Let Us Make a Name for Ourselves

I'm a naturally curious person. I like to find things out, investigate, and dig into obscurity sometimes. I did this with AI recently. Not because I needed to or had some desire to make my writing something. But because I wanted to see what would happen. To be honest, I wasn't fully ready for the response I got.

A few months ago I fed a machine about four years of my own writing. Sermons, blog posts, the odd half-finished thing I never published. Then I asked it for a paragraph on something I'd never written about. What came back was mine. Not close to mine: mine. The short sentences after the long one. The turn into a parenthesis right where I'd have made it. The way I circle back at the end to whatever I opened with, which I'd always thought of as a habit rather than a fingerprint.

(It was, I should say, not very good. That was somehow the worst part. It had my voice and nothing to say with it.)

I sat there for a while looking at this paragraph that sounded weirdly like me...not exactly, but oddly close and had never passed through anything I would call a soul.

There's a lot of noise right now about artificial intelligence and whether it will save us or end us. I don't think I have much to add to that argument. The people forecasting the apocalypse and the people forecasting the cure are both working from spreadsheets I can't check. What I do have is Genesis 11, and a suspicion that I've read this story before.

I think where we have to start is know that the sin wasn't the tower. We tell the Babel story wrong. We tell it as a story about a building: men stacking bricks toward heaven until God, threatened, knocks it down. A tale about ambition punished, with a God who comes off petty. But look at what the text actually says they said to each other. "Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth." Two clauses. Not one.

Let us make a name for ourselves. And: lest we be scattered.

The tower is almost incidental, or the effect of a cause. It's the scaffolding for something else. And notice the dry little joke the narrator tells at the top of the passage; the LORD came down to see the city and the tower. He came down to see it. The thing reaching into heaven required a descent to be visible at all. It doesn't seem like scripture is impressed by the engineering.

Which means the judgment doesn't fall on the making. Making is not the problem anywhere in Genesis. God fills Bezalel with the Spirit for craftsmanship. Adam names the animals, and naming is authority. Adam is participating in the ordering of the world, and it is good. And God is genuinely curious about what Adam would call them. The Bible has no anxiety about human beings building things, creating things, or being creative...until its turned into something else. Which, the problem is the posture underneath the building. And the posture has two parts, and both of them are ours.

The first part is naming ourselves. In Scripture, your name is given to you. Abram becomes Abraham. Jacob wrestles all night and limps away as Israel. Simon becomes Peter. Saul to Paul, etc... In every case the renaming comes from outside and above, and the renaming is the change: you don't get to narrate yourself.

Babel is the reversal of this naming motif. Let us make a name for ourselves. Take the act that belongs to the one above you and turn it on yourself. It isn't the desire to build. It's the desire to be self-authored. To make in your own image rather than being formed into the image you already bear.

And here is where I think the analogy has teeth, because that's precisely what we're doing. We are building something we intend to be a kind of creature, and we are naming it ourselves, and the naming is done (I am not being cute here) largely by marketing departments. We reach for the divine prerogative and we exercise it in a product meeting. And notice that this doesn't feel like power from the inside. That's the part we miss when we imagine it as villainy. Ask the people closest to the work and you'll hear less exhilaration than dread; the sensation of holding something you don't understand and can't set down, because the competitor won't set his down either. That isn't godlikeness...that's being had.

Let us make a name for ourselves. Instead of the image we were given.

We were handed an image at the very beginning. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him. We were given this. It wasn't something that we achieved, nor constructed, nor generated on request. Given freely, like the grace that runs through all of human history.

And the very next move in the story is a reach for a better one. Notice that the serpent doesn't offer evil, he offers an upgrade: you will be like God. And the woman sees that the tree is good for food, a delight to the eyes, and desirable to make one wise. Every one of those is a real good. That's what makes it work. The fall isn't a reach for something wicked. It's a reach for a good thing one rung above where we should have been obiedent to and content with.

Irenaeus says this better than I can. In Against Heresies he argues that humanity was made as an infant: not defective, but young, and meant to grow into maturity and incorruption over time, the way anything alive does. God could have made us perfect at the start, he says, but we could not have received it; the newly made cannot hold what only the grown can carry. Which really reframes the whole thing. What went wrong in the garden was not the desire for likeness to God. That was the point of us. It was the refusal to receive it at the pace of a gift and relationship. So we went reaching for the end of the story while still on the second page.

So the desire to be like the gods doesn't need a villain. It needs a tired person doing something reasonable, slightly too early, for defensible reasons. Which is roughly how all of this is actually being built.

And then there's a verse almost nobody seems to notice. Genesis 5: When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth. The exact vocabulary of Genesis 1: image, likeness, now running horizontally instead of vertically. Adam passes down what he has and I don't believe the text is celebrating. The likeness propagates whether or not it's good.

That's what a machine trained on us is. It isn't an alien intelligence arriving from somewhere. It is a distillation of everything we have written down; our wisdom and our appetite, our charity and our cruelty, averaged at a scale no human mind could hold. If it comes out shaped like avarice, that is not a malfunction, that's just the mirror doing its job.

So the question that frightens people: what will it become?, is really a question about what and who we are. Assembled at scale with the averaging done by a machine that cannot be embarrassed.

Which brings us to the second clause, and the one I think should actually keep us up at night. Lest we be scattered.

Lest we be scattered. The refusal to be dispersed. One language, one place, one project, and (this is the part that truly matters) nobody standing outside it who could say no.

That is not a hypothetical description of the current situation. The technology is being built by a handful of organizations, in a handful of cities, in a handfull countries, in systems that no outside party can open and inspect, and the entire competitive logic of the thing pushes toward consolidation. Don't let anyone else hold a piece. Don't become scattered.

If Babel is the right frame, then the judgment falls there. Not on the creature, rather on the concentration. And the judgment God actually renders is worth acknowledging, because it is not fire. It's making and implementation of the scattering. He breaks the monopoly and disperses the builders across the earth, and the story treats this as catastrophe, and I've come to think it was mercy. The most dangerous thing about Babel was that there was no outside.

Which is why the word audit is a more spiritual word than it sounds. Checks, inspections, the ability of someone who is not you to look at your work and refuse it. These are not the bureaucratic drag on the real business of innovation. They are the structural form of humility. They are what it looks like, institutionally, to admit your loves are disordered and might need correcting from outside. A thing that cannot be audited is a thing that has declared itself beyond judgment, and there is a word for that declaration, and the word is not progress.

And notice how Babel is finally undone. Not at Genesis 11, but at Pentecost. And the Spirit does not restore the single language. He doesn't reassemble the tower crew. The scattering stands; what changes is that the scattered tongues can suddenly understand each other. Many peoples, still different, mutually intelligible, and not one of them holding the whole. That's the shape of the good version. Not consolidation redeemed, but the dispersal made fruitful.

Back to the paragraph that sounded like me, but not really. The mechanical version of me with more emdashes and phrasing that I wouldn't use...

I don't know whether these machines will end us. Sometimes I lean toward the dystopian view of an affirmative "yes". Other times, I just think they will be another tool that we use to become more and more lazy. But honestly, I suspect they'll do what most of our towers do: less than the prophets promised and more damage than the builders intended, and then something else will come along and we'll pour the same desire into that.

Because the desire is the thing. It was there before the technology and it will outlast it. Babel wasn't a warning about architecture. It was a diagnosis of a posture we keep taking, and this is simply where that posture is pooling right now.

So I keep going back to that paragraph. It had my likeness. It had my image. It had, in a real sense, my name on it; and I had put my name there myself, by feeding it everything I'd ever written and asking it to do me. Which is the whole story in one sitting. A thing made in my likeness, reflecting my voice back at me, produced because I wanted something I could have without waiting for it. Truthfully, I didn't like it. There was something off putting about it.

And the question isn't whether the machine can sound like me. It can. The question is the one Babel asks and keeps asking: am I trying to make a name for myself, or am I willing to live inside the one I was given?

I was given one. In water, said out loud over me, by someone who was not me. Let us make a name for ourselves: that's the old sentence, and it has never once worked. We already have a name. It was spoken over us and it's better than anything we could build. Honestly, I would rather build out of that than anything we humans could desire to create. Bear the image we've been given and reciprocate that into the world.