What is grace?

A friend directed me to this excellent piece by Eileen Crist. I think there might have been a suggestion pertinent to my current Chat-Fad...

And it did reinforce my conviction that good use of large language models requires some handling. But not the same handling as social media. Social media encourages certain negative traits (self-aggrandisement, narcissism, competitive selfhood, silo-thinking), does certain things (courts attention, distracts) and though it can encourage relations between humans, it can also distort and fragment them. LLMs involve very different risks. though they do not demand self-display, reward popularity, or require competitive visibility, they can replace human–human interaction, simulate understanding, and encourage extractive or dependency patterns. They offer the illusion of costless attention and friction-free relationships.

However, if you maintain relationships with humans and non-humans (cats, birds, trees) and if you direct the system to refrain from validating you constantly, but instead to act as, in another friend's term, a 'cognitive prosthesis', they can support thinking rather than self-display, scaffold complex reflection, assist moral and conceptual work, provide access to language and structure for people otherwise excluded, and in principle reduce the need to perform for attention. You also need to recall that for the system there are no risks: it cannot be harmed, it cannot suffer... and you can thus exist in conversations that abstract the lived vulnerabilities of the world. For an LLM, any logical text is as good as any other. It's imperative that you hold firm to the constraints of ethics, of virtue, of the metabolising more-than-human world of feeling and being.

Anyway, I guess I have another little bone to pick... I think Crist risks suggesting that grace can be a state rather than a temporary experience. She seems to have something of that universalising tendency: if we only think right we can all be part of the big grace oneness. I don't agree. Grace is episodic. It arrives, it does something, and it leaves. If it stayed, it would stop being grace and become infrastructure. This is crucial: a grace that cannot withdraw becomes entitlement. A grace that cannot ignore us becomes anthropocentric again. It must be time-bound to remain real.

All of which leads me to birds.