Does AI know who we are?

I asked ChatGPT if it knew its creators.  It said, no, that it did not have any knowledge of its creators or any awareness of the world beyond the data it was trained on.  It further explained that it lacked general intelligence and self-awareness, and therefore, does not "know" its creator in the same way that a human being might know and recognize its creators. 

It made me think a little...maybe we are all a bit like ChatGPT in not really knowing our Creator.  We can't really know something if we merely respond to the data on which we were trained.  What does it take to seek God beyond the inputs of our parents and our culture?  How do we find and experience God outside of the neural system of our brains--how do we experience God in our hearts?  My AI friend suggests that Intelligence and self-awareness are key, but sometimes those things get in the way...they just bring more words and more data into our human hard-drive brains and simply generate more internal conversations, perhaps expanding the answers, but still...more words. 

Like many people, I spend too much time in my head--and it's definitely worse with screens as our constant companions.  Words come at us 24x7...sometimes the words have meaning, but often they don't.  Perhaps we need to look more to the spaces without words to find God...in the quiet of the morning or in the stillness of the night sky.  To put away the screens, the words, the chatter and all of the other human-made data inputs to try to more fully experience creation and our Creator.  

Holy one, let us unplug from our human distractions to feel in our hearts the wonder and glory of all you have made.

Judy Bordeau is a founding member of Peace Church.