I expected my article on ChatGPT to cause a stir, but I still wasn’t fully prepared for what I had set myself up for. In response to a number of ways I articulated students and pastors can use ChatGPT, my friend Jordan Steffaniak published an article in response. He argued that the dangers inherent in ChatGPT outweigh any perceived benefits and necessitate leaving ChatGPT alone.
In response to Steffaniak’s emphatic “No!” I’d like to offer a resounding “Yes!”[1] But before we can look at Jordan’s article, we first need to take step back to address the necessary theological framework to approach cultural issues by drawing on the work of Andy Crouch.
A Theology of Cultural Engagement
In his helpful book Culture Making, Andy Crouch provides four common approaches to culture: Condemning, Critiquing, Copying, and Consuming Culture. It seems that Jordan’s self-professed luddite tendencies betray marks of the Critiquing Culture model.
In the Critiquing Culture model, engagement with culture is understood as “critiquing them carefully to show how they are inadequate or misguided.”[2] However, little else is done in terms of positive engagement with the culture. Jordan’s article doesn’t offer “cautions” or “challenges” with using ChatGPT. Instead, he simply offers problems with ChatGPT, contending the “latent nefarious potential [of ChatGPT] is so potent and corrupting that while tools like ChatGPT can theoretically be employed harmlessly, even beneficially, the risk is not worth the reward.”
Crouch points out the obvious problem when one only critiques culture: “Critique and analysis very rarely change culture at all.”[3] To be sure, thoughtfully investigating cultural artifacts like ChatGPT must occur when interacting with culture, but merely boycotting ChatGPT will no more change the culture than railing at a fiddling Nero would have put out the fire in Rome. We have to offer more than an emphatic “No!”
Instead, Crouch proposes the idea of cultivation in which “people…tend and nourish what is best in human culture…[and] do the hard and painstaking work to preserve the best of what people before us have done.”[4] Of course, there is room to critique in this model, but Crouch argues “those who have cultivated and created are precisely the ones who have the legitimacy to condemn—whose denunciations, rare and carefully chosen, carry outsize weight.”[5] I propose that Crouch has cast the right vision for cultural engagement. This model of Cultivating Culture should be the posture that we should employ when confronted with cultural artifacts like ChatGPT.
And it does seem that we can approach ChatGPT with a posture of cultivation, as there is nothing inherently problematic to ChatGPT. Even Jordan avers (all the while disagreeing with the use of ChatGPT), “While tools like ChatGPT can theoretically be employed harmlessly, even beneficially, the risk is not worth the reward” (emphasis mine). In other words, his problems with ChatGPT are not inherent to AI. ChatGPT is a cultural artifact that can be cultivated. Indeed, in Crouch’s analysis, ChatGPT must be cultivated.
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