Interpreting Interpreter: AI Skill Detection

The Takeaway

Hales consults AI to build a list of skills that would be required to write a book like the Book of Mormon, concluding that there is very little historical evidence that Joseph Smith had any such skills.

The Summary

In this article, Brian C. Hales presents a somewhat tongue-in-cheek analysis of the skills that would be needed to write a book similar in length and complexity to the Book of Mormon. He does this by consulting a panel of 11 different publicly-available large-language artificial intelligence models, providing them with a complex query that elicited a set of 15 skills that AI commonly associated with a literary achievement on the scale of the Book of Mormon. After informally testing the accuracy of those AI models, and validating their list of literary skills (using faithful, neutral, and critical sources), Hales turns to the historical record to look for evidence of Joseph Smith having acquired them. The skill categories include:

• Attention to detail, discipline and stamina, mental focus, organizational, and time management skills. Though most accounts don’t directly describe Joseph’s skills in this area, some record that he was “lazy”, “lounging”, and “idle”, despite being a “good worker”. He does not appear to have been particularly energetic or enterprising in the years before 1829.
  
• Bible and theology skills. Though Joseph had some familiarity with the Bible, many describe that familiarity as limited, lacking in-depth historical and biblical knowledge as well as theological education.
  
• Composition, editing, vocabulary, and language. Joseph wrote very little before dictating the Book of Mormon, and he is afterward described as writing “very poorly”, and as “illiterate to some extent”.
  
• Memory and recall. According to Hales, “no eyewitness statements describe [Joseph] possessing extraordinary recall or a photographic or eidetic memory”. None of Joseph’s modern biographers, critical or otherwise, portray him as having such, and he appears to have been an inferior student to some of his peers, such as Orson Pratt.
  
• Research and specialized knowledge. Though he may have occasionally read his father’s newspapers, he is described as being “without scientific knowledge or attainments” and as having “a strong mind utterly unenlightened by the teachings of history”. None in his local area recall him buying ink or paper, and no one describes him visiting libraries or bookstores. He is instead documented as spending his time farming, clearing land, laboring, and treasure hunting.
  
• Creativity, imagination, and world-building skills. Despite Lucy Mack Smith’s recollections of Joseph’s prolific tales of the particulars of Nephite society, his younger brother William seems to recall it somewhat differently, and Lucy’s memory does not seem to align very well with what we have in the Book of Mormon itself.
  
• Speaking, dictation, and storytelling. Though Joseph is described as a “passable exhorter” and a capable debater, he was “not known to have preached a single sermon before organizing the church” and was later described as “not naturally talented for a speaker”. Others recall that “he had no great choice of words, and generally expressed his ideas in a very humble, common-place way… Joseph was no orator.”
  

Hales’ analysis highlights a key contradiction in attempts to naturalistically explain the Book of Mormon. Eyewitnesses consistently declare that Joseph dictated the words of the Book of Mormon, but they also declare that he did not have the skills necessary to have produced those words himself. Hales declines to resolve this contradiction, content to conclude that the list of skills produced by AI might be helpful for defining the apparent (and apparently large) skill-gap evidence with Joseph and the Book of Mormon.

The Reflection

Even when it’s delivered with a wink to the camera, one can trust an analysis by Hales to be interesting and robust. I can’t help but be a bit gratified that he and I came to the same conclusion regarding Joseph’s memory. I was afraid that my amateur sleuthing had missed some important memory-relevant factoid, but if Hales failed to turn one up it’s unlikely anyone could. I appreciate Hales’ succinct framing of the core problem of the Book of Mormon. In the naturalistic mind, we have very little historical room for anyone but Joseph to have authored the book, and yet Joseph decidedly fails to fit the mold of an accomplished author. This contradiction doesn’t seem to give the critics much pause, but the rest of us are allowed to think it a bit strange. I’ll continue to look forward to a book-length treatment on this topic from Hales (or anyone else who decides to give it a shot).