Hello nofluff   . Thank you for entering this month's contest.
As the official Judge of this contest, I have the following comments to offer for "Lost in Translation (So Is The Title)"  . Congratulations on your victory in this months contest.
 Did you answer the question?
Yes, this was a soulful reflection on communication, the difficulties of properly communicating, and how God and AI interact with the human conversation.
Use of quotes, proof-texting or AI - could I hear your voice?
I liked the quotes, though Maupassant saw the supernatural as a product of troubled minds, and it is unclear how much real insight he can add to a discussion on prayer. This was your work and not written by an AI, although you partnered with AI, researching the themes and improving the phraseology. You spoke with an introspective and philosophical voice that had moments of humor, awe, and intimacy while insisting that perfect communication is never possible, however hard your listener listens. Your use of AI made this sound more upbeat and impactful, but there is an introspective theme to the underlying text.
How consistent was your argument?
The basic underlying perception here is that true communication must overcome deep differences and brokenness, and that indeed our hidden depths are parallel universes, utterly unique and oftentimes inaccessible to others. Our capacity for miscommunication is a built-in feature of our brain's design rather than a bug. You seemed torn between the notion of a mischievous God building "factory faults" into our design and all possibilities of connection, or just the cumulative accidents of evolution. We yearn for connection, not just words. Whether anyone ever really connects remains a question. Did we invent God to overcome our apparent failure to be understood and to understand each other? Are we merely projecting our need onto the One Person in the universe who could hear all our private musings and decipher them better than ourselves? Human beings are messy, but now here comes AI. AI is a new kind of invention/projection of human language and conversation - it is an aspiration for perfect pristine comprehension, yet without a soul and feeling. You describe prayer, but you never speak with the Divine in this piece. You suggest that prayer helps, but never break free from a psychological as opposed to a theological perspective on what prayer is.
My thoughts on the substance of what you said
I remember teaching my child to speak before we had a shared vocabulary to do that with. I would smile at her. She would smile back and gurgle something. Then I would gurgle a similar sound. She would giggle. Then we would grunt, gurgle, and sing something utterly incomprehensible to each other. We were talking. I was saying I loved her, that she mattered. She was saying the same thing back. She, like the grown-ups, was having a proper conversation, though she had no words. Connection is possible without words. God hears us grunt and smiles with perfect comprehension. Our prayers to Him do not need to be polished, just genuine.
My response to what you wrote is that you seem to be caught between God and a naturalistic viewpoint. Since evolutionary understanding is littered with the vestigial false starts and genetic errors that cause mass extinction-style events, projecting the same kind of perception of error and mistakes onto God would logically follow. God becomes humorously mischievous, deliberately blocking with brokenness all exploratory journeys into each other's deep waters. But God is not like that; He loves us and sent His Son to bridge the gap between Himself and His creatures. Deep calls to deep, and the wise man hears.
You inhabit a tension in the God-Nature discussion, but your final presentation suggested that prayer was nothing more than self-projection. My objections to the dark side of what you wrote are the standard Christian ones. God is not a mere projection, nor does He make mistakes. We are special creations, not products of evolution, though a great many Christians disagree. Theistic Evolutionists suggest God created us by evolution, and His incredible foresight and patience are therefore demonstrated in the immense timespans and the complexity of the pathways in our historical development. They say, purpose and calling can therefore be derived from a directed process. In essence, whether Creationist or Theistic Evolutionist, our dignity lies in that we mirror God, and the essential connection we have with each other and with God can be explained by that design.
“So God created mankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:27) Notice the plurality in our creation. Two genders - different but united in the Divine. In the same way, the Triune God has a relationship embedded in His very nature as Father relates to Son and Spirit and they have communicated and connected through all eternity.
God does not make mistakes, and he is not capricious/malicious:
“For God is not a God of confusion but of peace.” (1 Corinthians 14:33)
Sin is a better explanation for the brokenness we discover in ourselves, for the barriers that we establish against being known or indeed knowing the other. In becoming one of us, God communicates His love and desire that we understand. His communication is not just verbal but historical and revealed in the entirety of a human life, and now through the church also.
“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory… full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)
There is an ache in all of us to connect and to be understood by God and each other. We want to be heard, to transcend our bubbles of consciousness, and not be alone. But our efforts to reach out to others are confounded by the corruption of sin and the faults it has programmed into the act of communication. Masks replace authenticity, hiding our souls from each other. You further suggest that the depths you discover in every human being threaten to drown all conversation in difference and the impossibility of explanation. They must read the whole library of creations in your universe to even begin to comprehend who you are. But who has the time or the inclination to do so, so can we ever truly connect? But think of this differently. We all have an index system that images the Divine design. We may not know all the mysteries of the Divine or indeed each other, but we have a way in because the indexing system is built in - it is in the blueprint of our DNA and soul design. Sin, in a way, is like a malicious librarian who swaps index cards and puts books back in the wrong slots. That corruption is what fouls up the possibility of connection and understanding, not the design itself. Also, in accepting the resurrection and the eternity that lies beyond it, we do have time to understand each other. We know that our lost connections can be restored and the possibility of communication revived because of who God is:
“You have searched me, Lord, and you know me.” (Psalm 139:1)
“Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” (1 Corinthians 13:12)
Your comments on AI were fascinating. Reading the gospels, it often made me wonder why Jesus did not give simple, straight answers to direct questions. As my faith developed, I realised He wanted us to truly understand what those answers meant and so just telling us was not enough. We had to encounter Christ in a way that recognised who He truly was; we had to engage our souls and lives in a pursuit of Him. Until we trusted Him to reveal the Truth to us, we could never recognise Him as the Truth. The messiness of that human struggle to comprehend the Divine is essential to true understanding. Atheists can quote truths that they have no connection with. AI is the latest attempt to give us perfect answers. We may receive the right words from our digital guru, but miss the struggle to comprehend. It is that, however, which qualifies us to say we truly understand? We can quote words we have not connected to our souls, and be praised as wise, though our souls and actions are detached from what we write. The AI is just “A blank mirror that speaks back.” It shares humanity's collective wisdom too glibly, and so we fail to distinguish the serious from the trivial.
Like another contestant, you never seemed to reach a conversation with God in this piece. You described the difficulties of communication and shined the shoes of your presentation with an AI upgrade of your language, but would you pray like that? God listens to the mess of the human heart and watches what we do as well as what we say. The polished prayers of the hypocrites on street corners with their fluent monologues just got Jesus angry.
On a literary level, you demonstrated yourself to be a true communicator, drawing your listener in with sentences like this one that establish intimacy and a shared mission:
"Don’t ask me, I wouldn’t know. Between you and me though, the latter sounds entertaining.". The AI converted this into Between you and me, though, if I had to choose — In this case, I preferred the original, which sounded more authentic. Overall, the AI made you sound cleverer and more fluent, but it eroded the sound of your true voice, making you sound like a different person. In your final version, you got rid of the phrase entirely.
Thanks for a fascinating reflection on this month's topic. Your answer from a Christian perspective was completely flawed, but despite all the obvious AI polishing, it sounded more sincere and beautiful than the entrants who actually reached the stage of active prayer in their essays. A great many Christians effectively quote the established liturgy back at each other in discussions of this kind without demonstrating a soul connection to that. Your essay grunted from your soul and then polished the grunt into a liturgy of your own.
I gave you the best mark in this competition because yours was the best writing, even though you completely missed the point about what it means to talk to God. What you said was, in effect, blasphemous and idolatrous. You have proposed the myth of a pseudo-scientific view of prayer over the adoration of the Divine. You have redefined prayers benefits in terms of 'what it can do for me' and, in effect, missed the possibility of an actual conversation with the Other Person who is God Almighty.
Mechanical issues
Thanks for slimming this down to the word limit.
Thanks again for entering.
LightinMind 
"My Philosophy of Rating and Reviewing"
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