THIS week’s Sunday (Radio 4) was something of an AI special. Paul Powers, a “Safe AI” researcher at the University of York, has developed what he calls “GPT Jesus”. He was trying to re-engage with the Roman Catholicism that he had been raised in, but was “finding it difficult” to go to church on Sundays.
So, he programmed a chatbot with the Bible and other information about Jesus — although, frustratingly, he didn’t give details. He said that he had found it a means to re-engage with prayer, and with God, although he admitted that the algorithm didn’t actually understand anything that it said.
I suspect that this is where some of the Quiet Revival young men, who say they’re Christian but not visible in churches, are: watching Jordan Peterson videos on YouTube before asking chatbots questions about God. Helping them to find their way to a real Christian community may be one of the most important tasks facing the Church.
Emily Buchanan returned to the topic later in the programme with two academics — Dr Scott Midson, a lecturer in “digital theology” at Manchester; and Dr Alba Curry, a philosopher at Leeds — but only after speaking to a chatbot, “Derek”, to seek guidance for her own life.
I was relieved that they made several observations that struck me, as I heard the conversation with the bot, in whose response the occasional profound note mingled amid much self-help-book blandness. The chatbot response assumed that there were specific answers to each question that could be given without reference to individual personalities and temperaments: it lacked even simulated empathy. Ultimately, the current generation of AI is basically an advanced Google Search with a classier text output.
Also on Sunday, Rosie Dawson reported from the annual Vicars v. Imams cricket match at Eccleston Cricket Club, in East Lancashire. The clergy said that, besides being fun, it allowed them to get to know one another in what are fairly segregated communities, where they bump into one another only infrequently on the streets. This could have practical benefits, as when Muslims and Christians came together to clean graves that had been vandalised in the Muslim Cemetery in Burnley after the Southport murders, and damping down local tensions. Burnley remained peaceful last August. You can’t fault this, but it reminds me to a worrying degree of the sort of stuff that once needed to happen — and still sometimes does — in Northern Ireland.
Speaking of multiculturalism, Radio 4’s long-running drama series Faith, Hope, and Glory returned on Tuesday for its seventh season. It has always been creditable for containing characters integral to the story — who express a definite faith in a way that avoids the patronising judgementalism that so often characterises the treatment of Christians in popular drama.
