Bible

I have a paper that emphasizes ChatGPT errors. It is important to recognize that LLMs can make mistakes. However, someone could look at our data and emphasize the opposite potential interpretation. On many points, and even when coming up with citations, the LLM generated correct sentences. More than half of the content was good.

You can read ChatGPT’s take on a wide variety of topics within economics, in the appendix of our paper. The journal hosts it at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/05694345231218454/suppl_file/sj-pdf-1-aex-10.1177_05694345231218454.pdf If that link does not work then the appendix has been up on SSRN since June in the form of the old version of the paper.

Apparently, LLMs just solved an unsolvable math problem. Is there anything they can’t do? Considering how much of human expression and culture revolves around religion, we can expect AI’s to get involved in that aspect of life.

Alex thinks it will be a short hop from Personal Jesus Chatbot to a whole new AI religion. We’ll see. People have had “LLMs” in the form of human pastors, shaman, or rabbis for a long time, and yet sticking to one sacred text for reference has been stable. I think people might feel the same way in the AI era – stick to the canon for a common point of reference. Text written before the AI era will be considered special for a long time, I predict. Even AI’s ought to be suspicious of AI-generated content, just in the way that humans are now (or are they?).

Many religious traditions have lots of training literature. (In our ChatGPT errors paper, we expect LLMs to produce reliable content on topics for which there is plentiful training literature.)

I gave ChatGPT this prompt:

Can you write a Bible study? I’d like this to be appropriate for the season of Advent, but I’d like most of the Bible readings to be from the book of Job. I’d like to consider what Job was going through, because he was trying to understand the human condition and our relationship to God before the idea of Jesus. Job had a conception of the goodness of God, but he didn’t have the hope of the Gospel. Can you work with that?

Continue reading →

Sarah Ruden is an scholar of ancient literature who has translated classic works such as The Aeneid. Her new book is an English translation of the 4 first books of the Bible’s New Testament, the Gospels.

If you buy a standard Bible, there is usually only a 2-page preface to a 500+ page book. Ruden’s introduction and glossary takes up closer to 50 of the first pages. I would pay just to read the introduction. Ruden describes what it was like, as a professional translator of classics, to approach the Gospels. A reader who is already familiar with the Bible will learn as much from this introduction as from the translation itself. It’s rare to hear the Gospels discussed simply as books instead of as weapons wielded by all sides of the culture wars. I found it interesting to learn about how the Gospels, stylistically, compare to other ancient texts.

Ruben’s enthusiasm for listening to the voices of ancient writers is contagious. She makes it all sound so interesting that anyone, regardless of their previous stance on god (the lowercase g is her idea of what the ancients would write), will want to keep reading. Speaking as someone who has already read the New Testament, I have never been more excited to read the Gospels as I was after finishing Ruden’s introduction. Ruden promises to deliver to modern readers the voices of the ancient writers, with as much accuracy as possible.

Continue reading →