There is a small new sentence in this issue which may pass almost unnoticed: our note in the contents page concerning the use of artificial intelligence (AI). It is there because we are increasingly receiving material which has plainly been generated by AI. The immediate editorial question is one of authorship. The more interesting question is what this development is revealing about us.
I have noticed that people increasingly use ChatGPT for matters that once belonged rather more obviously to friendship, conversation, and the private life of the conscience. I know people who ask it what a particular message from a friend means, whether somebody sounds angry, how they should reply to a difficult partner, or what they ought to say after an argument. There is an understandable appeal in this. The machine is available at any hour. It does not become impatient. It does not look embarrassed. It does not sigh, misunderstand, bring its own grievances into the conversation, or tell us that we are being rather unreasonable. And therein lies the difficulty.
A recent international study of more than 7,000 chatbot users found that more than a third displayed some form of emotional attachment to chatbots. Almost 21 per cent said that a chatbot would be their preferred place to share their deepest secrets. Feelings of privacy, freedom from judgement, and relief from loneliness were amongst the strongest factors associated with this attachment.
I suspect these figures describe something older than AI. We have become accustomed to living in a society in which there is very little time for attentive presence. We send messages instead of telephoning, react instead of conversing, and increasingly process our relationships through screens. The chatbot has arrived in a culture already suffering from a shortage of listening.
For Christians, this should make us uncomfortable. The Church has always dealt in the things which AI is now being asked to imitate: consolation, counsel, confession, interpretation, reassurance, and the patient hearing of things which are difficult to say aloud. A priest knows that people rarely arrive at the door with a neatly formulated question. They arrive with a tangle of things: resentment, embarrassment, grief, guilt, desire, fear.
The Christian tradition has never regarded the human person as a problem to be efficiently solved. At the heart of our faith stands the extraordinary claim that the Word became flesh. God entered human life and all that is in it.
Perhaps, then, the arrival of AI should cause us to examine our own habits of presence. How readily do we listen to one another to understand, rather than to respond? How often do we sit with someone in grief without reaching immediately for an explanation? Can we tolerate an awkward silence? Can we offer advice without imagining that every difficulty requires a solution?
There is also something rather humbling here for the Church. If people increasingly prefer to discuss their relationships with a machine, perhaps we should ask what they are finding there that they do not reliably find amongst us. A chatbot offers privacy, patience, and attention.
The answer cannot simply be to warn people away from the machines. We need to become better at being human with one another.
The danger of our age may not ultimately be that machines learn to imitate human beings. It may be that human beings become so accustomed to artificial companionship, artificial reassurance, and artificial language that we lose some of our appetite for the untidy, sacramental reality of another person sitting beside us.
The Christian vocation has always involved this reality. We call it friendship. We call it pastoral care. We call it communion. And, at its deepest level, we call it love.
