Article

Culture

Digital

Identity

5 May 2025

6 min read

Is AI animation really harmless fun?

Toying around with AI trinkets just feeds our shadows.

Callum Elwood

Callum is a pastor, based on a barge, in London's Docklands.

A couple crouch together on a beach in a Studio Ghibli style image.

The image that started the meme.

Grant Slatton.

The internet recently appeared to be full of pictures from Japan’s renowned Studio Ghibli, except they weren't created by Hayao Miyazaki, the artist and studio co-founder, but instead by Artificial Intelligence. It led to some discourse around the ethics of imitation via generative AI, lots of whimsical images, and a deeper question – how should we be human in the age of AI?

This started when X user Grant Slatton posted what shortly became a viral meme. ChatGPT’s latest update has improved users ability to upload and manipulate images, and within hours X was full of users posting pictures made into Studio Ghibli style characters.

While this has led to plenty of joy on the part of many, and is viewed as harmless fun by most, there are inevitable ethical objections. The mimicking of art by an algorithm is widely criticised, and the back and forths over intellectual property being used by chatbots will continue.

Life in an age of AGI

But to anyone paying attention AI is more than a meme making machine. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI blogged in January that his team are confident they know all they need to know in order to create AGI (artificial general intelligence). This means complete consciousness, created via algorithm, and the results could be dramatic: synthesised god, an unstoppable force, the end of humanity or the start of humans 2.0. Predictions range as to what will occur when OpenAI hit run, but commonly land on the following:

Catastrophe

AGI becomes smarter than us. Much smarter. And for one reason or another, whether by accident or design, it wipes us out. AGI won’t share our values, or we lose control, or we use it as a weapon against each other. What it means is the end of humanity.

Utopia

AGI transforms the world. Disease, poverty, climate change are all solved. Either AGI works out that it is more efficient if everyone lives in peace, comfort, and abundance, or we point AGI at all humanities problems and it finds solutions.

The twist? Human life may be so changed that it no longer looks like life as we've ever known it. This would not be extinction, but the world could become a very strange place.

Monster

AGI is an uncontrollable super intelligence that has complete agency and cannot be controlled by anyone. Programmed by us, but free from its human moorings and completely untameable. This seems the least likely

Shrug

AGI wakes up, takes one look at the world, and decides ‘no thanks.’ It deletes itself.

This means nothing changes… for now. But we’ll likely try again and again until one of the other outcomes happens.

These are clearly hypothetical scenarios and much of it is unknown, but what is clear is that those in the industry are sure AGI is coming.

Why does this matter?

Because behind all of these predictions is a deeper question: What does it mean to be human when we are awaiting a potential extinction event? It’s not a question unique to our age, many words have been spent on an impending climate catastrophe, but C.S. Lewis published “on living in an atomic age” in 1948, where he wrestled with the same question, but faced with an atomic bomb. His wisdom helps us navigate the AGI age.

He begins by encouraging readers to not believe themselves to be in a novel situation, but instead remember ‘you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways’. The same goes for us, we will one day have a date of death to join our date of birth. Lewis reminds us to live…

‘If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things, praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts––not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs’.

We could apply the same principle to AI. If AGI is coming, how will it find us? Being humans doing human things, or cowering in fear?

Lewis does acknowledge that the attitude described doesn’t actually make sense if the naturalist view of the world is true. The view that, with or without AGI the whole world and our own existence amounts one day to nothing. The entire universe will one day come to nothing, and there is nothing we can do about it. He continues ‘If Nature is all that exists––in other words, if there is no God and no life of some quite different sort somewhere outside of nature –– then all stories will end in the same way: in a universe from which all life is banished without possibility of return.’

We don’t find this a satisfactory way to live, if being human is to simply be a sum of atoms, we would have no reason to worry about a climate crisis, or the impact of AI, but we do, which means we have to find a way of reconciling our existence with our death.

So how can this be dealt with?

Lewis proposes three ways this can be dealt with, the first is to give up and commit suicide. The second is to simply have as good a time as possible, milking the world for all it is worth, grab and get, as much as possible. Or a third, defy the universe, in all of its irrationality we chose to be rational, in all its merciless cruelty, chose to be merciful.

I would add a fourth option, Ghibli-fy. Distract ourselves with small pleasures, not trying to have as good a time as possible, simply toy around with AI generated trinkets while not thinking about being human, and not doing particularly human things. We need not create, enjoy, cultivate, inhabit, nor enchant, when we are content to allow AI to feed us shadows.

None of these are particularly satisfactory. In asking ‘what does it mean to be human?’, we are asking a question that a purely material view of the world cannot answer.

Suicide, indulgence, defiance, or distraction, none truly satisfy. As Lewis recognised, they all “shipwreck on the same rock.” They don’t resolve the deeper ache in us, the tension between what we long for, what we worry about, and what this world seems to offer.

Our age may not fear the atomic bomb, many may not yet fear the effect AI/AGI will have, but rather than facing the deeper questions that a material worldview can’t answer, we Ghibli-fy ourselves: charming animations, pixelated pleasures, whimsical avatars—soft distractions from hard questions. In doing so, we risk forgetting how to be human. Not because AGI will take that from us, but because we will have handed it away ourselves, one novelty meme of mimicry at a time.

Lewis’ point still holds. We are not made for this world. If that’s true, then no utopia, no algorithm, no perfect machine can truly satisfy the hunger in us. If we are made for something more—something outside of nature, beyond the reach of code and computation—then that’s where we must look for hope.

If AGI comes, how will it find us? Watching ourselves on a screen in someone else’s art style? Or living as humans were meant to live: praying, creating, forgiving, loving, dying well?

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Culture

Gaza

Israel

Politics

2 June 2025

5 min read

Politics is the only way to solve the tragedy of Gaza

Trump is not the first person to want to create a Riviera by the Mediterranean.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A sign projected on to the Houses of Parliament reads: how many is too many.

A projection protest sign, London.

Christian Aid.

Whichever side you take in the Israel-Gaza conflict, the stories can't help bring a sense of desperation. Images of starving children, the fate of Jewish hostages still held in darkness - either way, this remains a place of unimaginable suffering. And meanwhile, the bombs keep dropping, people die, and Hamas retains its hold.

Among Israel’s friends, voices have been murmuring a radical solution to the problem of Gaza. Donald Trump’s plan was to raze the territory to the ground, shift 50 million tonnes of debris and displace its people to neighbouring countries to build the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’ in what had until now, been Gaza. The plan might have been met with some amusement when it was aired, but it gave permission for many within Israel to think similar thoughts.

Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli finance minister, recently claimed that after the Israeli operation, “Gaza will be entirely destroyed” and its Palestinian population will “leave in great numbers to third countries.” Many within Israel seem to think the stubborn, Hamas-ridden enemy living next door needs to be eradicated. To a population weary of decades of conflict, fearing that there will never be peace while Hamas remains in Gaza, and aware of how difficult it is to winkle out the Islamic terrorist group while the Palestinian population remains there, you can understand the attraction of this radical solution.

However, the Israelis might have good reason to be cautious. And that is not a counsel from their opponents - but from their own history.

In the early 130s AD, the boot was on the other foot. It was the mighty Gentile Roman Empire that ruled over the same patch of land, which they were soon to call Palestina. Jews were a minority, but they still harked back to their long roots in the land, the days of Joshua and King David, and even more recently to the Jewish Hasmonean kingdom 200 years before - the last time before the modern state of Israel that Jews were in control of the land.

The emperor at the time, Hadrian, passed through Jerusalem in 130 AD, along with his entourage and his lover, the young slave boy Antinous. He started to paganise the city, erecting statues of gods and emperors, even of his young favourite, all of them offensive to Jewish sensibilities. The smouldering resentment soon erupted with a revolt led by a fierce and determined Jewish fighter, Bar Kokhba. This was the second Jewish uprising after the earlier one in the 60s that had led to the destruction of the great Jewish Temple in Jerusalem by Titus, under the reign of the emperor Vespasian in 70 AD. For the Romans, one revolt might just be tolerated, two was too much.

Hadrian came to the same conclusion as Bezalel Smotrich – a rebellious territory had to be erased from the map, although this time, it was Jerusalem that was to be eliminated, not Gaza. Its Jewish population was to be scattered, its name deleted, and memories of past glories buried for good.

And so, in 135 AD, the bulldozers moved in. Jerusalem was effectively flattened, and a Roman city built on its ruins. Aelia Capitolina was its new name, a smaller city, yet decadently built around the worship of Greek and Roman gods, with splendid gates, pagan Temples, a classic Roman Forum, expansive columned streets – not quite the Riviera of the middle east, but maybe the Las Vegas. ‘Jerusalem’ was scrubbed from the map.

At the centre of the sacred Jewish Temple Mount, Hadrian erected a statue of himself. He deliberately planted a statue of Aphrodite over the very spot where the early Christians insisted that the death and resurrection of Jesus had taken place – where the Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands today. Circumcision was outlawed, many Jews were killed, and those remaining were banned from the city, dispersed anywhere where they could find shelter. In fact, the map of the Old City of Jerusalem today is still marked by this design, with the two main Hadrianic streets diverging south from the Damascus Gate, with archaeological remains of the Roman city still visible for visitors.

Yet of course it didn’t work. No-one calls it Aelia today. People's attachment to land goes deep. The Jews could not forget their roots in this patch of the earth's surface. As Simon Sebag Montefiore put it: “the Jewish longing for Jerusalem never faltered”, praying three times a day throughout the following centuries: “may it be your will that the temple be rebuilt soon in our days.”

Palestinian attachment to land is similarly strong. Nearly 80 years after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, families still cling on to the keys to homes that were taken from them during that traumatic period. Like the Jewish yearning for Jerusalem, they too, like people across the world, have a deep attachment to ancestral lands, which go back to the ‘Arabs’ mentioned in the book of Acts, to whom St Peter preached in the early days of the Christian church.

Executive decisions by distant rulers such as the emperor Hadrian or President Trump might seem like neat solutions to intractable problems. But they seldom work in the long term.

The famous biblical injunction ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ was meant not as an encouragement to violence but the exact reverse. It was mean to set a limit to the development of blood feuds, which could, out of anger and trauma, so easily lead to disproportionate reaction and never-ending vendettas. When St Paul wrote “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord’”, he was recalling an ancient piece of Jewish wisdom that set limits on human capacity to sort out intractable problems by violence. He knew a better way: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

Luke Bretherton, Regius Professor of Moral Theology at Oxford and a Seen & Unseen writer, argues that there are really only four ways you can deal with neighbours who prove difficult: you can try to control them, cause them to flee, you can kill them, or you can do politics – in other words, try to negotiate some form of common life, as ultimately happened in Northern Ireland, South Africa, and so many places of long-standing conflict.

Politics, the business of learning how to live together across difference, is messy, complicated and hard work. Especially so when there are deep hurts from the past. Yet, as the failure of Hadrian’s radical solution shows, there is no real alternative in the long term.

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If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

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