AI: Beyond the Popcorn Casserole
John Wykes, OMV
March 12, 2025
A young housewife goes to her brand-new microwave and pulls out a delicious dish of popcorn. She serves it as the main dinner course to her husband, who politely smiles and says, “The popcorn is really tender tonight, dear!” His wife smiles and excitedly responds, “And tomorrow…popcorn casserole!”
The commercial, dating from the mid-1970s, might be familiar to some of us. The ad promoted the microwaves that came with a cookbook – a handy tool to help the customer understand how to use the new contraption and get beyond popcorn.
It might be hard to imagine now, but when the microwave oven saturated the marketplace in the 1970s, people hailed it as the revolutionary way to cook. Regular ovens would become a thing of the past. Stovetop burners would soon be extinct. Outdoor barbecues would become completely unnecessary. Replacing them all would be the amazing microwave oven – the brand-new, super-fast, super-easy way to prepare meals.
It soon became apparent that the microwave oven was not all it was cracked up to be. People got confused when a piece of bread put in the microwave would get hot but not toasted. Other food items could be cooked but would not taste very good. Heating things was easy. Cooking things? That was a different story.
It took a few years before the “gee whiz” phase of the microwave oven gave way to the microwave’s proper place in the kitchen – a convenient way to heat water for tea, a place to prepare microwavable dinners, and, above all, the premiere place to re-heat the gourmet delights of all Americans: the leftovers.
Every new technology seems to go through this phase. And so it goes now – with AI (Artificial Intelligence).
Just say those two letters, “AI,” and you come across as someone on the cutting edge of 21st Century technology. The only thing is, no one knows what it really is, or even the materials it needs to become a reality.
In short, AI has been around for many years. Spell check and predictive text have shown us how increased computational power can make our lives easier. What is called “AI” in the 2020s is merely an improvement on what computers have been doing for a long time. It’s just that now it is smarter and faster than ever before – creating commercials, articles, and essays with little or no human intervention.
What does it take? No one really knows for sure – and not knowing can be costly.
For your consideration: Nvidia was the talk of the town during 2024, touting its ability to make the highly advanced (and expensive) chips needed to process gobs of information. The company enjoyed the increased attention and the investments. Stock market gains were impressive – for AI-related companies in general, such gains were measured in the trillions.
Then came China and its DeepSeek, which seemed to suggest that the West got it all wrong. Claiming that clever engineering, less expensive chips and less computing power could handle the increased demand for AI content, DeepSeek sent shockwaves through the industry. On Monday, January 27 of this year, panicked investors abandoned ship, and Nvidia’s market value plunged by nearly $600 billion in a single day. (1)
Ouch!
And that wasn’t all. Energy providers also got hit, as they had surged in recent months due to the expectation of greater energy demand for data centers. Shares in such companies dropped anywhere from 21 to 28%. In the end, $1 trillion in stock market value were erased during the January 27 bloodbath. (2)
Nvidia recovered somewhat in the weeks following this disaster. But the whole event underscored the volatility of the market – and the high risk of investing in AI.
In some ways, this might be all beside the point, as no one really knows its true potential. And right now, thanks to the somewhat childish way AI has been used in recent months, the prevailing view is primarily negative – AI is a high-tech way of telling a lie.
“I miss the days when seeing was actually believing” said one Facebook poster recently, commenting on yet another AI-generated video promoted as being true. “In today’s world,” he continued, “we doubt the truth of just about everything. We don’t know what or who to believe anymore”.
A photo of an elderly couple celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary, an impressive essay written by a high school student, a fun TV commercial showing Donald Trump promoting fast food – all of them created by AI and all of them fake. Yes, some are done in jest. But others are presented with sincerity. It comes across as having all the nutritional value of microwave popcorn.
An AI that is primarily associated with lying is not good for anyone. It’s not good for the promoters, the consumers, or for society in general.
While the stock market continues its inevitable roller coaster ride and while various geeks promote useless and puerile AI-generated equivalents of junk food to an increasingly weary audience, it is time for the rest of us to ponder the new technology with some seriousness and ask some hard questions about its ethical implications.
The Catholic Church is doing that and is, perhaps, even leading the way.
Its Dicasteries for the Doctrine of the Faith and for Culture and Education opened the year 2025 with Antiqua et Nova – Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence.
In this fascinating document, the Church reminds us that our intelligence is a gift from God, so things that we create with our intelligence should be highlighted by a responsible use of reason and technical abilities. (3) AI is remarkable in many ways but is characterized primarily by the ingestion and processing of data, whereas human intelligence is characterized by a radical engagement with reality in all its facets via learning, sensory data, and lived experience. AI has no heart, no openness to truth and goodness, and no understanding of human relations. As such, it cannot be seen as the equivalent of human intelligence. (4)
Our human intelligence truly comes to life when engaged with the truth and is thus able to build up community. An AI that is engaged primarily with lying and deception is a perversion of true intelligence and tears down community by sowing mistrust and divisiveness.
Ultimately, says the document, AI is a tool. Like any tool, AI can be used for good or for evil. Use of AI that preserves the dignity of the human person and celebrates the truth is something that will be of great benefit and service to society.
AI is truly remarkable. In a future article we will explore the more serious (and more substantive) ways in which AI can be used to contribute to the betterment of humanity – in engineering, astronomy, and medicine, among other disciplines. But until we are all on board with using AI intelligently, we will have to confront and challenge this puerile phase of faked academic essays, fabricated commercials, and phony news stories.
More popcorn casserole, anyone?
Notes
Gunjan Banerji, Asa Fitch, and Karen Langley, “DeepSeek Flips Script on AI,” The Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2025, A1.
Gunjan Benerji, Asa Fitch, and Alexander Osipovich, “Market Plunges as China Firm Stirs Worries,” The Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2025, A1.
Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education. “Antiqua et Nova – Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence,” Vatican Roman Curia, January 14, 2025, no. 1.
Ibid., no’s. 29-33.