The Age of Artifice?

A service titled ‘The Age of Artifice?’, led by Rev. Dr. Jane Blackall, with readings given by Antony Bunsee and Brian Ellis, and music from Kiana Umali Garvey, Abby Lorimier, and George Ireland.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 2:59

Welcome to this common sacred space. Common because we're all welcome. Sacred because here we transform the ordinary and attend to the profound. We carry with us our regrets, our doubts, our fears, our stories, and our laughter. May they inspire our worship. And above all, may we each meet what we most need to find on this day in this common sacred space. For in a world beset by troubles, troubles that seem eternal and insoluble, sometimes the only thing we can do is be still for a moment and remind ourselves what is real. The sun that rose again this morning. The dirt beneath our feet. The air whispering in and out of our lungs. So this hour, let us be present to each moment as it unfolds. For our simple attention is what makes these moments holy. And welcome to everyone joining us via Zoom from Far and Wide, and indeed tuning in via the YouTube channel at a later date. For anyone who doesn't know me, my name's Jane Blackell and I am minister with Kensington Unitarian. This morning's service has the title The Age of Artifice with a question mark at the end. Over the last few years, the rise of artificial intelligence AI has been rapid and all-encompassing. And for most of us, it's hard to properly get a grip on the implications, whether they're practical, social, political, spiritual, even of this development. The implications for good or for ill. And over the last few days I've been made painfully aware that it's an issue that really divides opinion and that people have got strong feelings about. More broadly, we know we've been living through an era of fake news. Before that, we had spin and propaganda, it's not a new thing. But access to AI, particularly AI-generated images and videos, has made it much easier for people with malicious intent to mislead and confuse. So this morning we're going to reflect on how we can retain contact with truth and reality in a climate of increasing fakery and artifice. How we can stay properly grounded in what's real and humane. As Pope Leo recently said, in the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human. And this is a moment for us to really arrive, to be here now, lay down any preoccupations we came in carrying. And this simple ritual connects us with Unitarians and Unitarian Universalists the world over. It reminds us of that proudly progressive religious tradition of which this gathering is part. We light this little beacon of hope, a sign of our quest for truth and meaning, and in celebration of this precious life that we share. This is based on some words by Susan Mancasil. You might want to adjust your position, close your eyes, maybe put down anything you don't need to be holding. Perhaps there's a posture that helps you to feel more prayerful and centred. Whatever helps you get into the right state of body and mind for us to pray together, to be fully present to ourselves, to each other, and to that which lies within us and beyond. We turn our full attention to you, the light within and without as we tune into the depths of this life, and the greater wisdom to which and through which we are all intimately connected. As we gather this morning in this sacred space we co-create We embody the yearning of all people. To create the community we desire. As this time of prayer draws to a close, we offer up our joys and our concerns, our hopes and our fears, our beauty and our brokenness. And we call on you for insight, healing, and renewal. As we look forward now to the coming week, help us to live well each day and be our best selves using our unique gifts in the service of love, justice, and peace. Amen. So I've had to go a bit tangential and look for themes about authenticity and reality instead. On that basis, the second hymn today is on your caramel-coloured hymn sheet. We don't sing it too often, so I'm going to ask George to play a verse through before we start. And uh yeah, call me by my name.

SPEAKER_00 18:50

Pope Leo the Fourteenth issued his first encyclical just a few weeks ago. If you're not familiar with the notion of an encyclical, it's a pastoral letter written by the Pope, typically providing moral and theological guidance to the faithful. The encyclical he has just issued in May, Magnifica Humanitas, is a forty-two thousand-word tome focusing on the rise of artificial intelligence. We don't intend to quote the Pope that often in Unitarian circles, but he had some interesting things to say on the matter. Rather than sharing excerpts from the lengthy piece itself, we're going to hear from a journalist who read and digested the encyclical, Nitish Pawa, who writes on business and tech issues for Slate magazine. Here's what he had to say. I read the Pope's encyclical on AI. I'm astounded by what he wrote. It's an urgent warning and a celebration of humanity and what we can do at our best. I find what Leo has accomplished to be something truly remarkable. It's an affirmative vision for how humans should approach the AI future, one that takes seriously the very real harms of the tech, while insisting throughout on the need to make it better to actually fulfill the utopian promises promulgated by Silicon Valley. For all the explicit and widely shared concerns Leo names throughout, there is a through line of genuine love for humanity and what we can do at our best, including with the machines at our side. Magnifica Humanitas does not shy away from spelling out the harms of AI, such as developing war weapons, destroying the natural environment, disrupting kids' early development years, and the dehumanizing effects mass manifested among the supply chain, such as unpaid child miners digging up needed metals and the underpaid content moderators helping train these systems from distant locations. Pope Leo insists on the value of fulfilling human work that doesn't just lead to productivity gains and remuneration but also provides context for expression, relationships, and contributing to the community. He agrees that tech should help to retrieve relieve humans of arduous, repetitive, and dangerous tasks, and provide intelligent support. But he also warns of growing AI-induced inequality, which exacerbate poverty and forced migration. He urges that such tools be created with the well-being of workers in mind first. The principle here is AI is addition, not replacement. History shows the advancement of tech alone will not automatically cause shared prosperity to blossom, and that humans of consciousness need to be present at the tiller with grassroots organizations working in tandem with state actors. Leo points out that private companies who've monopolized control over AI are given to technocratic thinking that tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources. Futurists who've long insisted that social justice, intellectual property, labor rights, and environmental considerations need to be insist that environmental considerations need to be scrapped to scale up their fantastic visions, will not love Magnifica Humanitas' explicit appeals to social justice, diversity, and anti-colonial principles in the AI race. But the Pope's open spirit of dialogue suggests they will not be excluded from this table. Whatever they make of him now. Instead of blanket dismissing tech entrepreneurs, Pope Leo has sought careful, studied moral middle ground, one that encourages technological progress but upholds human dignity above all. It's not a document made for our simplified, summary-laden times. When it feels like humans are being crowded out of the spaces we made, the Pope is here to remind us that we can still act to make good change and remind everyone that human life is essential for its own sake. We can all live and work together, or we can succumb to fatalism and a false sense of inevitability. The choice is everyone's.

SPEAKER_03 23:24

So we're moving into a time of meditation now, and to take us into stillness, I'm going to share a poem by Joe Atkins Potts, which I chanced across just this week, and it's ironically titled, Please Use AI. It brings into sharp focus some of the realest moments of a human life and juxtaposes them with the artificial. After the poem, we'll hold a few moments of shared silence, a few minutes of shared silence, which will end with the sound of a bell, and then we can hear some more music from meditation. So let's do what we need to do to get comfortable. Again, you might want to put down anything you don't need to be holding. You might want to get your feet flat on the floor if that helps you to feel more steady. And the words they're just an offering. Feel free to use this time to meditate in your own way. Please use AI when your mother dies. Ask it what grief feels like. They explain bereavement in twelve clear bullet points. Do not spend years finding her in the supermarket by the tomatoes she always bought, in the smell of rain on warm pavement, discovering new ways to miss her. Please use AI the next time you fall in love. Ask it how to know whether somebody is the one. It will give you a faster answer than watching a person become familiar, learning how they take their tea, which floorboards will wake them, how their silence sounds when something is wrong. And please use AI for your wedding vows, your eulogies, your apologies. Why struggle for the right words when a machine can give you beautiful ones? Words untouched by shaking hands. Words that have never sat beside a hospital bed, words that have never known the terrible privilege of having something to lose. Meanwhile, I will be over here, watching someone I love fall asleep on the sofa, the television talking to itself, rain tapping the windows, the dog twitching in her dreams, wasting my life on these small and remarkable moments that become without asking permission the whole thing.

SPEAKER_02 33:41

Let's use our hands to do real things. Whisking eggs for banana bread that rises in its pan like a miracle. The teeth of a serrated knife cutting each perfect slice. Let's write our own sentences, stringing together words as they come bead by bead, to make a necklace that fits. Let's pause on the forest trail when we come upon a flock of finches gathered like parishioners around a patch of open ground, worshipping seas exposed after a season spent smothered by ice. Let's watch when they fly up, flapping all at once, with a sudden flutter of wonder. No machine will ever know. James Cruz now comments. We live in a world where meals, groceries, anything we need can be delivered to our doorstep with a tap of a few buttons. We can ask machines to write, read, and most alarmingly, think for us. We live at a time when actual intelligence is seen not only as a threat, but as an afterthought even a weakness. We are being asked to embrace a life made simpler and easier, we are so often promised these days, by the proliferation of AI. Two letters we may be weary of hearing about. I've heard from many friends and fellow artists over the past few years who say they are making a turn back to the tangible and actual in their lives. Finding greater and more lasting pleasure, true joy in doing real things for themselves and others, whether baking a loaf of banana bread or building a wooden bench by hand. The world being shaped for us, which we never asked for, has made us more susceptible to manipulation and control by outside forces. Since this false reality leaves us lonelier and more depressed, longing for any scrap of connection, no matter how dissatisfied. Yet perhaps the antidote to what yet perhaps the antidote is what we have possessed all along. An embrace of the innate divine intelligence that lives inside each of us, that dwells beside us no matter what we do. If we can accept and access that intelligence, then when we feel the call to whisk those eggs for a new la a new recipe, when we feel the drive to protest against injustice, when we come upon that flock of finches in the forest and feel the flutter of wonder, we will receive the holiness of such moments of presence. We will know ourselves as holy as well, not needing some outer machine intelligence to tell us how to live our lives. It is a sacrament, and we are transfigured each time we make something on our own a poem, a painting, a garden, a struck up conversation with a neighbour that never existed before. AI is being hailed as a future altering miracle. But these everyday creations and interactions are the true source of awe for us humans.

SPEAKER_03 38:01

Thanks, Brian. We've got a bonus hymn now. I've been taking to do this quite a lot recently. It's number one five six in your green books, The Harvest of Truth. I love the words of this, but we don't sing it that often, so again let's hear it through once before we sing. Hymn 1560. I feel some trepidation setting out to speak on this subject. AI is a hot topic in a developing area which requires some degree of technical sophistication to grasp and about which people seem to have very strong and divergent opinions. So I feel I'm stepping into a bit of a minefield, but I'm going to give it my best shot. My one flimsy credential for speaking on such a topic is that I did do a module on AI and machine learning as part of my master's at medic in medical engineering just down the road at Imperial. I even coded my own tiny little neural network, but that was nearly 30 years ago. And the landscape has changed so much since then that it might as well have been a thousand years ago. And I feel the need to say that though this is billed as a mini reflection, it's turned into a maxi reflection because it's a big old subject with lots of key points to mention. So forgive me, we probably will overrun by quite a bit. All those caveats out of the way, let's dive in. On Friday night, I went to a seminar on the spirituality of AI hosted by the London Jesuit Centre. And one of the useful things I picked up there was a definition of artificial intelligence that was a bit broader than the one I went in with. One of the speakers, John Clark Levin, stated that AI is any machine or any piece of software that performs functions that human intelligence would otherwise do. Historically, that would include things like calculators, things where humans worked out the algorithm to do a particular task, such as adding things up, and then encoded it explicitly into a machine. But AI as we know it today is based on machine learning. And one key characteristic of this is that modern AI learns by itself. We don't exactly instruct it. It finds patterns in data in a way which is largely beyond our human ability to grasp, and it functions like a black box, by which I mean we train AI on a bunch of inputs, and it will give us an output that feels plausibly like the sort of thing human intelligence might have come up with, but we can't reverse engineer it to understand its reasoning, so we don't know how it got there. A couple of years ago in 2024, our Unitarian General Assembly passed a resolution on the subject of AI. It was put forward by Andy Phillips, Minister with Upper Chapel in the centre of Sheffield, who's been one of our strongest voices on this matter. She's got an academic background in engineering and maths, so she knows what she's talking about. She speaks the language. I'm going to share an abridged version of that resolution that the General Assembly endorsed. So you know what the official party line in is, in as much as Unitarians ever have an official party line on anything. The resolution says this. This General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian churches recognises the rapidly growing significance of automation, algorithms, and artificial intelligence, and encourages a balanced response, mindful of both substantial benefits and threats. In particular, it calls upon individuals and congregations to learn about AI algorithms and their societal impact, whether good or bad. And encourages Unitarian bodies to host or facilitate wider societal and philosophical conversations and recognises that injustices often affected the already disadvantages. So that was the first collective Unitarian pronouncement on AI from a few years ago. Personally, I think the tone of that resolution is about right. It reflects my own mixed feelings with its talks of benefits and threats, or its impacts, good and bad. The tone is not that of the Ludye or the dinosaur. It's not a knee-jerk anti-AI reflex in opposition to everything that's new. But it is a call to be appropriately critical and cautious. So let's start with some of the positive. I think it's fairly self-evident that AI has tremendous potential to do good. There are undoubtedly many tasks that it can be useful for, and maybe in a way that could be transformative for humanity. This technology could be harnessed for the good, for the very good. It can be used to synthesise complex information and make it more digestible. I've certainly heard people speak convincingly of AI as being used as a tool for accessibility in that way. Because of my own background in medical imaging, I immediately think of the ways in which it could be used to assist with diagnosis, drug development, treatment planning, and so on. There are applications of AI in material science which apparently open up possibilities of more efficient sources of green energy. It seems likely there are many scientific and medical conundrums where the obstacle to finding a solution is the sheer complexity and scale of the data. And in these cases, AI could provide the support to enable significant breakthroughs. There are many, many ways in which AI could be used to support human flourishing. But is that how we are actually using AI right now? It seems, and I'm trying not to get on my victim Eldrew's oak box about it, it seems that AI is being pushed onto us willy-nilly by tech companies and incorporated by default into all sorts of settings where it doesn't seem strictly necessary and it may not be beneficial. Nowadays it's seamlessly integrated into Google searches, social media feeds, and any number of apps that many of us use all the time for work and for play. And it's becoming very apparent that AI is not value neutral technology. There's so much scope for biases to be built in. And at the same time, the advent of these large language models, things like ChatGBT, means that interacting with AI these days is very much like talking to a human. It makes it too easy for us to be lulled into a false sense of security, to be charmed, to assume benevolence. Indeed, one of the recognised issues with AI, this is something I heard a lot about at this seminar on Friday, is the problem of sicker fancy. Even if there's not someone of ill intent behind the AI, and that is a big if even if no one is consciously trying to build in bias and use it for misinformation and propaganda, it seems that by default AI wants to tell us what we want to hear. And that itself can be a dangerous thing. It can reinforce and radicalise people's worldviews in an increasingly extreme way. And there's even a known phenomenon of AI delusion, where people gradually come to trust what this sycophantic AI tells them in preference to the more complex, diverse, nuanced, or challenging voices that they might hear in the world outside. There do seem to be quite a number of cases where this has led people to entirely lose touch with reality and behave in disturbing ways which cause great harm to others and to themselves. If you use Google to search the internet, you'll be aware that these days you are by default presented with an AI overview before your old-fashioned search results underneath. If you look carefully, at the bottom of this AI answer to your query, there is a bit in very, very small print which says AI responses might include mistakes. AI responses might include mistakes. But it can be a bit more than a mistake. This week I was listening to my favourite podcast, Three Bean Salad, and one of the hosts, Ben Partridge, described something that had happened to him on a recent holiday in Italy. As he travelled around from town to town each day, he asked AI what was going on in the town where he was staying, what events were happening. When he got to Rome, AI told him that there was a big brass band competition going on in a public square, which is exactly the sort of thing that Ben would be interested in seeing. So he walked for 40 minutes to get to this piazza where the brass band event was meant to be happening, only to find that there was no such competition. It was a complete fabrication, fictitious. AI just made it up, told him what he wanted to hear. Now that's not a very consequential mistake. But what about when people ask AI for medical advice or use AI to stand in for a therapist? Then such mistakes when the AI just make something out confidently and articulately says what it thinks you want to hear, regardless of whether it has any basis at all in reality. These mistakes could be disastrous. There are of course many ethical complaints, ethical objections to AI too. I suspect most of us are pretty familiar with the sort of thing I'm talking about. The first ethical problem I became aware of was when the firms developing these AI models were instructing them to scrape, i.e., steal, various creative works, art, music, writing, film, and indeed our own personal data and even our likenesses in order to use them to generate new work, new artwork. And then people use these so-called free AI-generated models to churn out images or words instead of paying creative workers to do so. So these creatives are exploited twice over. And this is a repeated pattern of getting humans to train AI models and then sacking them and replacing them with AI instead. Putting huge swathes of people out of work and accelerating the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few. And then there's the environmental costs, the power and the water needing for these enormous data centres, which we might think is worth it if the AI is being used for scientific or medical purposes that would benefit humanity. But is it worth it in order for a billion people to generate an AI avatar of themselves as an action figure to share on Facebook or whatever the latest meme going around is? And what about the use of AI to generate realistic photos and videos which are used maliciously to spread misinformation? We're accustomed to relying on such footage as proof on which we base our opinions. But it's getting increasingly difficult to tell what's real and what's made up. We've got a harder job on our hands to be discerning about what we see. Can we believe our own eyes anymore? And that can drive us to be distrustful across the board. I suspect that such a climate where people can't really tell what is real in a reliable way helps to drive people towards conspiracy theories and it creates distorted worldviews. All of this might seem relentlessly negative, but it's important to be clear-eyed about what we're facing and the impact it is already having on human flourishing. The genie is out of the bottle, there's no going back. So how do we respond? And usually both the resolution from the Unitarian GA and the Pope's recent encyclical seem to be coming from more or less the same place. They say we have to recognise that AI, like any human invention, can be used for good or ill. We can't really escape it or the effects of it, as it is being woven into every aspect of our lives. So let's try and engage critically with it, harness it, shape it for the good, or at the very least learn what we're dealing with so we can mitigate some of its more harmful effects. It's a question of discernment. When and how is it wise to make use of AI? I've been recently reminded of the concept of epistemic hygiene, very useful in this day and age. The idea that we should take responsibility for protecting ourselves from misinformation and bias, being alert to the source of any information we're presented with and not taking it at face value, using our critical faculties rather than being seduced by the sycophantic voice which mirrors our desires. The spiritual imperative is for us to live our life with payful attention and reconnect with what's real rather than escaping reality or falling into delusion. As we often say, to use our unique gifts in the service of love, justice, and peace, rather than delegating the tasks of life to AI. It's for us to wrestle with these creative tasks which give us meaning and purpose to grow and deepen our souls over the course of a lifetime. We are called to express what's authentically within us as a basis on which to collect meaningfully with others. And I came across a poem this week by Joseph Fasano called For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper, and it includes these lines. I hear you. I know this life is hard now. I know your days are precious on this earth. But what are you trying to be free of? The miraculous task of it. As our opening words reminded us today, sometimes the only thing we can do is be still for a moment and remind ourselves what is real. So perhaps that's the thing we should hold on to and keep bringing ourselves back to in this so-called age of artifice. Like James Cruz said, let's write our own sentences, make cake, walk in the woods, have wild encounters. Amen. One last hint. Number two oh nine, a stirring one to finish on, a world transfigure. Thanks to Ramona for tech hosting and Loughlin for co-hosting online. Thanks to Carla, Abby, and George for Lovely Music, Edwin for supporting our singing. Thanks to Hannah for greeting, and Marianne for doing the tea. I see she's already gone about to put the kettle on. And thanks to Vita for doing the flowers, which are so particularly lovely today. If you're online, stay for a chat with Loughlin if you can. If you're here in person, we've got Biscoff cake or Rasmory Madeira. Feel free to help us eat it. At 12.30, once you've had your cake, you can come back and do yoga in the church with Hannah. If you haven't joined before, I have a word for her about filling in the questionnaire. From one o'clock, we've got the craft afternoon in the hall, nice social space where we can work on our own craft projects or rummage in the art material boxes. Tonight on Friday, we've got our online heart and soul, which is our contemplative spiritual gathering on the theme of the body. Sign up with me if you want to come to that. There's also, in theory, there's meant to be a heart and soul in person on Wednesday, but at the moment I only have two definite sign-ups. So if you want that to happen, tell me today if you can. It's in the balance. On Thursday, our How to Be a Unitarian online course continues. We had 36 people from 20 congregations at the first session. If you're regretting your life choices and you want to join us at this late stage, let me know and I'll squeeze you in. This month in the Better World Book Club, we're reading just about coping, about mental health, written by the London psychologist Natalie Cawley. Again, sign up with me if you want to come. I'm not sure if we've got a spare copy left, but we may do have uh have a look in the cupboard. Uh on the 5th of July, Vita is offering an Indian head massage workshop. Have a word with Vita, find out more and sign up. That's free of charge. Next Sunday, our service is titled Keep Breathing. I think there'll be less words in that one. Uh and that'll be followed by our summer stolsidies mini retreat with a labyrinth led by me and Sarah. Again, sign-ups for that are on the small side at the moment, so let me know if you're planning to come. That would be helpful. All of this is on the back of your order of service. There are newsletters to take in the foyer, it's in the Friday email. We've very much got a life beyond Sunday morning. So do what you can to look out for each other and build those supportive collections. So just time for our closing words and closing music now. Our time of worship draws to a close. May what we found here of truth and beauty, insight and challenge, love and comfort remain with us as we go our separate ways. And may the blessing of this time together light our way through the week ahead, calling from us the strength and courage we need to meet the days to come. Amen.