Are We Producing Human Bots?

Most of us move through an education system we didn’t design—and rarely have the opportunity to question.

Fr. Ambrose Criste, O.Praem., does. Speaking at an AI conference in Rome, he traces the roots of modern schooling to systems built for efficiency and output—and asks whether Catholic education is still operating within a model not originally designed for human formation.

Catholic education, he argues, has a deeper purpose: the formation of the human person, ultimately ordered toward the salvation of souls. Everything else—grades, college, career—follows from that.

His response to the AI moment is not a better system of production, but a renewed vision of what a human being is—and what education is for.

Timestamps:

• 0:00 Intro: The True Purpose of Education
• 1:03 Meet Father Ambrose
• 1:34 How the Church is Actually Using AI
• 4:08 The Problem with "Factory" Schools
• 8:18 Why AI Will Never Have True Intelligence
• 9:32 The Hidden Dangers of Tech Algorithms
• 13:17 Why AI Can't Replace Human Teachers
• 15:36 Using AI as a Teaching Tool
• 17:23 Finding Hope in Screen-Free Schools

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Catholic education is about the salvation of the souls of the students and also the souls of the teachers and administrators. It's about the salvation of souls. It's the mission of the church to populate the kingdom of heaven with people who are saved in Jesus Christ. Everything else is downstream from that, whether it's learning math or learning science or getting into a good college or getting a good job, all of that is far downstream from the goal in view, which is the salvation of souls. Okay. To the degree that artificial intelligence can serve as a positive tool for that end of real authentic Christian human formation, great. Where it impedes that or becomes part of the mechanistic do-way Prussian model of just producing factory bots, we should throw it out.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

Well, Father Ambrose, uh, thank you so much for joining us in the Gregorian studio uh and being here for the Builders AI Forum.

SPEAKER_00 1:07

It's my pleasure. Thank you for the invitation, Ben. I'm happy to be here. Always happy to be in Rome and uh happy to be speaking with you today.

SPEAKER_01 1:14

Yeah, no, we're we're we're very, very um blessed. And on this first day here at the forum, uh, Father, I wanted to I wanted to speak with you a little bit about AI and education in particular and to look at how um AI is accelerating certain opportunities in the education space and also kind of the problems that you see in in your work, uh, in particular with the Evermote Institute.

SPEAKER_00 1:34

My Confairs and I have developed an online curriculum to teach the faith to Catholic school teachers and administrators. The Catholic school system is kind of a disaster in America. It needs renewal, and one piece that needs renewal is the catechetical formation of the faculty and administration. Okay, so that's what we're working on. We use AI for that in this way. We we've developed an online platform. My developers, in fact, the developer was a cameraman who taught himself how to code by using AI technology online right now to build out a platform. Wow. So that's a very practical, immediate technical use of AI that's been extremely successful in my experience. Now, that's not in the classroom, that's behind what's going on in the classroom. My my team of lay people who help us Norbert teens to film, well, create, film, and then deploy our catechetical curriculum, use AI to help generate um texts, um, scripts. I never use those just off the shelf, as it were, from AI. It always needs a human touch. But the team of people who help me to do what I do best as a priest, kind of with the public face of this program, they can line up for me the working materials from which I can then do my priestly work. It's like a research tool almost, or um uh it's a Bible, it's a library. I almost said biblioteca because we're in Italy, but it's a library of a sort that then I can reference and then do my work. Okay, so that's been extremely helpful so far as a tool. The I see future possibilities in this. Uh, for example, we've rolled out the curriculum in an archdiocese that is mostly English speaking, but with a heavily um uh heavy Spanish-speaking component. And so the teachers are asking me, is this curriculum in Spanish? And I tell them, well, no. But within the next 12 months, I would like to put the whole curriculum in Spanish, and AI will help me to do that. Me and my team. We'll be able to take all of the filmed contents. As it is right now, we can generate transcripts in all the languages. But I'm interested to see how AI technology can help us to refine, hone, sharpen the instruments that we already have created, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 4:07

What do you think when you look at the broader landscape in Catholic education needs to change so that there is that proper formation where people know what life is really truly about?

SPEAKER_00 4:17

Okay, so that's a great question. And actually, it's the intersection of where this technology meets one of the big problems, which is a more theoretical problem with education as such. Much of American education, I'd say all of Western education, but it's obvious my experiences in America, as in the United States, and in Catholic schools also, we have adopted the Dewey model, the Dewey model of a very utilitarian approach to education. So you get a good grade, you get into a good college, you get a good job so that you can make a lot of money and rinse, wash, and repeat through the generations. This is not human. This is capitalism. This is the industrial revolution of the 19th century and before, philosophically before, applied to education, so that it's a factory-line production. It reaches back to Prussia. It was a military thing. You know, even the fact that students sit in rows in seats. I've been too excited and having trouble just focusing on the phone. All of this and the bell rings, all of this is modeled on military formation so that we can um deploy an army of utilitarian bots in a capitalistic culture for production. That's where it comes from. It's not human. So rethinking or re-remembering what the formation of the person is, what Catholic education is, what education is. You know, we can look all the way back to the pre-Christian times of the Greeks and the Romans about virtue. What is virtue? What is what does it mean to be a human being as such? And then how do we form someone into the life where they can be happy, a life of virtue? And ultimately, of course, as Christians, we know that means a life of grace, sanctifying grace. We need to help. So this is all very, I know it's a very high level. This is kind of 30,000-foot theoretical conversation so far, but I'm going to make it practical. I'll try to make it practical. Education, Catholic education is about the salvation of the souls of the students and also the souls of the teachers and administrators. It's about the salvation of souls. It's the mission of the church to populate the kingdom of heaven with people who are saved in Jesus Christ. Everything else is downstream from that, whether it's learning math or learning science or getting into a good college or getting a good job, all of that is far downstream from the goal in view, which is the salvation of souls. Okay. To the degree that artificial intelligence can serve as a positive tool for that end of real authentic Christian human formation, great. Where it impedes that or becomes part of the mechanistic do-a-prussian model of just producing factory bots, we should throw it out. So I think that this is the role of teachers in the classroom to say, listen, we need to get it might be, and again, I'm kind of a purist about this. I went to a liberal arts college, I was trained by the Jesuits, I went to a Jesuit boys' school. I this and I'm a middle-aged man. I grew up without any of this stuff. And I think it's really devastating for young people to be on a screen all the time. I think that in an ideal Catholic family, a a child would not even have a screen in front of him or her ever. Seriously, ever until maybe they're 12 or 15. They would never have an access to the internet or a cell phone until they're 18. Now, is that going to happen in North America? Probably not. So, but how can we avoid the dangers of artificial intelligence and other technologies that make that give us the illusion of somehow knowing when in fact we've just outboarded all of that exploration and cognition and mental exploration to a machine. So that's a real chat, that's a theoretical challenge. And I think that the answer to that comes down, Ben, to what is artificial intelligence? It's not ever going to be intelligence, but it will always be artificial. Because intelligence is something that requires a rational soul. Only humans and angels and demons have such a soul. So all of it is just simply an artifact. It's a technological artifact. And it can't replace human intelligence. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_01 8:52

But but Father, what what do you what do you say to that when when almost on some level, like the underlying principles of this technology are embedded in a transhumanist ideology, which is which is, of course, uh the opposite on so many levels to the faith or the the or the the truths of the faith?

SPEAKER_00 9:08

I think that um, well, it means that we have to be very circumspect and prudent, prudent about how we use it, how we deploy it, knowing that this technology is not necessarily in its creation at the service of a common good. And is it at the service of an evil end? I'm not convinced of that. I don't know that it's it's just I think it's morally neutral. Um, I was having a conversation earlier today with somebody who who was in Silicon Valley, very, very well placed in all of the big companies that you would know from Intel to Microsoft to Amazon. And he was describing how um the engineering departments were, you know, creating all of the algorithms that we all live with. Um I'll just use one as an example that you know, the algorithms on, let's say, something like Amazon or Amazon Prime are designed specifically to capitalize upon those people in the ecosystem who are going to become addicted to the use of this platform. So what does that settle into? It settles into the people who have the least amount of money, but the greatest propensity to spend on loan, to rack up debt. And that's the demographic that is most lucrative, which is of course not human at all. In fact, it's abusive. But the but the technology itself is not concerned about that because what was the motivation creating it to capitalize to algorithms, AI-generated algorithms that cap that make it the bottom line, the supreme end. And it doesn't matter who they're stomping all over or ruining, whose lives they're ruining to get to that end. Okay, so that means that we Catholics and people who are thinking about these and willing to use these technologies, we can supply the proper end in view. We can say, okay, listen, the bottom line is not the be all end all, but the common good of a culture or the individual good of the soul concerned, the person concerned, is more important than the instrument instrumentalization of that person for a capitalistic end or some other end that would be just using the person as an instrument. We can provide that. Now, can we change the can we inform the, as you said, a transhuman motivation that is at the very origin of that? Maybe if we convince the people, the so-called Silicon Valley giants who are really the the the drivers of this movement, if we can convince them that there's a higher good than the bottom line. Now, I mean, that's really what the church has always been. We're supposed to be a light in the world, right? The church is the light, Christ is the light of the world, and we reflect that light. Not everyone's going to see it. And that means that we, like I said, we have to be circumspect and prudent about how we use a technology that is going to be inclined to the instrument toward the instrumentalization of the human person. What does that mean? Like I said, I think for a family, it means probably don't give your child an iPhone until they're 18. That's the that seems to me, as a priest, to be a very prudent thing. Now, then you then of course I don't have a family of my own. So I don't know what that's like to have the 12-year-old come home and say, but all of my friends have one. Then you, of course, have the movement of families to say, well, you know what? We probably shouldn't have our kids in the public school then, and probably not in the Catholic school then either, unless the Catholic school is the kind that is on board with that approach. So then we think, okay, well, are we going to circle the wagon so much that our children then don't engage with the culture at all? Well, no, that's not probably a good idea either. So I'm highlighting for you, Ben, and for our viewers and listeners just how deeply we need to think about the ramifications of the individual choices we make in the application, in the use of these technologies. It's important, these are important decisions at every moment.

SPEAKER_01 13:17

And I guess, Father, where would you draw the line in the classroom as as well?

SPEAKER_00 13:23

I'm strongly against the replacement of person-to-person education in the classroom for education of elementary school or high school or probably even university. I think that that's a bad idea to try to replace real professors and teachers. And, you know, education is a leading, it's to lead out educare, is to lead out out of darkness into the into the light, out of ignorance into knowledge. That requires a human being who leads somebody who is the teacher, almost like taking somebody by the hand and bringing them, come along with me. I want to show you what I know, what I've discovered. Let's go look for the truth together. A machine can never be that. Where could we use it? Well, like I was describing the work that I'm doing, I think that we can use it as a tool to help those people, those real human people, do their work. So this program that my converts and I have put together is, as I said, is virtual. The teachers either watch videos together as a faculty and then discuss them, or they go home, depending on their school, and they watch the videos and then they have their assessment questions. Okay, so I'm interested to see over the next nine to 12 months how we can use AI technology as a personal teaching agent, personal learning, so that that teacher watches the video and AI helps them, helps us to assess have they learned what they need to learn from that video. You know, what was important to you? And then the AI can they they type something in or speak something back. Then the AI says, okay, well, did you think about this? So, and that's I think that we are at a point where the technology can do that. And that way, without my being able to teach personally 2,500 educators across the country to be sure that they watch, that they heard what I said or my confair said and understood it. We can use AI technology to do that. These are adults, these are busy people, and they're the ones who are teaching the children. Now, would I I would not want to replicate that in the classroom for the 12-year-old or the 18-year-old or even for the 20-year-old. But I think it's a tool that can help at the back end to prepare the teacher. It's very similar to, you know, I preach a lot. We priests have a lot of work to do, but we have, we have to be able to access, let's say, I want to know what St. John Chrysostom says about this passage of the scriptures. I can use the computer for that. I can go back to my library shelf where I have St. Thomas Aquinas' Catena Aurea. It was a technology from the 13th century where he took the fathers, digested them according to the gospels. So I can look at this chapter and verse. St. Thomas Aquinas did this for me. It's an AI technology from the 13th century, right? It's a tool. And I can pull that off my shelf and I can look, okay, here's what St. John Chrysostom says in St. Augustine. And, you know, a kind of it's a but it's material. And and it's of great use to me in my preaching. And I can prepare my homily from that. And I put the book back on the shelf. And then I preach. I write the homily. I prepare the homily, but I preach. And that in the background is a technology that's helped me. I think similarly, like I just described, the AI engagement with the contents of the Evermode Institute curriculum can be that for the teacher. They're learning the faith. And then now he or she tells the students who is Jesus Christ, what is the sacrament? How does the life of grace inform my work as a biology teacher for the freshman in high school? The AI is not doing that. The teacher is doing that. And our program, assisted by AI at some very minimal level right now, but it could be more, is helping the teacher to be prepared well to do the teaching. Does that make sense? It's an instrument, it's a tool, it's a sharp tool. It can never replace the human.

SPEAKER_01 17:21

I love that. And and Father, one final question. Um, what are you most excited about to get out of this uh uh edition of the Builders AI form here in Rome? And kind of a follow-up to that is what what is giving you hope when you look at the Catholic educational landscape in general?

SPEAKER_00 17:35

Okay, two good questions. A conference like this is always an opportunity to network with some of the people who are doing the most good and who are the the sharpest instruments or the sharpest tools in the in the toolbox in God's kingdom right now, thinking very creatively, working very hard. These are the the movers and the shakers. And that's really fun to be in a group of people like that and to have conversations like this that we're having right now, or or hearing from people in the conference contents, but especially in the networking that happens around it, to see where our worlds intersect and where we can support each other. I'm excited about that. I always look forward to that in this kind of a conference. It's my first time at the Builders AI forum so far. It's been a great day. I'm most, and you the other one was what am I excited about in Catholic education? What gives you hope? Yeah. Uh what gives me hope? This is gonna sound strange given that this is a conversation about AI. What gives me hope are those places like the Chesterton Academies, the um classical um Catholic startup schools, very often outside of the kind of on the periphery of ordinary Catholic education, where families, parents, teachers, um, and also sometimes clergy, but that's usually not where the motivation comes from, are throwing themselves into the best of the old. Why can we put a school together where there is no screen, where there's no screen time? That gives me hope. Is that weird for AI? I understand. That gives me hope because I know that those people will be the ones who will understand how best to confront the challenges when they come up against them.

unknown 19:18

Beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 19:18

Well, Father Ambrose, thank you so much for your time. This has been wonderful. Thank you, Ben.