A new spin on hearing it from the horse's mouth

One of the confounding realities of resuming a broken annual tradition – you can blame COVID-19 for the rupture – is that the time warp, from the past to the present, is sobering and tangible. 

As I walked among my 350 colleagues from the Catholic Media Association last week in Baltimore for the 2023 Catholic Media Conference, I was mindful that because of the pandemic, I had not attended a convention of Catholic journalists since 2018 in Green Bay, long before Aaron Rodgers ever slipped into a 21st-century cave for his first “darkness retreat.”

A certain sign of growing old(er) – as sure as walking into a convenience store when you are in your late 20s and having the clerk ask, “How can I help you, SIR?” – is that the crowd of Catholic journalists toting their iPads and wearing their Apple watches and Bose earbuds gets younger, smarter and more enthusiastic every year.

That’s a great sign for the Catholic Church and for Catholic journalism, because in a media world progressively anchored by the opaque algorithms of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), we need human beings with actual souls to carry the torch for a media “brand” – the Good News of Jesus Christ – that can be trusted. 

Daughter of St. Paul Sister Rose Pacatte is one of those “seasoned” Catholic journalists. She has been in this business for more than 50 years and is the director of the Pauline Center for Media Studies in Los Angeles, peering at all media through a faith lens.

In her fascinating keynote address on the potential of A.I. for good as well as for ill, the nun in her blue and white habit dished out grammar school common sense. A.I. has proven it can create stories, essays, term papers, books, photographs and videos and even replicate someone’s voice, meaning you literally could put words in someone’s mouth.

But, sometimes, as Sister Rose said she learned in her first interaction with A.I., it admits that it “hallucinates” when it comes up with a wrong answer. Oops, my bad. Anyone who has seen Pope Francis miraculously hooping it up on the basketball court shortly after being released from the hospital can testify to the eerie power of A.I. to permanently alter reality.

A.I. has seemingly unlimited potential to help doctors, lawyers, scientists, mathematicians, teachers and even priests search an infinite database of knowledge for the purpose of distilling best practices, solving problems and even preparing homilies. 

But how does that power work in the hands of students “writing” their own essays, and what are the inherent dangers of plagiarism?

Who determines what type of information is fed into the A.I. system to produce the “correct” answer?

What money holds the controlling interest?

What biases and stereotypes are in play?

How can we discern truth from fiction?

Can fake news get any “faker”?

Well, I have $100 that says we’re going to find out in the hours and days ahead, because that “fake news” horse is not only out of the barn, it is Secretariat lapping the field at the 1973 Belmont. 

What did Secretariat say after embarrassing the Triple Crown field by 31 lengths? Let’s go right to the source and ask the horse, he’ll give you an answer that you’ll endorse: “Slow horses eat as much as fast horses. I need a raise.”

Mr. Ed has the transcript. You could look it up, Wilbur.

Some of A.I.’s responses are innocuous fun. Sister Rose signed up for ChatGPT and asked: “Can you give me some good jokes to kick off my speech to a group of Catholic journalists?”

Not only did A.I. offer some corny jokes; it also breezily explained the corny jokes.

I decided to try it out, and here’s what the A.I. joke machine offered: “Why did the Catholic journalist always have the best headlines? Because they had a direct line to the ‘Pope-ular’ opinion!”

And yes, for the slow-witted, there was an explanation: “This joke is a wordplay on the phrase ‘popular opinion’ and the word ‘Pope-ular.’ It suggests that the Catholic journalist has an advantage in writing engaging headlines because they have a direct connection or insight into the opinions and views of the Pope, who is a significant figure in the Catholic Church.”

Sharp readers will say A.I. still needs some grammar lessons (“the Catholic journalist” … “they”), but let’s save that for another class.

Sister Rose says it is more important than ever for high schools, colleges and graduate schools to teach media literacy – she calls it “media mindfulness” – because it is so easy these days to turn lies into truth. Currently, she said, there are no colleges or universities in the U.S. offering graduate degrees in media literacy.

“There’s a desert out there,” she said.

As Catholics, we must view all news and news sources skeptically – can I trust this outlet because of my previous experience with it? – but we cannot fall into cynicism.

If there is any good news about Secretariat talking to reporters, it is that Catholic publications draw from a 2,000-year wellspring of trustworthiness. 

Go right to the source.

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