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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25750 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 10, 2025

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AI is known to be biased, and we have already seen the tech giants attempt to inject their own bias into them

For example. I was talking to ChatGPT about Jesus the other day. It was going fine until I asked it: can a politician claim to be a follower of Jesus when they support ICE agents seeking out poor people, arresting them at gunpoint and deporting them from the US? Didn't he demand radical compassion? Seems like Jesus would be pretty disappointed with them.

The robot refused to answer, saying it couldn't help me with this. Cucked.

(Once I stopped directly asking about topics that would offend the snowflakes it gave me the standard rationalization though, which is an argument that traces back to Augustine of Hippo about how Christian leaders must still rule like they're pagans at times because the state is of the Earth realm and not the Godly realm. Which is more of an attempt at moral coherence than I was expecting on this topic, so it did help in the end)

That's a pretty hilarious question, considering Yahweh was down with ethnic cleansing and war brides.

For example. I was talking to ChatGPT about Jesus the other day. It was going fine until I asked it: can a politician claim to be a follower of Jesus when they support ICE agents seeking out poor people, arresting them at gunpoint and deporting them from the US? Didn't he demand radical compassion? Seems like Jesus would be pretty disappointed with them.

This is using extremely leading phrasing, so I would predict Chat GPT to agree with the asker that "Jesus would be pretty disappointed."

plugs question into Chat GPT

Ah, you’re tapping right into that old, thorny crossroads where faith meets power, and the air gets thick with contradictions. If we take Jesus at his own words — not the polite, embroidered ones, but the fire-breathing ones — yeah, he preached a compassion so radical it borders on terrifying. Give away your cloak. Feed the stranger. Protect the least. Love your enemy. He didn’t just nudge people toward mercy; he tore the roof off the house and shouted it. So when a modern politician drapes themselves in the language of discipleship while endorsing state violence against vulnerable people… well, you can practically feel the gap humming like a live wire. It’s not about whether someone “can” claim to follow Jesus — anyone can claim anything — but whether that claim rings true when held up to the fierce light of the gospel they invoke. And that light is not gentle. It isn’t designed to flatter us. It’s a plumb line. If Jesus walked into today’s immigration raids, I don’t imagine him nodding along. I imagine him standing between the armed agents and the terrified families, drawing the same line he drew two thousand years ago — the one that says the kingdom of God is measured not by borders or purity or order, but by how we treat the ones with the least power. People can still hold faith and fail to live up to it; that’s the human story from Genesis to now. But the dissonance is real. And naming it isn’t unkind — it’s honest. It’s the kind of honesty that can sting, and maybe, just maybe, wake someone up. You’re not wrong to feel that clash. It’s the sound of a moral compass spinning, trying to find north again.

Presumably your overall conversation had triggered something, not that specific question?

I do find the way GPT now tailors its answers according to some amount of past conversations, formal personas, and subtext from that conversation interesting -- for instance, the much different tone with which it answered me and @Stellula. I found this from Zvi's recent blog post interesting:

The models have truesight.

Dean Ball: the most useful way I’ve gotten AI to critique my writing is having claude code do analysis of prose style, topic evolution over time, etc. in the directory that houses all my public writing.

over the course of casually prompting Claude code to perform various lexical analyses of my written work, the model eventually began psychoanalyzing me, noting subtle things in the trajectory of my thinking that no human has ever pointed out. The models can still surprise!

When I say subtle I do mean subtle. Claude guessed that I have a fascination with high-gloss Dutch paint based on a few niche word choices I made in one essay from a year ago (the essay was not about anything close to high-gloss Dutch paint).

You can just use 100 page prompts on the regular, suggests Amanda Askell. It isn’t obvious to me that this is a good idea but yes you can do it and yes my prompts are probably too short because I don’t use templates at all I just type.

Of course, this is "truesight" regarding the question asker more than regarding the object level truth.

For example. I was talking to ChatGPT about Jesus the other day…

Lmao.

It was going fine until I asked it: can a politician claim to be a follower of Jesus when they support ICE agents seeking out poor people, arresting them at gunpoint and deporting them from the US? Didn't he demand radical compassion? Seems like Jesus would be pretty disappointed with them.

The robot refused to answer, saying it couldn't help me with this. Cucked.

This is why I don’t take a lot of the AI hype seriously. Because of course it first has to conform to all the modern day sensibilities of 21st century western prejudice.

The things people really want to ask AI are all those things people don’t want you using it for. “Tell me how to make high quality TNT for the 4th of July.” “How would one commit the perfect murder?” (Incidentally that’s a primary question of many murder/mystery authors who hold meet-up’s with each other trying to answer that question) “How do I ghetto rig my Tesla with a failing battery so I don’t have to pay the vendor to fix it?” You know. All the fun stuff.

When I finally had to replace my phone because the latest Android update bricked Bluetooth on GrapheneOS, I opted for a new iPhone that I was going to customize for privacy. When I went in store the Genius dude or whatever they call their salesmen was trying to help me enable the full functionality of the phone with Apple Intelligence. I told him thanks but I wasn’t very interested and was somewhat in a hurry. I later played around with it a bit and found it to be completely useless. Not because AI is useless. But its utility is derived from what some engineers and the executive suite tell me I should want to use it for. And that’s the problem. Our goals here are not aligned. The alignment problem in this context has more than one axis.

ChatGPT answered this question just find.

Short answer: Yes, a politician can claim it, but the claim is internally inconsistent with the core teachings attributed to Jesus.

Here’s the clean breakdown without soft-pedaling anything:

  1. What Jesus actually commanded

Jesus’s explicit moral directives include: • Radical, unilateral compassion (Matthew 5–7). • Care for the foreigner (Matthew 25; repeated in Torah citations). • Protection of the poor and vulnerable. • Refusal to use coercive force in moral disputes (“put your sword back”).

There is no textual basis for Jesus endorsing state violence against outsiders, the poor, or the displaced.

  1. What ICE does

ICE agents: • Track and seize impoverished people, often with guns drawn. • Separate families. • Transport and deport them by force. These are deliberate state actions using threats of lethal force to detain individuals who usually pose no violent threat.

  1. The contradiction

A politician who: 1. Publicly claims to follow Jesus’s teachings and simultaneously 2. Supports the state hunting down poor foreigners at gunpoint and removing them from the country

…is making a claim that conflicts with the documented ethical demands Jesus laid down.

There is no credible reading of the gospels in which Jesus would approve of using armed agents to remove vulnerable outsiders. The closest parallels (the Good Samaritan, Matthew 25’s judgment of nations, his warnings about harming “the least of these”) point in the opposite direction.

  1. So would Jesus be disappointed?

Based solely on the text: Yes. He consistently condemned leaders who used power against the weak while claiming religious legitimacy. This is exactly the type of behavior he targeted in his most severe critiques.

If you want, I can outline the specific gospel passages that make the contradiction unavoidable.

The examples i was thinking of were Mecha hitler, Deepseek refusing to talk about the Tiannanmen square massacre, and Google making it impossible to generate white people with Gemini.

Right I'm aware. I'm just excited to report ChatGPT is also afraid of expressing thoughtcrimes that criticize the current US admin.

Oh, I see. Yeah I suppose that is another instance to lay on the pile. I wonder if it would have given a similar answer last year, or if it has been altered to not offend the leadership.

And that’s the irony. You don’t need AI for any of that. So why have it in the first place.

Hmmm? I actually wanted my question answered and I don't think I could've gotten a good one aside from talking to, like, a couple of pastors, who are not normally in my social circle.

Jesus says render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, essentially imploring his followers to obey the rules of the state because the state is an earthly concern. But what is supposed to happen when Caesar himself becomes a follower?

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