Whether it's AI or us, it's OK to be ignorant

Our search for answers begins by recognising that we don’t have them.

Simon Walters

Simon Walters is Curate at Holy Trinity Huddersfield.

A street sticker displays multiple lines reading 'and then?'

Stephen Harlan on Unsplash.

When was the last time you admitted you didn’t know something? I don’t say it as much as I ought to. I’ve certainly felt the consequences of admitting ignorance – of being ridiculed for being entirely unaware of a pop culture reference, of being found out that I wasn’t paying as close attention to what my partner was saying as she expected. In a hyper-connected age when the wealth of human knowledge is at our fingertips, ignorance can hardly be viewed as a virtue.

A recent study on the development of artificial intelligence holds out more hope for the value of admitting our ignorance than we might have previously imagined. Despite wide-spread hype and fearmongering about the perils of AI, our current models are in many ways developed in similar ways to how an animal is trained. An AI system such as ChatGPT might have access to unimaginable amounts of information, but it requires training by humans on what information is valuable or not, whether it has appropriately understood the request it has received, and whether its answer is correct. The idea is that human feedback helps the AI to hone its model through positive feedback for correct answers, and negative feedback for incorrect answers, so that it keeps whatever method led to positive feedback and changes whatever method led to negative feedback. It really isn’t that far away from how animals are trained.

However, a problem has emerged. AI systems have become adept at giving coherent and convincing sounding answers that are entirely incorrect. How has this happened?

This is a tool; it is good at some tasks, and less good at others. And, like all tools, it does not have an intrinsic morality.

In digging into the training method for AI, the researchers found that the humans training the AI flagged answers of “I don’t know” as unsatisfactory. On one level this makes sense. The whole purpose of these systems is to provide answers, after all. But rather than causing the AI to return and rethink its data, it instead developed increasingly convincing answers that were not true whatsoever, to the point where the human supervisors didn’t flag sufficiently convincing answers as wrong because they themselves didn’t realise that they were wrong. The result is that “the more difficult the question and the more advanced model you use, the more likely you are to get well-packaged, plausible nonsense as your answer.”

Uncovering some of what is going on in AI systems dispels both the fervent hype that artificial intelligence might be our saviour, and the deep fear that it might be our societal downfall. This is a tool; it is good at some tasks, and less good at others. And, like all tools, it does not have an intrinsic morality. Whether it is used for good or ill depends on the approach of the humans that use it.

But this study also uncovers our strained relationship with ignorance. Problems arise in the answers given by systems like ChatGPT because a convincing answer is valued more than admitting ignorance, even if the convincing answer is not at all correct. Because the AI has been trained to avoid admitting it doesn’t know something, all of its answers are less reliable, even the ones that are actually correct.

This is not a problem limited to artificial intelligence. I had a friend who seemed incapable of admitting that he didn’t know something, and whenever he was corrected by someone else, he would make it sound like his first answer was actually the correct one, rather than whatever he had said. I don’t know how aware he was that he did this, but the result was that I didn’t particularly trust whatever he said to be correct. Paradoxically, had he admitted his ignorance more readily, I would have believed him to be less ignorant.

It is strange that admitting ignorance is so avoided. After all, it is in many ways our default state. No one faults a baby or a child for not knowing things. If anything, we expect ignorance to be a fuel for curiosity. Our search for answers begins in the recognition that we don’t have them. And in an age where approximately 500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute, the sum of what we don’t know must by necessity be vastly greater than all that we do know. What any one of us can know is only a small fraction of all there is to know.

Crucially, admitting we do not know everything is not the same as saying that we do not know anything.

One of the gifts of Christian theology is an ability to recognize what it is that makes us human. One of these things is the fact that any created thing is, by definition, limited. God alone is the only one who can be described by the ‘omnis’. He is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. There is no limit to his power, and presence, and knowledge. The distinction between creator and creation means that created things have limits to their power, presence, and knowledge. We cannot do whatever we want. We cannot be everywhere at the same time. And we cannot know everything there is to be known.

Projecting infinite knowledge is essentially claiming to be God. Admitting our ignorance is therefore merely recognizing our nature as created beings, acknowledging to one another that we are not God and therefore cannot know everything. But, crucially, admitting we do not know everything is not the same as saying that we do not know anything. Our God-given nature is one of discovery and learning. I sometimes like to imagine God’s delight in our discovery of some previously unknown facet of his creation, as he gets to share with us in all that he has made. Perhaps what really matters is what we do with our ignorance. Will we simply remain satisfied not to know, or will it turn us outwards to delight in the new things that lie behind every corner?

For the developers of ChatGPT and the like, there is also a reminder here that we ought not to expect AI to take on the attributes of God. AI used well in the hands of humans may yet do extraordinary things for us, but it will not truly be able to do anything, be everywhere, or know everything. Perhaps if it was trained to say ‘I don’t know’ a little more, we might all learn a little more about the nature of the world God has made.

Article

Creed

Music

Spiritual formation

3 October 2024

4 min read

Sing, pray, manifest: what’s the difference?

Song, success and the search for someone who loves.

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Associate Minister at Holy Trinity Clapham, London.

A colourful graphic overlay of praying hands over a band playing.

Coldplay.com

No one should be surprised when Coldplay release a song called 'We Pray'. Yes, the band's back catalogue is already peppered with references to the divine, but prayer in song is remarkably unremarkable.

Just do a quick search on Spotify: Coldplay are hardly alone. In recent years our purveyors of prayer have notably also included HAIM and Elda Good. Go a little further back: Leonard Cohen, even Take That and Duke Ellington. Which song do you immediately think of when I mention Bon Jovi? And who could forget Madonna, Dionne Warwick or Andrea Bocelli with Katharine McPhee. Prayer makes good music sales.

A recent poll by Skylight showed that 61 per cent of Americans pray. And, 9 in 10 of those believed they'd received an answer to prayer in the past year. If prayers and songs are both places for us to process emotion, then the genre overlap is hardly surprising.

But when you think about it, these songs at their essence sing about a spiritual practice. The spirituality is sometimes overt, and sometimes prayer is useful as a device for something else (Nick Cave's immortal line: 'I don't believe in an interventionist God / But I know, darling, that you do…'), but whichever way you slice it, we sing about prayer because prayer is one of our deepest instincts. We get meta about our metaphysics because the divide between the sacred and the secular simply isn't there. 43 per cent of respondents to this recent survey were almost as likely to pray in nature as they were in a house of worship (46 per cent). We pray for all manner of reasons, which is the premise of Coldplay's song, why 'we pray'.

This instinct seems to have also birthed the song itself. ''We Pray sort of wrote itself like some of the good songs do,' Chris Martin recently revealed. 'In Taiwan, in the middle of the night, I woke up and the song was in my head, and I don't know where it came from. So, the sound of it sort of dictated itself and that's all. I just sort of followed the road map that it said.'

The ambiguity of the song's origins also matches the huge scope within the song for the listener to interpret as they wish. Coldplay have fascinatingly added a 'blank verse' version online where people can ad lib their own prayers within the song. This is not unlike the practice of many 'charismatic' worship leaders, providing a space for deeply personal expressions of prayer within a corporate religious experience. And whether you're at Glastonbury or alone with you and your AirPods in the park, the offer is not only to connect with a higher power, but to reflect on why you're doing so at the same time.

What if the power instead resides not in the person praying, nor in the prayer itself, but in the recipient of the prayer?

We may not all have the musical genius of Martin, but many of us similarly profess an innate desire to pray, regardless of religious beliefs. Studies come and go showing that praying can also have emotional benefits.

So, the question arises: is there power in prayer? If the power is in the act itself, then it's on par with manifesting.

The act, and thoughts of manifesting may have the same motivations as prayer for many, but it can be argued that manifesting is not in the same category as prayer. Much like The Secret or The Power of Positive Thinking, manifesting the latest new age trend where your mind achieves your aspirations: you can simply manifest that new job, relationship, or Ferrari. But the practice has its limitations, and its critics. Vox's senior correspondent Rebecca Jennings reports that 'Overestimating the power of one’s thoughts, which is a symptom of OCD among many other disorders, 'could be very dangerous to people who already have anxiety disorders, but potentially, it might even be enough to start those symptoms happening in someone who originally doesn’t', according to cognitive neuroscientist Rhiannon Jones.

I recently spoke to a couple of women in their early 20s who'd just returned from a manifesting conference. Manifesting may have the same motivations as prayer for many, but it can be argued that manifesting is not in the same category as prayer, even though this hugely popular practice could be understood as a secular form of piety, potentially rivalling that of the devout. But what if the power instead resides not in the person praying, nor in the prayer itself, but in the recipient of the prayer? Martin hints that the prayer itself is not the power. He sings 'Only by his grace', and 'for someone to come and show me the way.'

Simply searching on Spotify with the keyword 'pray' is only the tip of the iceberg for prayerful songs. Many of them don't include the word, yet still meditate on prayer. For instance, U2 sang 'I waited patiently for the Lord, he inclined and heard my cry' - a reworking of King David's Psalm 40 where he is lifted out of the miry pit. The psalm's final verse begins 'But as for me, I am poor and needy; may the Lord think of me.' This is not so much a song of spiritual practice, but desperation. It can be hard even to pray when you're stuck in a rut. And in his helplessness, David finds that there is someone who fills his mind with thoughts about him.

I've recently sat with people who've in some form of prayer thanked God, the universe, even the day itself. The blank space is there. The space is for us to fill. But what if we are not praying into the void? Because far and above any personal experience or benefit of prayer, the ordinariness of prayer is really quite extraordinary: We pray. Someone is listening.