The love of my life, whom I’ve been married to for almost 35 years, is the most avid reader I’ve ever known. She devours more books a year than I could ever count. Periodicals as well, news, whatever; she’s in that category of reader that the rest of us can only admire. We were driving for July 4 weekend and chatting about the most recent AI writing scandal, and wondering what in the heck are we going to do about the new reality?

I’m not going to say she said exactly that quote, but, y’know, maybe it was exactly that. And I feel precisely that same way: Life is too short to waste time on computer-generated novels and stories. Even if an AI program could write a great story [somehow], we don’t want it. Why? Why does it matter if a human created it or if it was robotic plagiarism?

The point is that we’re reading –perhaps you’re reading, too– in order to experience Life, and the source of that experience is critically important: it must emerge from other Life. There’s an essence to it, a spirit if you will, which requires a continuous chain of progression like a flame or an electric current, without which the magic is gone, either interrupted or never there. Soul-less.

If the World Cup were being played by a bunch of robots, would it matter? I would say, “no.” For the same reasons.

We humans have got this tendency to mechanize or subcontract everything we can. Progress has resulted from this. Certainly modern life is amazing because of it. But we’re at a new point in human history here and is there an inflection point in which we’ve gone too far? How much of what we do should be outsourced?

Pope Leo put out an encyclical point exactly this out. I’m going to give him credit for being the FIRST and the ONLY major leader to even resist, much less outright oppose, the unfettered explosion of this new tech that will likely reduce most of us into peasantry.

I’ve no answer yet, but to start, we (meaning all of us) need to see this for the threat that it is.