The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligence amplification (IA) is transforming how theology is taught and studied, raising fundamental questions about the role of digital tools in theological education. This presentation examines the intersections of AI and IA with theological pedagogy, focusing on how technologies like ChatGPT and NotebookLM enable new forms of scriptural analysis, liturgical preparation, and apologetics.
Key questions include: Can these tools discern genuine theological insights from superficial correlations? How do they reshape the intellectual and spiritual formation of students and teachers alike? Inspired by Aquinas' De Magistro, this paper critically evaluates the promises and pitfalls of digital technologies in cultivating theological understanding. In what areas will the use of AI tools be beneficial to the teaching of theology: will it be so, for example, in the preparation of medieval textual criticism, speeding up and avoiding possible omissions and human errors when working on manuscripts and making transcriptions? But won't the lack of contact with the sources, and reliance on analysis by AI tools, essentially deprive us of what is the content of intelligence? Will the next generation of theologians, grown up without reading the source texts for theology, be able to teach better because they will discover more correlations, grammatical nuances?
The discussion will also address the ethical and epistemological implications of integrating AI and IA into theological pedagogy. How do we navigate the tension between digital innovation and fidelity to the tradition of ad fontes—a return to the sources—as we form a generation of Homo Digitalis? Certainly, a critical discernment and proper hierarchy of the available tools is needed. The Thomistic proposal of the ideal of teaching may prove to be one of the useful tools for organizing and criteria for applying AI in the teaching of theology.