Fine-tuning Christian thought
Technology - 001
It’s possible to take a large language model (LLM) with an open-source licence and fine tune it for a specific area of interest, cutting away what is irrelevant for your focus. The reduction can make the training process more affordable and gives you the ability to run on less costly hardware. You create a tool for the job you need to do, rather than a multi-tool.
Link: The future is Smaller and Specialized Large Language Models
Thinking about this made me ask what answers we would get if we fine-tuned a model just on Christian material. How about theological writings from the last two thousand years? Or commentaries? Devotional works? Sermons? All of the above? We would want to train the model in Scripture too, of course, since that’s the key to all this other material. But once complete – and if the copyright/plagiarism issues could be honourably handled – what would we discover? What patterns would be picked out by our system? How would it deal with the debates such as on baptism or communion? How would it express theological mysteries like the Trinity, simplicity or immutability? Where would the model take us and what biases would it show up? (Of course, it may be that companies with a specialist interest in the Christian use of technology have already done work on this – let me know if you know.)
And, more importantly, would having such a model actually help us in any way? Yes, with some well-written prompts it might be a useful tool for summarising ideas. But in terms of unlocking the truth which God has revealed to us and settling our long-standing debates, would the statistical analysis of two millennia of Christian verbal expression be of assistance? Well, I guess your answer to that will depend upon the extent to which you think the Holy Spirit guides the church through democracy. Does the Spirit bring the church to the truth by convincing the most number of Christians, which is then detectable through the remarkable number crunching that LLMs can do on the written and spoken word? Does God work through majorities? If not, how does he bring his church to theological clarity?
I think we would have to say that the actual process is that of maturing. Individual Christians who keep in step with the Spirit hope to grow in likeness to Christ through their lives: to see sins mortified and godliness grow through the understanding of Scripture and the work of the Spirit (2 Peter 5:1-9). The same should happen in local churches (1 Corinthians 3:1). And surely the church universal is on the same path to maturity, to become the beautiful bride of Christ (Revelation 19:7). Yet, historically that doesn’t seem to be a process of simple, constant improvement but of steps forward and back, as the Spirit moves in different places and providence takes the church through different experiences. And I’m not terribly sure that an LLM would cope well with modelling that.
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Introduction to this series of posts
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