Why an AI-generated seminar made me feel sick

I sit at a small table listening to a seminar. The speaker is an expert in their field. They've travelled a long way to be here. The audience is quietly attentive, leaning forward to catch every drop of wisdom. There are nibbles and handouts on the table. The speaker continues fluidly. But I start to feel queasy.  

"I feel like vomiting - and all of a sudden, there it is: the Nausea." (Satre, Nausea, 1938, p. 176 in Penguin Classics edition, Baldick translation)

Why do I feel this spinning, motion sickness, almost vertigo? I know why. The realisation is sharp and certain and lands on me with a suffocating heaviness. What I'm hearing through the mouth of the speaker is very largely AI-generated.

I know it (at least 95% sure) because I've spent quite a bit of time using AI tools recently.

1. Partly it's the presentation slides. It's the beige background and serif font (favoured by Claude and Gamma). It's the the three-column format and the little icons at the beginning of a content bar and the 'hand-drawn' illustrations that don't illustrate anything and the diagrams that don't explain anything. 
2. But more than the presentational side of it, it's the content of the talk itself. It's all true and much of if very helpful but AI tools have a 'voice' and even when you've edited their content a bit that voice still comes through. This time it sounded like Copilot, but I could be wrong. It's a voice that sounds like it's trying to be 'sincere', 'authentic', 'caring' but in a cloying way that leaves a sickly sweet, artificial taste in the mouth. It attempts 'wise' and 'emotionally-intelligent' - but it's more like pop psychology. Like a friend who puts their hand on your arm and says, "I know exactly how you feel and I want to validate that." Aaaaah!!
3. There's a form to AI generated content that's telling too. There's too much rhetoric. Probably because the Large Language Models have been trained on a billion speeches, sermons and TED talk scripts, they communicate using the most effective rhetorical devices possible. Everything is in 3s. Everything is arranged in pairs - "Power without aggression; Humility without weakness." The prose is too purple. The sentences too short. There are too many aphorisms and maxims. The first pithy proverb sounds impressive and insightful ("The real question is not X but Y") but after the fifth or sixth they start to feel faux-profound. Maybe someone could come up with one or two helpful pithy insights or craft one big take-away but nobody sounds like Cicero or MLK all the time. The Apostle Paul was very rhetorically proficient but he didn't locate the power in the rhetoric (1 Cor 2:4) and his rhetoric was a rhetoric of clarity - showing you the substance as sharply as possible - rather than the Corinthian rhetoric of surface (2 Cor 4:2). That's the problem with AI-produced rhetoric - you get a sense of hollowness, artifice - is there anything beneath the surface dazzle?
4. There's also a disorientating amount of repetition and lack of progression. In a human-generated seminar there is a structure and movement from A to B to C. Whether it's a western logical argument or a narrative arc - we are going somewhere and building to something. But AI doesn't usually do that so well. If you look at how Copilot or ChatGPT tend to respond to a prompt question - they usually give you the short summary answer, then they expand that with some more detail, perhaps from two or three perspectives, then they summarise, giving you the short answer again. There's not a lot of progression but there is a lot of repetition. Which makes sense of the strange feelings of deja vu I experienced as we moved through the seminar slides. My brain is wanting to see progression - to see what in this slide is new and how it builds the argument - but instead it just feels like it's saying essentially the same as the slide three slides ago just in slightly different language.
5. Linked to this, there was little sustained Scriptural exegesis. I know the speaker is an excellent Bible handler but there was only a light sprinkling. A few allusions. A verse or two quoted at length but not an actual unpacking of a section in a sustained, systematic, careful, deep way. That's what forms the backbone and meat and momentum of a good sermon and often of a good seminar too. Lack of serious Bible handling means lack of real depth and power.
6. And the last red flag, as I reflected later, was there were virtually no real life stories. It was almost all generalised propositions and proverbs - without anything tangible, grounded. There might be some references to "the office" or "the school yard" but they are generic scripts rather than, "I'm trying to teach my son to drive and what it's reminded me is..." It's alright to have a bit of abstraction but after half and hour of this I felt like I was drowning in generalities - gasping for something specific and real to grasp hold of, desperate to feel something solid under my feet. (This is why narrative and application in preaching and training are so important - don't just tell me to "Love my wife," tell me to listen really carefully to the next thing she says to me and tell me what happened when you did that with your spouse.) 

[There's still a 5% chance I'm completely wrong and the seminar was entirely human. If so - I'm so sorry to misjudge. But that's the disturbing thing about our AI world. I now start to suspect that things are fake. And all it needs is a strong suspicion for the nausea to start.]

For Roquentin in Satre's novel, the Nausea (always capitalised) sounds a lot like a mental illness - specifically the derealisation in the early (prodromal) stage of a schizophrenic psychotic episode - "Nothing looked real; I felt surrounded by cardboard scenery which could suddenly be removed" (Nausea, p. 113). And indeed in the early part of the book, Roquentin wonders if he is ill or insane. His experience is certainly visceral, bodily: Nausea. But Satre makes the deeper issue philosophical - existential - Roquentin is experiencing the radically disturbing disconnection between what he can see and touch (or rather what touches him) and meaning. With no God, things simply are. They have no reason to be, no meaning or purpose. They are hideously superfluous. It is the exact opposite of the experience of theists like CS Lewis and GK Chesterton who are filled with wonder and comfort by their encounter with the sheer existence of things - created things - beautifully, joyously superfluous creations given reality and solidity by a real and good Creator. 

The disconnect that I think caused my nausea in the seminar was not so much the thing-meaning disconnect as a speaker-speech disconnect - a broken connection between the person speaking and the content I was hearing through their mouth. But interestingly there is something quite like this in Satre too. When Roquentin experiences one of his worst episodes of nausea (quoted above) it is as he listens to the Autodidact - a man who has been seeking to assimilate all human knowledge by reading the entire library in alphabetical order. Doesn't that sound a lot like the data harvesting AI has been doing? The Autodidact - like someone delivering an AI-generated lecture - is not delivering his own thoughts but rather a slop of 'human knowledge.' Just before the onset of Roquentin's nausea the Autodidact's delivery sounds distinctly automaton: "People. You must love people. People are admirable."

It's not just an uncanny valley feeling - 'almost human but not quite' / 'a bit off' / a biological disgust at mixing human and non-human. That's certainly part of it but there's something deeper and more theological. What God has joined together let no man put asunder. God has joined our mind, body, spirit and voice. Duncan Forbes has pointed out how important voice is to the image of God. It is how we value, judge, bless, curse, name, teach, ask, answer, sing, woo. It brings what's inside outside: Out of the heart the mouth speaks. So when someone speaks something that you start to suspect is not from their own heart there is a feeling of disconnect. And it's worse than just acting or plagiarism - reading someone else's seminar or sermon - because at least those words came from another heart. Here are words that are not coming from any heart but rather from the AI matrix. 

Phillips Brooks' First Lecture on Preaching is worth quoting on this (and the full lecture worth reading):

"Truth through Personality is our description of real preaching. The truth must come really through the Person, not merely over his lips, not merely into his understanding and out through his pen. It must come through his character, his affections, his whole intellectual and moral being. It must come genuinely through him." (p. 8)

[In contrast to] monotonous reiteration of commonplaces and abstractions; ...the true sermon, the utterance of living truth by living men, was never more powerful than it is to-day." (p. 12-13)

"The principle of personality once admitted involves the individuality of every preacher. The same considerations which make it good that the Gospel should not be written on the sky, or committed merely to an almost impersonal book, make it also most desirable that every preacher should utter the truth in his own way, and according to his own nature. It must come not only through man but through men. If you monotonize men you lose their human power to a large degree." (p. 23)

Father God, we praise and thank you that you spoke your heart to us through your Son - the Word made flesh. Thank you that he spoke from his gentle and lowly heart. Thank you that your written Word is your Truth refracted through forty personalities. Please would you form us to be speakers like your apostle Paul, our lives conformed to Christ crucified as well as speaking faithfully from the Scriptures the truth of Christ crucified, with our hearers engraved on our hearts, making every effort to speak to their hearts, and with our bodies marked by death and resurrection - so that your truth would come through personality to blinded people with power to open eyes to your glory in the face of your Son in the pages of your Word. We realise that's a dangerous prayer to pray but we pray it for your glory. Amen