AI-dolatry

That's Bruce's coinage, from an email, though likely one that's been independently invented by others as well. I thought it was precisely apropos and replied:

Idolatry is exactly what it is: taking something we ourselves have made -- human-created software mindlessly plagiarizing and imitating human-created content -- and treating it as some font of wisdom. When [a fellow Christian blogger] wrote that he was "pretty spooked" [by the apparent quality of "AI"-produced content], I couldn't help but think of that comment of Nietzsche's about painting a scary face and then being scared by it.

"Their land also is full of idols," wrote Isaiah. "They worship the work of their own hands, that which their own fingers have made" (Isa. 2:8). No one in the ancient world actually did that. No one actually thought that they had created Baal with their own fingers, or that their statue of Zeus was the great Cloudgatherer who had defeated the Titans. "Idolatry" as lampooned by Isaiah and his school, never really existed.

Until now.

Well, sort of. No one is (yet) worshiping Fake Intelligence as a god, but what they are doing is something even the most benighted Baal-worshiper never did outside of the prophetic satires: treating the work of our own hands, that which human fingers have made, not as a symbol or a channel but as a source of actual intelligence, even of a superior intelligence to which they defer.

The late great Gene Ray, self-proclaimed Greatest Thinker and Wisest Human, once said, "Talking dog could enslave humanity." A few short decades later, something considerably stupider than a talking dog has proved him right.