I’ve been using AI more and more over the last six months to help me research a variety of business and work-related topics. Pretty quickly, I learned that AI is very eager to give me answers that it thinks will make me happy. Its tendency to throw out recommendations and answer questions without the full context started getting in my way and actually made the research process take longer overall.
I mentioned this observation to a business consultant recently over coffee and he shared an approach he uses with AI to avoid this outcome. Before he starts typing into ChatGPT or whatever AI tool he’s using, the first thing he does is create pillar documents to serve as references and foundational sources. He uploads those and then tells AI to use those documents as guardrails to ground the discussion, keeping it within the boundaries of his worldview or the confines of a specific topic.
This process made so much sense to me and I was eager to try it for myself. So with my next business project, I took the time to upload a bunch of pillar documents to anchor my discussion. Many of these documents included topics related to Catholic teaching because I never want AI to make recommendations that are contrary to my faith.
After that, I took it a step further and told AI to only pose questions to my queries instead of answers. By doing so, I found that AI became a thought partner that helped me solve my own problems instead of something I relied on to solve my problems for me.
This experience using pillar documents with AI reminded me of the many documents that the Church gives us as Catholics to help form our consciences. We have Scripture, the Magisterium, Church teachings, and tradition all acting as God’s guardrails to keep us from harming ourselves and others, and to show us how to order all things towards love.
Just like with AI, though, these guardrails are only useful when we know what they are. It’s worth considering the effort we’re making to try to integrate these teachings into our own lives. Because if we don’t, it will inevitably be harder to know when we’re acting only to make ourselves happy, and perhaps straying away from God’s love in the process.
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