Does the process matter?

On AI and the value of struggle.

My daughter, the one who is a freshman in high school, mentioned something about writing a paper using Magisterium AI as a resource. This tool, developed by Longbeard, an outfit dedicated to building Catholic AI, combs a database containing over 11,700 Vatican documents to respond to your engineered prompt. I poked around on it this morning. Admittedly, it is fast and easy. And, at least you know the data source is solid.

But, is fast and easy always best? Is there any value in the process? Perseverance? Struggle? Is there any value in searching for an answer? In other words, attaining the end matters. Achieving the goal is important. But how one gets there makes a difference for the human person and shapes the human person.

In the human question for knowledge, AI eliminates the struggle from the experience. With AI, the challenge lies in engineering the right prompt to get the answers you want, as opposed to struggling through your own research to get the answers you need. The person and the struggle of the quest both drop out of the equation.

Does this matter?

For our efficiency-driven culture, probably not. It seems that speed matters more. And, AI delivers in this regard.

But, what about for the human person? Does the process matter? Does the trial of the quest matter? Albeit limited, I will offer a few responses.

First, I’d like to draw from Matthew Crawford over at Archedelia. In his article, “AI as self-erasure,” Crawford relates the story of a father struggling to find the right words for the toast at his daughter’s wedding. At the end of his creative rope, he turned to ChatGPT for help. The man said:

He gave a few prompts to ChatGPT, facts about her life, and sure enough it came back with a pretty good wedding toast. Maybe better than what he would have written. But in the end he didn’t use it, and composed his own. This strikes me as telling, and the intuition that stopped him from deferring to the AI is worth bringing to the surface. To use the machine-generated speech would have been to absent himself from this significant moment in the life of his daughter, and in his own life. It would have been to not show up for her wedding, in some sense.

The father would not have shown up because he would not have been involved (yes, that painful reality) in a totally passive exercise of ChatGPT writing one of the most important public affirmations of his daughter’s life. Removing the person from the process, in this case, might have resulted in a more eloquent speech, but it would have stripped it of sincerity and emptied it of meaning somehow — drawing as it would from impersonal data and Internet niceties instead of from the living memory of a father.

Just one more example.

When I was preparing for doctoral work, Dr. Gerard O’Shea, my dissertation supervisor, informed me that if I already knew the answer to my question, there was no sense in going through the painful process of pursuing the doctorate. Right off the bat, then, the whole thing was framed up as a quest. This effectively purified it of any utilitarian purposes. The thing became a matter of the truth and pursuing it.

Next, he led me through one of the most painful mental processes I’ve ever endured. He called it “reading broadly.” This meant reading over 100 books, chapters, or articles in the general direction of my intellectual interest. The goal was to expand my mind (read: blow my mind to smithereens). I needed to taste how much was out there, how much had already been said. I needed to have my own questions expanded and reworked altogether. I needed to realize how little I knew and how small the human mind is in relation to the truth about things and the cultural inheritance of thought about such things. I needed to realize that my mind doesn’t exist on its own, but it is indebted to generations of human inquiry and struggle and insight.

As I persevered, I felt my mind expanding to the point of oblivion. Eventually, I wasn’t sure if I could speak well anymore or generate a coherent thought. I certainly felt as though I had nothing consequential to say. My head was like an oversaturated sponge. Wet and oozing.

After he broke my brain, Gerard set out to put it back together. This meant combing through my notes with me. It meant homing in on questions that emerged that mattered to me. It meant peering down fruitful tangents. It meant reading more. Reading authors who held contradictory opinions — antithetical ones. All of this amounted to identifying and articulating my “burning question.” The burning question the question I would attempt to answer with the dissertation. And, I do mean attempt. It was an attempt at best, and by no means definitive.

Once I could articulate the question, you know what that meant? Multiple iterations of additional broad reading. More and more mind-blowing research for each of the four chapters.

“A doctorate is a test of character,” Gerard would say. Another mentor of mine said there are two types of people with doctorates. The first are pure geniuses whose minds are like huge databases from which they can quickly and easily draw forth the necessary knowledge. The second type are those who simply work hard. “Most,” he said, “fall into the latter category.” I certainly do.

A test of character is just that, a test. It is a trial. It requires struggle and doing hard things. For me, the doctoral pursuit was humbling beyond what I could have imagined. It introduced me to authors I would have never encountered and fruitful mental tangents I would have likely never traversed if it wasn’t for the struggle. It generated questions I would have never asked, or thought to ask. It made me confront the idealism I have about myself and my mental capacities, and helped me realize my own limitations. It led me to converse with people, with experts across the globe, I would have never had reason to contact otherwise. It led me to receive critical feedback that, in the moment, seems completely crippling. The kind of feedback from another person that puts you in your place. (AI can’t do that for you. Only another human being with a perspective outside your own can.)

Perhaps most importantly, the struggle led me to prayer. And, in leading me to prayer, it led me to waiting. Waiting for God to respond. Waiting for wisdom. And, his voice came. It came after hours of struggling while I was taking a walk down the street. It came in a seemingly random conversation over coffee about a topic unrelated to my research interest. It came from observing my children. It came at Mass when I couldn’t help but be distracted by my thoughts and God came anyway.

“Your life will teach you,” Dr. Petroc Willey told me. “So, pay attention to your life.”

There’s no AI for life. You can’t engineer a prompt to get a desired response for real life. You can only enter into the mystery of it. At least that’s what seems to be the invitation at any moment — if we can lift our gaze from the glowing screen.

Yes, there’s no AI for life. You can only struggle through it and, on the other side, come out a different person. “A doctorate changes you,” my priest mentor and friend, Msgr. Frank Lane once told me. “You’re a different person now. You can’t go back.” It’s not the letters “PhD” after someone’s name that changes them. It’s not the end result. At least not exclusively. It’s the process that changes them. Or, at least it should, if we are still faithful to the quest and don’t avoid it altogether by engineering efficiencies to the point of stripping the human person of the value of struggle.

A personal process of engagement puts you in your place. AI, for all its benefits, can’t never be able to do that.