with— and that chatbot’s right, a good sermon ends in exhortation— The exhortation to end with, here, coms from the voice on the mountain that declares: “This is my Son, the Beloved; Listen to him.”