Use Your Words

A post about the AI, Jonah, the Disciples, Chaos, Order, & the Glory of God

William Taverner (1703-1772) - Jonah and the Whale (after Gaspard Dughet)

I was so relieved and grateful to stagger in my own creaky front door last night to find all well. The dogs lost their tiny minds for ten minutes or so, and then apparently forgot we had ever been gone. The cat accepted a suitable portion of propitiatory treats from my hand. And Baby Ozymandias is growing thunder thighs (praise heaven). I can now look forward to a happy future of puttering around, trying to bring order out of chaos. Task Number One will be to swap my bedroom for my office. This great upheaval will result in the much longed for outcome of a Clean Desk without an enormous pile of papers and mail on one end, and a tower of books on the other that keeps falling over on the heads of cats and dogs. It’s going to be marvelous.

On the long ride home, though, I found myself bemused by the Gospel Coalition’s piece about the use of AI in writing. Apparently, according to some people on X, they hypocritically used AI to “aid” in the writing of the actual piece. Someone ran it through an AI detector which said, allegedly, that like 30% of it was AI. A brilliant troll (of the kind that keeps me from trashing anti-social media in order that I might gain my soul) tweeted this:

The TGC AI story is gatekeeping, pure and simple. It's an attempt at silencing our voices—an attempt that will fail.
It is not about writing, it's about who has a voice.
Would you like me to tweak this—make it shorter, more detailed, more casual, or more professional?

Which is to say, what AI has generated into the world—or rather, the wickedly naïve tech moguls who invented the AI and then forced it upon us—is catastrophic amounts of suspicion and distrust. Who is doing the writing? How can I know? Because if it isn’t a person writing it, I don’t want to read even half a sentence of whatever it is.

Personally, I doubt very much that the TGC piece, by Brett McCracken (who I assume is able to write deathless prose without the aid of this new sub-human technology), was helped by any of the available Large Language Models. But still, his first paragraph is stilted and a bit strange:

It’s an offense to the word “writing” to apply it to AI-arranged words and sentences. What AI produces is an impressively polished, usually helpful, sometimes cheeky string of words. But it’s just instantaneous pattern recognition and data organization. It’s soulless slop that can mimic and masquerade as brilliant writing. It’s aggressively efficient, speedily rendered, sycophantic information.

To me, this sounds like it was edited by so many different professional writers that whatever had originally occupied the page became tortured and awkward to the point of being unreadable. I would not say, for example, that “Writing” is a sufficiently personified concept who could therefore be offended. It would be more human and natural to say something like: AI “writing” isn’t writing and it is offensive to actual writers to say that it is. Although, having tried—and let’s be honest, failed—to rewrite that line, I must admit that the questioning suspicion goes all the way down into the very depths of my human soul. Moving on from that unsolvable problem, what, I want to know, is a “cheeky string of words?” Also, I don’t think that “information” can be “sycophantic.” People are sycophantic, not bits and bites of data or speech.

I promise, I am not changing the subject, but I happened upon a long interview at The Substack Post yesterday not about Christian writing, but about literature in general. Another AI scandal has broken open:

Last week, news broke that Jerry Falade’s debut crime novel, which had reportedly sold of $2 million after a 14-way bidding auction, had been pulled from publication by the author’s own agents over suspected AI use.

They go on to say that:

Falade, who has now obtained legal counsel, has vehemently denied the accusations. In a statement sent out to several press organizations, he wrote, “Three Black authors received major publishing deals this year, and all three later had deals cancelled or disrupted following suspicions about AI. There seems to be a troubling assumption that when a Black writer produces work that attracts significant attention, the work could not possibly be their own. Meanwhile, there are popular white writers who have publicly mentioned using AI for their writing processes and they're still doing fine.”

Several writers got together to discuss this particular crisis and the subject of AI in literature more generally. The interview was so long and interesting, if you have time to go back to it later, but meanwhile, I have pulled some quotes from “JP,” that is John Paul Brammer who I thought got quickly to nub:

JP: …What bothers me most about AI in literature is that, as much as I would love to blame Big Tech, what’s being exposed here is that we don’t have a robust literary culture. The people who are judging these things (I believe, however, that they stood by the Commonwealth story? I’ll check), are awarding this kind of prose, which, whether it was AI-generated or not, is troubling to me. I don’t think the average person needs to be reading Proust in their spare time or whatever, but the fact that the people in our culture who should be discerning readers are being broken time and again to be undiscerning makes me worried about the future of literature. AI is only accelerating and revealing it.

He goes on:

JP: …I don’t mean to say I can’t be fooled. I’m sure I have been. But for me, it’s usually pretty obvious when I read something that has that AI-affected prose. It seems to me that AI does have a certain libido for a certain style, and for certain techniques. There’s this corny animism everywhere. The bench that watches. The rock that remembers. Etc.

The “information” that was “sycophantic” as it were. Quoting him again:

JP: My basic thing is that we have a culture that defines “writer” not as something you do, but as something you produce. Writing should be in the doing. The laboring over small choices on the sentence level. A lot of people think that “writer” is an identity they are being gatekept from by dastardly effort.

And then he gets a bit sarcastic:

JP: It always struck me as odd that the tech types on social media who champion gen AI demand to be called “artists.” Like I thought you guys were ruthlessly practical and results oriented? Who cares what anyone calls you, if you have the product. But what’s interesting is that, no, it’s not all about the results for these types! They want the identity of “artist” or “writer.” It’s a spiritual thing for them, no less than it is for us. …The concept of the authentic, inner self, which is invariably some kind of artist. They don’t read or write, but they’re “writers”! It has something to say about how we approach identity generally, and the thin membrane between contemporary identity and…marketing demographic, I guess.

And then, finally, the bit that brought me round to the lections appointed for today if you didn’t move the Feast of the Transfiguration to Sunday:

JP: I’m buying low on “being literate.” I’ve written about this before, but I do think it’s an exciting time to be a reader and a writer. Reading has a heroic valence to it in the LLM era. Imagine that! you’re fighting the system by reading a book. You're a prodigy for “using your own words.” I love when the bar is in hell.

That’s just about where we expected to find our old friend, Jonah, who, when the word of the ^LORD came to him should have used his heart and vocal chords and tongue and mouth and lips to utter the blessed and happy words, “Yes, of course, let it be to me according to your will etc.” and then followed up with the obedient action of traveling with all speed to Nineveh to speak the words of that same Word. But he didn’t want to. Instead he lied to everyone by omission and then chose the raging chaos of the sea rather than risk his enemies hearing God’s cataclysmic words of truth and then amending their lives accordingly. He isn’t exactly in hell. He is in the dark tomb of a large fish.

And I think, reading Jonah’s great and perfect prayer from the belly of that fish, I have always been inclined to meditate on how dark it must have been, how uncomfortable and cold, and how foolish Jonah was to run from the presence of God. I generally feel sorry for him, and ask God never to let such a damp fate befall me.

What I hadn’t really noticed before is all the speaking Jonah does. Having, in the first chapter, been taciturn and silent except for admitting, publicly, that he is trying to get away from his God—the way that so many of us just run our mouths and reveal the dark contents of our hearts without intending to—in the prayer he twice refers to his own “voice.” He did speak, it seems. When he finally understood what actual chaos portended, he did something astonishing. He “called out” to the Lord.

Was it some kind of inarticulate cry? Did he say a formal and solemn prayer? Did he rehearse to himself in words and images all that he had done and why? Whatever it was, it was audible. He used his voice to speak to God—the God whose voice Jonah had disregarded—and God heard Jonah’s voice and then responded with salvation and mercy. I’m sure you have it memorized, but here is the Prayer if you need a little refresher:

“I called out to the Lord, out of my distress,
and he answered me;
out of the belly of Sheol I cried,
and you heard my voice.
For you cast me into the deep,
into the heart of the seas,
and the flood surrounded me;
all your breakers and your waves
passed over me.
Then I said, ‘I am driven away
from your sight;
yet I shall again look
upon your holy temple.’
The waters closed in over me to take my life;
the deep surrounded me;
weeds were wrapped about my head.
To the roots of the mountains I went down,
to the land whose bars closed upon me forever.
Yet you brought up my life from the pit,
O Lord my God.
When my life was fainting away,
I remembered the Lord,
and my prayer came to you,
into your holy temple.
Those who pay regard to vain idols
forsake their hope of steadfast love.
But I with the voice of thanksgiving
will sacrifice to you;
what I have vowed I will pay.
Salvation belongs to the Lord!”

So then, as I’m sure you remember, the Lord “spoke” to the fish who then “vomited” Jonah onto the dry land. And the lectionary arrangers thought fit, quite cleverly I think, to pair this Prayer of Jonah’s with Psalm 29 which, in the middle, goes like this:

The voice of the Lord is over the waters;
the God of glory thunders,
the Lord, over many waters.
The voice of the Lord is powerful;
the voice of the Lord is full of majesty.

The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars;
the Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon.
He makes Lebanon to skip like a calf,
and Sirion like a young wild ox.

The voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire.
The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness;
the Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.

The voice of the Lord makes the deer give birth
and strips the forests bare,
and in his temple all cry, “Glory!”

And all of that sets the obedient Sunday Church Goer up quite nicely to languish in the boat with the disciples in the middle of the storm while Jesus stays on the mountain to pray for a while, having finally dispersed the comfortable and satisfied crowds back to their villages.

The difference between Jonah and the disciples is that they have only done what they ought, and their reward is to be just as terrified as that rebellious prophet. They’d endured a long day of listening to Jesus teach and preach and heal the sick. And in the late afternoon it had almost ended in total disaster. Anywhere from 5 to 20 thousand people out in a desolate place with nothing to eat is a catastrophe of biblical proportions. Which makes Jesus’ miracle of the bread and the fish to feed all those sheep searching for a Shepherd so marvelous. It must have greatly astonished them all. As the crowds drifted away, I think the disciples would have longed to take some rest, to think upon the mighty acts of their friend in a moment of quiet reflection, but Jesus wants to pray and not with them around apparently. So they get in the boat and try to cross “the sea.” And there’s the storm. And then Jesus, well, let’s let Matthew tell it in his own words:

And in the fourth watch of the night he came to them, walking on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, and said, “It is a ghost!” and they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them, saying, “Take heart; it is I. Do not be afraid.”

And Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water and came to Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid, and beginning to sink he cried out, “Lord, save me.” Jesus immediately reached out his hand and took hold of him, saying to him, “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?” And when they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

Here also, in the midst of the raging storm, I haven’t often noticed what must have felt like an interminable conversation, the discursive effort to get to the nub, which is Trust. Jesus “spoke to them” when they were so terrified, telling them not to be afraid. He let the storm rage on, knowing that he could calm it, as indeed he does. But only after Peter in some strange recapitulation of Jonah, asked Jesus to “command” him to come to him on the water. Jesus, Matthew reports, “said, ‘Come.’” But then Peter began to sink and so, like Jonah, he “cried out,” only we do get to know what he said. It is the most rational thing to say when you find yourself in such a predicament. It is sublimely simple. It is not some kind of strange string of descriptors punctuated by page breaks. It is the phrase that causes all internal, if not immediately all external storms to cease. “Lord, save me,” cries Peter. And the effect of this cry? The Lord saves him.

Philipp Otto Runge - Pedro sobre el mar - 1806

It might be disheartening to watch the chaos of distrust and suspicion, even amongst Christians, rise up like an overpowering wave, threatening to destroy any possibility of peace and comfort. On the other hand, it’s not like we past-moderns are doing anything our ancestors haven’t. All they lacked was the means that we now possess to lie to ourselves, to confuse one voice with another, to make a chaos of words and noise.

But the Voice of the Lord is over our waters and our AI and our confusion. The Voice of the Lord breaks through our technology. The Voice of the Lord has power to calm any storm, to bring about order. And if you want to hear it, clearly and unmistakably, you can take your Bible with you when you go to Church and crack it open and measure what the people there are saying against what is on the page. And when you feel helpless and hopeless sitting there in your pew, you can practice being Peter or Jonah. “Lord save me” you can cry, and he will.

Hope to see you there!