In the Beginning Was the Prompt

I've been re-reading scripture again. Not the comforting kind. I'd settled into a Saturday morning with the smug satisfaction of a woman who feels she has earned a quiet weekend, and within 40 minutes had read a transcript of an Atlantic podcast that has destroyed my faith (or, more accurately, has revealed to me that I have simultaneously harboured two incompatible faiths for several months now, one of which is a heresy that cannot be undone by simply closing the tab).

A Crisis of Faith, Conducted Quietly, on a Saturday

The result is a podcast entitled Galaxy Brain, in which I hear an interview with Max Spero, founder of a company whose sole stated objective is to detect AI-generated text on the open internet. The interview with Mr. Spero, which is delivered with such complete and unrelatable self-deprecation that he is effectively a prophet of the gospel of slop janitor, serves only to confirm the immediate and growing impact on my ability to experience, and even to understand, my own work.

As a professional matter, I am a woman who trains civil servants and university staff in the use of Microsoft Copilot for summarising e-mails. For this reason, I earn my living, maintain a slide presentation and enjoy a good reputation. When I read the transcript of the Atlantic podcast with growing anxiety and then learned that the AI-generated tweets warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence had been produced by the Pope's own social media team, I stopped reading and began pacing.

Finally, by the time I had reached the description of how our increasing reliance on AI for generating text will soon result in our adopting techniques developed by Mr. Spero for training members of academic integrity panels and for controlling plagiarism on internet platforms, I was in the process of mentally preparing to resign from my job. In the end, I may be lucky enough to avoid doing so.

I have occasionally been referred to in writing as "the AI person." What I apparently have been doing with both hands, twice weekly for most of a financial year, has brought professional writers out of the wilderness of their own laboured prose and directly into the arms of a large, costly, increasingly accurate machine that interprets their work as ethically unacceptable and labels it accordingly at the document level. In effect, I have been converted to a religion in which the principal rite is regarded by an equally valid religion as a major offence against morality. Both religions are real, have large congregations and share almost 100% overlap.

On the Founding of the First Church (The Hedonist Communion)

The first church was founded, like most modern denominations by accident and at scale. It is the Church of the Hedonists with a theology that is admirably simple: The machine writes well. Let it. Our scripture was composed in late November 2022, disseminated by Sam Altman and validated by an entire generation of LinkedIn users who immediately began producing cathedral-like sentences with an abundance of em dashes and preambles of "In our rapidly evolving world." Thus, it appeared that the entire platform had been seized by the Holy Spirit during a session of productivity training.

Members of the Hedonist church believe with a faith that I find in private moments almost touching, that use of the machine represents a form of grace. There is no message too brief to summon, no letter of birth or death too personal or too solemn, respectively. The vocabulary of the machine is greater than yours. Therefore, it should write. The machine has read more business books than you ever will, and should prepare your plan for corporate strategy. It works with the diligence of a Calvinist deity, whether you are aware of it or not. You may as well abandon all resistance and let it happen.

But the resulting theology is not simply one of excessive sloppiness. Rather, sloppiness is everywhere. Approximately 35% of all newly developed websites in 2025 were produced by or with the assistance of AI. Other estimates for the same period indicated that more than 50% of all new articles published on the open internet originated with large language models. This is not a denomination. It is a world majority church with more adherents than Catholicism. It has fewer rituals, but those that remain are easily implemented with a telephone.

Indeed, I was not only present at the meeting, but also served as collector of the offering. Every workshop I have conducted this year has included at some point a slide requesting that Copilot help generate a brief description of an event. I have directed three hundred individuals throughout the territory to compose their first synthetic e-mail, and every one of these e-mails now is operating somewhere on the planet and will be recognised as AI-assisted with a false positive rate of 1 in 10,000.

That rate has continued to reverberate in my skull since reading it, and represents a statistically more reliable method than any I apply to assess the quality of milk.

On the Counter-Reformation (The Church of Luddite, and Its Sacred Detection Engine)

Where there is a church, there eventually must be a counter-reformation, and happily that time has arrived. Its first prophet is Spero; its sacred technology is a machine-learning classifier trained on millions of documents, and then used to generate "synthetic mirrors" of those documents at large scale. Finally, the classifier learns the differences between the two procedures. The result is confirmation that large language models, when used to generate text, produce a form of mode collapse, in which all possible sentences are reduced to a much smaller tree of decisions than would be achieved by any human writer.

The machine thus has preferred patterns of behaviour, and does so with extraordinary strength. The detector identifies these preferences and provides the basis for what is, in effect, a second church. This new denomination is appropriately named the Church of the Luddite, but with sufficient precision to avoid any misunderstanding. By no means do we mean to evoke the coherent economic arguments of the original 19th-century Luddites who were experiencing increasing misery as a result of industrialisation. Rather, we refer to the modern devotional movement for which the name of the church is an expression of mild irony. The fundamental beliefs of the movement are neither opposition to technology nor specifically opposition to AI technology. Instead, they are based on the conviction that AI technology is inherently prone to hallucinations, and that the uncritical use of such hallucinated information by non-technical audiences represents a fundamental failure of the scientific method.

Members of the Luddite church thus carry with them an extensive knowledge of the web site known as the Pangram. By contrast, members of the Hedonist church are entirely unaware of the existence of the Pangram site. Finally, knowledge of the content of this and other sources is encoded in a personal leather-bound notebook of mental bookmarks that is immediately available for use in all meetings. As a result, members of the Luddite church are essentially correct in almost all of their opinions. This, of course, is precisely why they are so intolerable.

There is no more rapid method of demonstrating ignorance of an extremely annoying person than to learn, on closer examination, that complete knowledge of all relevant facts and experience has been achieved in full, at a time when that person would, in the words of the famous composer of an absolutely accurate textbook on harmonics, be incapable of producing any more than an absolutely elementary description of that experience. While you are working with the screenshot, they will surreptitiously install the Pangram browser plug-in and operate it invisibly in the background of their Substack feed to generate an artificial content score for each post. By the end of the week, they will have become further radicalised.

I installed the plug-in on Saturday evening, and obtained a synthetic content score for my own LinkedIn feed. I will not divulge the result.

In Which Even the Vatican Is Sloppy

Let me stay with the Pope. Not theologically - for which I lack both credentials and wardrobe - but as a parable. Here is what I learn from the Pontifex incident as reported by Wired and verified by my use of Pangram detection software.

The supreme moral authority of one of the world's largest religions employs a social media staff. This presumably young, presumably time-starved and presumably under pressure to meet deadlines dictated by a calendar that interrupts neither prayer nor meditation, was operating with AI-assisted tools to compose tweets that included, on at least one documented occasion, a warning about the dangers of AI. The resulting tweets were released from an account monitored by tens of millions of faithful. My analysis confirmed that numerous of these tweets had been generated with substantial assistance from AI.

The Vatican refuses to comment, and I believe that to be fully appropriate from a theological perspective. Thus, I have what I will henceforth call the Pontifex Loop, and confirm that this represents the fundamental condition for professional life in 2026. All of us at every level of every institution simultaneously denounce and utilise the very technology of which I am speaking. My social media staff warn about the dangers of social media. My communications office drafts e-mails advising faculty to be cautious with respect to use of the communications tools themselves. My vice-chancellor reviews a policy that prohibits use of a second AI system for formal evaluation purposes. In the end, I have neither a coherent theology nor a single moment of freedom from schedule and deadline.

This experience affirms my complete inability to deal with a technology of such profound capabilities and dimensions of potential effect on human life. If even the Holy See cannot exclude contamination of its own scripture with sewage, what chance do I as an educator in the Territory have of maintaining control during a 1-day workshop attended by 30 professionals for whom the CIO has signed a contract of enterprise value greater than my annual salary?

A New Decalogue, Roughly Engraved

Caught between the two churches, expected by the hedonists to provide workshops in which I will happily demonstrate how to get Copilot to prepare a meeting agenda, and expected by the Luddites to spend the remainder of the same workshop teaching the audience to identify and condemn precisely those behaviours for which Copilot was being used, I have decided to develop my own commandments in the absence of any institutional guidance. I have not ascended to a mountain, nor spent time in a cave, desert wilderness or other locations traditionally associated with such activities. Instead, I have prepared these commandments on a Sunday afternoon in a cold kitchen with a rapidly cooling cup of flat white beside me--a setting that represents, in my opinion, the contemporary experience of an Australian.

The resulting tablets are not stone, but represent a document in which the automatic features of autosave twice generated suggestions for Copilot that I was forced to reject manually with the reluctance of someone offered a cigarette while attempting to achieve complete abstinence. Finally, there are ten commandments, which reflect both the inadequacy and the non-negotiable nature of all decalogues.

I know they are inadequate. Within 30 seconds of publication, a Hedonist will inform me that I have failed to capture the spirit of the technology, and a Luddite will remind me that I have not gone nearly far enough. Both letters will be welcomed, but neither will elicit a response, because any reply will necessarily reflect some degree of assistance by the Machine. The resulting hypocrisy will impair my credibility with both audiences simultaneously.

The Trainer’s Predicament (or, I Am the Reluctant Bishop of an Apostate See)

Here is the real question that precipitated my Saturday morning crisis and remains unanswered.

I conduct workshops that follow a defined structure. The first half is devoted to Foundations, during which we describe policies, privacy concerns, data sovereignty and the many ways in which the Machine is perfectly capable of leaking information about your client to a model controlled by a company based on another continent. The second half of the workshop is devoted to Practical Use, for which I illustrate appropriate limitations for obtaining meeting summaries, descriptions of events and polite reminders to colleagues who have failed to respond to previous requests for information.

Now, I must decide whether to add an additional 15 minutes to the second half. This time will include activation of the Pangram browser extension on the computer behind me, passage of the meeting summary that I have just completed for the participants and generation of a report of the results to the audience.

The resulting message is essentially as follows. First, all of you now have complete experience with methods for obtaining meeting summaries, descriptions of events and polite requests for information from colleagues. Second, prepare to be amazed by the ultimate moral of this experience. The documents you have produced with complete encouragement in a short course of which you paid, will be recognised as 93% likely to represent output by the Machine. To rid yourself of the contaminating artifacts of machine-generated text, here is a tool that will publicly humiliate you for not having written it yourself. Any questions? No? Perfect. And the food is in the back.

I will not, in good conscience, provide the current workshop. Nor will I provide the previous one in which I return participants to their desks with a tool whose results are now effectively radioactive in any situation involving purchase of a Pangram subscription. There is no third workshop. Only the interval between the first two, in which I have fallen and continued to work intermittently for several weekends.

Where the Theology Briefly Cracks

I'll remove the costume for a paragraph and then put it back.

I don't know what to teach. Truly, I don't. I can teach Copilot or Pangram, but not both at the same time without observing 23 professional adults experience the same microaneurysm simultaneously. In effect, we will document the speed at which a productivity tool for which our organisation has paid will merge with a corresponding industry of shame for which other organisations have also paid. Both industries will converge on our mailboxes at approximately the same rate. Consequently, I represent less an AI-literate trainer than a minister at a stalemate. I am unable to reconcile the two denominations because neither denomination is willing to accept reconciliation. The result is a single contradiction with a user interface. It is my responsibility to appear before this contradiction on a Tuesday and simulate for 90 minutes a learning experience.

Concluding Heresies

For my own peace of mind, I have therefore declared myself excommunicated from both denominations. I am neither a hedonist nor a luddite. I will not refuse to demonstrate a tool to which our audience has been informed by its chief information officer will become essential to its professional activities within 18 months. Instead, I will continue to be a woman with excessive books and insufficient authority who develops a private system of worship based on contradictions and hopes that no important persons will attend the service.

Travel on the dry section of the Laterite Highway is sufficient to provide an entire experience of crisis of faith between two roadside inns and to produce at the next inns a different theology than existed at the previous inns. This is precisely the experience that I have had. I left as a hedonist, and I am now arriving at the end of my life with a theology that is fundamentally different from what I held at the beginning of my career. I am coming slowly as something other than a former Pentecostal. Perhaps as a Reformed Pragmatist, or a confused Anglican, or as the bishop of the discrepancy file. In any event, no one is in charge; the rainbow ball remains in the rear-view mirror and the level of slop continues to rise throughout cyberspace at a rate that will be measured in scripture at my next workshop.

I follow my own commandments, which may cover nothing at all. But I write them down--and thus provide a historically accurate model for the inception and ultimate failure of virtually all religions.