This coming Wednesday Professor David Wilkinson from the theology department of Durham University will speak in church about Artificial Intelligence and what it means to be human. David is a Methodist minister. He used to be principal of St John’s College Durham. He is a Canon of Durham Cathedral. His particular expertise is in Astrophysics. He will have many wise things to say about one of the most important issues of the day: AI and what we do with it.
Earlier this week I was in a meeting that welcomed by Zoom two folk who (on behalf of the CofE nationally) have been pondering deeply how AI may present the church with some really difficult pastoral challenges. As we are getting increasingly excited by the power of these computational models and we hear the promises from Silicon valley of the huge benefits they offer to humanity our meeting discussed some of AIs downsides. Yes: we already value AI’s ability to predict the weather. We can see the possibilities of its use in medicine and diagnosis BUT
I had not realised that, just as you can seek advice from Claude – an AI chatbot- you can create an avatar (a digital lookalike) of your deceased loved one with whom you can then have an AI created conversation that seems real. A funeral may have taken place, a burial or cremation may have happened but already vulnerable, bereaved people are living in this alternate reality where their beloved has not died. What happens when the AI creator monetises this service: demands a payment or cuts off the emotional support you have found. Is the comfort someone finds here based on an illusion?
A second issue: there were many – the largest growing part of the AI world is the use of images of children for the purposes of sexual gratification. Unknown both to them or their parents, pictures of children are being ‘scraped’ from the digital record and then digitally manipulated so that your child or grandchild’s image appears in pornographic material online. Does that bother you?
These things are alarming. They are not possibilities for the use of this technology – they are already realities, already happening. So where do these thoughts fit into today’s reflection on the scriptures? I think they sit alongside this morning’s reading about the Israelites’ creation of the Golden Calf. I’ve been pondering this all week. I’m not wholly sure myself but I offer a few thoughts to stimulate your thinking.
We all know that right near the top of the 10 commandments is the prohibition against God’s people creating idols. Down the centuries there have been moments of extreme violence as this prohibition has been enforced. The Reformation in our own history saw an unprecedented destruction of churches, art and glass out of an elevation of the Word of God that saw no place for the visual arts. Churches further away from London (up North) suffered less at the hands of the Protestant Reformers whereas those closest to centre of the reformation upheaval are perhaps still wary of replacing their leaded windows with any colour. Those that were spared then had to contend with Oliver Cromwell’s men who followed up with hammers to break heads off statues. This clash between Word and image has appeared elsewhere: you’ll remember that ISIS in Iraq and Syria destroyed statues of great antiquity.
The principle at stake for Moses and the people of Israel in our reading is that God cannot, must not, ever be contained or restricted by our own imagining. Last year we spent time thinking about the Nicaean Creed – the words of which we use each Sunday morning. One thing that the studies highlighted for me was the fact that we attempt to ‘tame’ God, feel that we ‘understand Him’, we’ve ‘got Him’ – when actually we only know that which He reveals to us. God is beyond us: His thoughts are not our thoughts! We only know ‘in part’.
I have no problem with stained glass or pictures, we don’t worship them – but I also see that an image, a picture, can fix our understanding of God. How hard it has been for us – influenced by any number of stained glassed windows or picture bibles – to grasp that Jesus was Jewish, not a tall, blonde Edwardian missionary!
Aaron in our reading had been hopelessly compromised, he was unable to control the people or resist their demands. They asked him to make ‘gods’ – plural. He made one: the golden calf. But then he declared a Feast to the Lord. He conflated this image with Israel’s God. He wants things every which way: he is trying to cover his bases, but everything backfires on him. We’re not given the rest of the chapter but, by the end of chapter 32 of the Book of Exodus 3000 people have been killed, the community is utterly divided and Aaron humiliated, having failed as a leader.
But back to my questions about AI. The golden calf was presented as ‘the saviour of the people’: this is what we need, think of the benefits of creating it? But the golden calf demanded sacrifice from the people – all gods do. There is a cost, considerable cost. In the scripture story the cost was expressed in the people pouring their gold into the mould that Aaron created. Aaron told the people to give him the gold rings that adorned their wives, sons and daughters – its worth noticing that it is the women and children who pay the cost – and Aaron created the mould for the calf. We have intergenerational wealth being spent and a technological solution presented to assuage the people’s desires: does that sound familiar? The costs of AI are only just being talked about. The huge investment of the tech companies can only be recouped ‘down the line’ as their technology is monetised: for these companies are now too big to fail and someone (we) must pay. There is an arms race in tech between the US, China and Russia with other countries forced to join in lest they be left vulnerable. The cost, we are learning, may come at the expense of the environment – the huge quantities of water needed to cool data centres- or at the expense of people’s jobs. If anyone ‘pulls the plug’ on this progress we face a financial crash akin to that of 2008. We have been captured. We are struggling to assert our humanity and morality against these large language models. Their creators claim they cannot control them and that they (the creators) are not responsible for them when they cause harm (think of the hacking of the Australian medical system) . (Interestingly, when Moses challenges Aaron about what he has done later in the chapter Aaron too denies responsibility. Our reading tells us that he made a mould for the calf. But by verse 24 he lies to Moses: ‘I threw their gold into the fire an out came this calf’ : it just ‘made itself’, it just happened!
But then look at the image Aaron created. It was a common image across the bible lands. The male bull calf. What image of god does it present? Strength and virility: Power and Sex. The calf made, the feast was proclaimed and the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to revel. ‘Rose up to revel’ – down the centuries that phrase has been regarded as something of a euphemism. By verse 25 of this chapter we are told the people were running wild. In the fertility god Baal (condemned later in the Old Testament), worship involved prostitution and sexual incontinence. By ‘fixing’ the image of the calf Aaron had given the people a false image of what God was like, he had set before them an ideal that appealed to the very worst in their nature. Power, control, violence, brute force – combined with the male sexual drive (which is real, God given but difficult to control). This is a very dangerous mix.
It’s not looking good is it? So where is the gospel? Where is the good news? The good news is that there was someone (Moses) whose understanding of God was such that he could see the danger in front of him for the society that he (under God) was seeking to create. The good news was that God’s vision for people was gentler, kinder than that which Aaron had acceded to. It would demand sacrifice but it would not strip people of their dignity, it would control the human urge to exercise power and abuse sex. It would structure people’s relationships and set those relationships beneath the call to worship, acknowledge and treasure something above and beyond themselves: the unseen God who calls us to reflect his true image in our lives. Where do we see that image: in the face of Jesus Christ? We model our lives on Him.
Christian voices, shaped by the image of God revealed to us in Jesus, need to be heard across the big issues of our day: for humanity deserves better than to be enslaved to malign ghosts in the machines we create or ‘just appear’ without our control.