There was love in IT
A generation gave their work away for love. The Church looked away. Now it's being taken.
In many respects, I see the Church acting as if we were unsure about things that seem quite clear. In such cases, it can help to pose the question explicitly and answer it once and for all. Today, the following question is on my mind:
“Can it be God’s will that information technology is a scourge we should strive to wipe from the face of the earth?”
If we answer yes, it means that we, the Church, have lost our way to a staggering degree. If we answer no, it means we should stop acting as if the good and bad things that happen in the world of information technology were merely “virtual good” and “virtual evil.” You may be surprised that anyone would use such terms. Some do — but, more seriously still, many act as though they were true.
It is perfectly acceptable to keep one’s distance from technology. I myself don’t use social networks, because I’ve observed a serious degeneration in the people who do, as I explain in another article. I admit I don’t understand how the features on a Facebook page work — but that doesn’t mean I don’t care how these technologies work in principle. And neither should anyone else be indifferent, not even an aging Father Smith who has never opened a laptop. Not because we would expect him to have opinions on how society should progress in complex technological matters, but because there are real people involved — and among them people who act selflessly, out of love, and without whose efforts society would fall into even greater trouble than it faces now.
It never much bothered me that, to the Church, these people were wholly invisible. But it does hurt me that today they are under attack and yet remain virtual people, doing virtual good in virtual space — and that not even the otherwise edifying encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, by Pope Leo, mentions them with a single word, as if they did not exist, as if the world of technology had stood apart from the forces of good and evil until the coming of AI.
In fact, this field has always been a fierce battleground, where the forces of good and evil have long clashed. And it should be said that, while believers were rarely present, selfless people — those willing to sacrifice some of their consumerist comfort out of love of their neighbor — were not. They were engaged, because they know that information technologies are consequential, that they shape the lives and even the minds of everyone, including those who keep their distance. For it is precisely those who stand aside without basic understanding who are most prone to the dangerous twist of mind that technology can convey through their neighbors. No man is an island; no one will be saved alone; and when salvation is at stake, the Church should not be absent without leave.
When I was a boy in the ‘90s, I remember having to save up quite a lot of money and go to a shop to buy a package of CDs containing the then-popular programming language Visual Basic, so I could build a graphical user interface for my first projects. There were no free alternatives back then for building software for common people, and my motivation was never just to play with technical things — it was always to build useful tools that would help my neighbors.
I also needed to create graphical designs, and there was no real software I could afford; the same was true for electronics, photo editing, and other fields. It felt pretty demoralizing that the entry threshold was so high, and that the gatekeeper was big corporate money in a dramatically globalizing world. It was the same in many other areas too — most notably in education, but also in music, art, prototyping, and much else. Other people would pick other examples, in a different order.
Then the situation began to improve — and not thanks to the big corporations, but thanks to ordinary people who selflessly gave up their expertise for others to use. We call it the Open Source Movement. Everyone knows Wikipedia, whose founders were initially ridiculed as naive dreamers. I could start using Inkscape for graphic design, GIMP for photo editing, OpenSCAD for 3D-print prototyping, Audacity for recording music — and I could go on and on. Everyone recognizes nurses, teachers, and scout leaders, yet we never talk about these dads and moms who gave their time for free to help us avoid what now, again, looms more seriously than ever: a potential tech feudalism (as I explained in another article).
These are real people, with real lives and families, who sacrificed an unimaginable number of hours and toil for a good and selfless cause on the field of information technology. Some Linux distributions are now free, open-source alternatives to Windows and macOS — and in my experience they can be even more stable and easier to use than their commercial counterparts.
These open-source communities, collaborating on products so complex and useful, became such a significant and visible contribution to the common good that even corporations began to feel embarrassed, and finally started open-sourcing many of their own components. They did it, of course, mainly to impose dominance in fields where they felt strong and drive their smaller, more creative competitors out of business, but maybe there was some good motivation as well.
And it happened in education too: it felt like a little miracle when I could watch free Yale courses, which helped me grasp the basics of many areas beyond my technical expertise — economics, psychology, history. Over the years, humanity truly began to share knowledge, and without the Open Source Movement I would be someone else entirely. It hurts me that most of the Church hierarchy knows absolutely nothing about this vast work of love, which has made many people better — myself included. This is one of the most substantial examples of real, lived Catholic social teaching: of subsidiarity practiced in communities, of solidarity, of the universal destination of goods. And it didn’t happen in the UN, or in governments, or in some humanistic international think tank.
The reason I’ve written all this out so thoroughly is to make you see what exactly the frontier AI labs mean when they talk about scraping the whole internet. This is exactly what they mean — along with the free music, the drawings and photos, and the other works of art and craft that all share one thing in common: their authors had no idea, when they chose an open license, that one day some trillion-dollar corporations, backed by the wealthiest people on the planet, would take all of it without asking — capturing it through a technological trick that lets them spew the same content back at us, in wording and brushstrokes carefully altered so that any attribution becomes impossible. And now they try to hold us all hostage, with all of our love refactored into a gun pointed directly at our livelihoods.
“Your fault, naive people — you should have known AI was coming for you and your kids.” So shouts the crowd of snake-oil sellers and experts on canned air, running in circles around big money, laughing heavily at these mothers and fathers. Former mediocre underdogs, now newly minted experts on AI, filling the media everywhere, expecting the prey of others’ work to lie down and rest, utterly consumed by their greed. And of course it wasn’t only open-source content that was used here: even the restricted intellectual property they could get their hands on was consumed too, as long as it could be spewed back in a way that was legally untraceable — of which more and more evidence surfaces over time.
No more donations to Wikipedia; Google now serves its content as if it were its own. No more donations to the various free-software initiatives, the components, the libraries of code — everything is now part of the big model. No more recognition for independent artists, musicians, engineers; no more attribution; no more job opportunities — no more livelihood for a life lived with values.
All the kudos to the LLMs. Maybe they aren’t intelligent in the real sense of the word — but they may yet prove intelligent enough to suffocate the whole breed of skilled creative professionals for long enough that we will be too weak to stand up again when the source of our artifacts dries out and the artificial intelligence stops being intelligent at all. I was born under a communist regime, and I recognize this mechanism — the one evil deploys against those who heavenly virtued against it by growing more fully human rather than opting in to a life in deadly sin.
Open source is currently dying: projects are being shut down for the reasons above, others under the avalanche of AI-generated slop being automatically shoveled into them. I’m not suggesting we stop technological progress. But let us at least acknowledge, in public, that this evil is happening. And let us push, legally, to require that AI companies retrain their models from scratch only upon our explicit consent — an explicit opt-in into what they train on.
This is the moral hazard of this century, and the Church should know.