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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Review

Culture

Music

27 February 2025

6 min read

The biblical undercurrent that the Bob Dylan biopics missed

In the best of Dylan’s work is a contemporary Pilgrim, Dante or Rimbaud on a compassionate journey.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A colorful mural depicts the eyes of Bob Dylan staring to the side.

Dylan mural, Minneapolis.

Nikoloz Gachechiladze on Unsplash.

The Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown begins with his arrival in New York and concludes with his performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. He begins the film as a complete unknown, as he arrives with no backstory to share or, where he does, one that he has invented. He ends it as a complete unknown, because he consistently refuses all the boxes or labels in which others want to imprison him.

This aspect of Dylan’s life and career has also characterised many of the earlier biopics, such as 2007’s I’m Not There which features six different versions of Dylan as poet, born-again Christian, outlaw, actor, folk singer, and electrified troubadour. Suze Rotolo, his girlfriend throughout much of the time covered by A Complete Unknown, described the way in which he absorbed influences at this time like a sponge:

“He had an incredible ability to see and sponge – there was a genius in that. The ability to create out of everything that’s ﬂying around. To synthesize it. To put it in words and music.”

Focusing on this aspect of Dylan’s life and practice can, however, lead to a minimising of his upbringing and also to a misleading sense of brilliant but entirely disconnected phases – essentially a series of rejections – as having characterised his career. There are some important elements of Dylan’s life and ideas that are overlooked, underplayed or simply lost as a result. Many of these involve the particular expression of spirituality that has informed his work from the beginning.

As Rabbi James Rosenberg has explained: “Robert Allen Zimmerman was born in Duluth, Minnesota, on May 24, 1941. He spent the majority of his childhood, including his high school years, in Hibbing, about 60 miles northwest of Duluth. His father and mother, Abram and Beatie, whose parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe, sent both him and his younger brother David to the local synagogue for their Jewish education leading to Bar Mitzvah at age 13.”

As a result, Dylan’s songs have from the beginning of his career been suffused with the phrases and imagery of the Bible; interestingly, not just the Hebrew Bible, but the Christian Bible too. Whether it’s the references to Judas in “Masters of War” and “With God on Our Side” or quoting Jesus in ‘the first one now will later be last’ (“The Times They Are A-Changin’”) or the Old Testament stories that feature at the end of “When the Ship Comes In”, wherever you look within Dylan’s lyrics the influence of the Bible is apparent.

Follow that thought with another which notes the prevalence of apocalyptic images (storms, hurricanes etc) and events (‘The hour when the ship comes in’, the moment when “The Times They Are A-Changin’” or the night when the “Chimes of Freedom” ring, for example). Then think from where images of apocalyptic events primarily derive in the Western imagination and you’ll be circling back to the Bible, and the Books of Daniel and Revelation in particular. That is of course what Dylan himself did following his born-again experiences in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, but the Bible was always the original seedbed for his images and ideas.

Then, look deeply into one of the most apocalyptic of his early songs – “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” – and you’ll see a manifesto to which he has held throughout his career and which illuminates his work in every decade and every change of direction within his lengthy career. The central character in “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” commits to walking through an apocalyptic world in order to tell and think and speak and breathe and reflect what he sees in order that all souls might see it too. In a much later manifesto song – “Ain’t Talkin’” – he puts it like this:

Ain’t talkin’, just walkin’

Through this weary world of woe …

Heart burnin’, still yearnin’

In the last outback, at the world’s end

Throughout Dylan’s career, he writes songs about people travelling through life in the face of apocalyptic storms seeking some form of relief or salvation or entry to heaven. So, what we have in the best of Dylan’s work is a contemporary Pilgrim, Dante or Rimbaud on a compassionate journey, undertaken in the eye of the Apocalypse, to stand with the damned at the heart of the darkness that is twentieth century (and then twenty-first century) culture.

It's actually all there right at the beginning in the song that he wrote for and sang to his hero Woody Guthrie:

I’m out here a thousand miles from my home

Walkin’ a road other men have gone down

I’m seein’ your world of people and things

Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings

Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song

’Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along

Seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn

It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born

(“Song to Woody”)

Dylan’s songs, from that point onwards, have documented where his pilgrim journey in the eye of the apocalypse has taken him; often with imagery of storms lighting his way. He has travelled the paths of political protest, urban surrealism, country contentment, gospel conversion and world-weary blues. On his journey he: saw seven breezes blowing around the cabin door where victims despair (“Ballad of Hollis Brown”); lightning flashing for those who are confused, accused and misused (“Chimes of Freedom”); surveyed “Desolation Road”; talked truth with a thief as the wind began to howl (“All Along the Watchtower”); sheltered with an un-named woman from the apocalyptic storm (“Shelter from the Storm”); felt the idiot wind blowing through the buttons on his coat, recognised himself as an idiot and felt sorry (“Idiot Wind”); found a pathway to the stars and couldn't believe he'd survived (“Where Are You Tonight? Journey Through Deep Heat”); rode the slow train up around the bend (“Slow Train”); was driven out of town into the driving rain because of belief (“I Believe in You”); heard the ancient footsteps join him on his path (“Every Grain of Sand”); felt the Caribbean Winds, fanning desire, bringing him nearer to the fire (“Caribbean Wind”); betrayed his commitment, felt the breath of the storm and went searching for his first love (“Tight Connection to My Heart”); then, at the final moment, it's not quite dark yet but he’s walking through the middle of nowhere trying to get to heaven before the door is closed (“Tryin' To Get To Heaven”):

The air is getting hotter, there's a rumbling in the skies

I've been wading through the high muddy water

With the heat rising in my eyes.

Everyday your memory grows dimmer.

It don't haunt me, like it did before.

I been walking through the middle of nowhere

Tryin' to get to heaven before they close the door.

(“Tryin' To Get To Heaven”)

Whatever the crises we face, whether personal or political, there’s a Dylan song that says there’s light at the end of the tunnel if you keep walking toward it and, whatever the song, there’s a depth of insight and compassion for those who are struggling along the way.

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