NP View: We wish you a very merry Christmas
National Post, 24 December 2025
Human fellowship requires human encounter, not digital facsimiles
The King James Version of the bible has approximately 800,000 words, a goodly number but still able to be handsomely bound between leather covers and easily carried.
The Canadian Encyclopedia, described as the biggest publishing project in Canadian history, was first released in 1985 in three volumes, each containing a million words. The online version now has four million words. The Britannica is more than ten times as big at 44 million words.
All of that work, decades of scholarly labour, can be vacuumed up in minutes by the apparatus of artificial intelligence. The PaLM 2, Google’s large language model, has 340 billion parameters with which to analyze and organize texts.
The scale and speed of AI demanded attention this year. What exactly it is is hard to understand, let alone how it works. The amount of land and resources and electricity it needs stretches the imagination, and the size of the required investments made — hundreds of billions — is staggering.
Large language models (LLMs) attempt to replicate (replace?) human intelligence by cataloguing vast quantities of text in order to predict what the next word, next phrase, next sentence, is likely to be. The human author searches for just the right word. Often enough it is elusive. AI spits it out immediately, cheerily ignoring the broker’s disclaimer that past performance does not predict future results. LLMs insist that it most certainly does. Thus the claim is made that the binary world of computing ones and zeroes can imitate (exceed?) the imaginative capacity of the human mind.
The old materialist debunking of human creativity was that, given enough time, a sufficiently large number of monkeys banging randomly away at typewriters would eventually produce a Shakespeare play. Creativity was not creative at all, but just massive randomness.
That was always nonsense. The new materialism takes the opposite approach and is thus more plausible. Instead of randomness, LLMs survey millions of sequences and sentences and stories to “see” what usually goes together. Recognizing patterns where even the human authors would not, AI can then offer, as the old cereal box contests used to say, a reasonable facsimile.
Materialism of both sorts ends up in the same place. The spirit is squeezed out.
AI’s accomplishments are real, unlike the monkeys on a fool’s errand, but can technological mastery of language mean a machine that will be the master of man?
Not yet. Not, one prefers to think, ever.
The King James Version has, at the beginning, God speaking the heavens and the earth into existence. In the first verses of Genesis language creates the world. And at Christmas in churches the world over Christians will hear the echo of Genesis in the first lines of St. John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word.”
That’s the Christian understanding of reality. God is simplicity Himself — not millions of words, not billions of parameters, just one Word. He is. He exists. He speaks one Word, and all creation comes into being. That one Word takes flesh, is born at Bethlehem, is God-with-us, Jesus Christ.
It requires faith to believe that. Yet it is simpler to understand than the incredible intricacy of LLMs. What God grants in simplicity – babies learn to speak – can only be approximated by the maddening complexity of our LLMs.
Continue reading at the National Post.