Article

Character

Culture

Digital

23 January 2025

7 min read

Apple’s AI ads show how we can lose our moral skills

Apple Intelligence promises to safeguard us from the worst of ourselves.

Jenny Lander

Jenny is training to be a priest. She holds a PhD in law and writes at the intersection of law, politics and theology.

A worker at a desk sits back contemplating a situation

Dour Dale contemplates AI.

Apple.

“I got through the three stages of the interview process, and they said I had done well, but they aren’t hiring any computer science graduates anymore. AI is cheaper, and faster.”

John*, a bright 24-year-old coder and philosopher, has just completed an MSc in Computer Science from one of the top universities in the UK. And he can’t find a job. AI has outcompeted him. In a couple of years, he says, entry level into computer science as a field will require a PhD. What about in ten years, or twenty? Will the only people able to work in the field have to effectively be geniuses to keep up with a technology that’s metastasizing at the rate of knots? It felt painfully ironic to be discussing over coffee the death of an entire sector of meaningful jobs less than a week after the new Labour government announced its plans to “turbocharge” AI (Artificial Intelligence) as the saviour of the nation’s economy. What are we willing to sacrifice in the name of “national renewal”?

As worrying as John’s story is, there is much more than jobs – and the skills, knowledge and social relations tied up in them – on the line when it comes to AI. The alleged saviour of the nation’s economy is after your soul as well, it turns out.

This came home to me starkly over the Christmas holidays with the new advertisements for Apple Intelligence tools on MacBook Pro. In the first ad, “Lazy Lance” – a procrastinating business professional – sheepishly shifts in his seat. He has been asked to make a presentation on the new business prospectus, and he has been caught out, unprepared. But he is saved at the last moment. The click of the “Key Points” button using the new Apple Intelligence software on his MacBook Pro provides him with the critical breakdown summary needed to avoid becoming the pariah of the team. The sheepish shifting turns to smug smile: his substandard performance has evaded detection with the ready aid of Apple Intelligence.

In the second ad, “Dour Dale” – a disgruntled office worker – writes a scathing email to the “monster” who has devoured his pudding from the communal fridge. Before clicking send on this missive, he raises his eyes from the raging words on his screen to see a pious teddy bear holding a love-heart which says “find your kindness.” This moral cue from a cuddly toy prompts Dave to select the “Friendly” button from the dropdown list on Apple Intelligence writing tools, which immediately converts his childish strop over pudding thievery into a mature response in which he kindly expresses his disappointment along with a polite request for the pudding to be returned. The only moral effort required of Dale is the click of a button; Apple Intelligence sorts out the bile and the blame and re-presents his pudding fury in a professionally palatable manner.

These advertisements for AI tools are designed to provoke an empathetic laugh. Who indeed can honestly say they have never arrived unprepared to a meeting, or at least mentally penned a vindictive response to the tiniest office slight?

AI is poised to strike at the root of our individual virtue, by inserting itself as an emotional regulator.

However, underneath the easy laughs, I felt a profound sense of dis-ease when watching them. They indicate just how far AI has already begun to penetrate our moral economy. By inserting a technological tool to disguise or translate social interactions into new terms, our moral relations with each other are deceptively smoothed to avoid the social and personal costs of shame (e.g. Lance using “Key Points” rather than owning up to his poor work ethic) and anger (e.g. Dale using “Friendly” mode to transform his email from raging diatribe into courteous appeal). As appealing as it sounds to have automatic tech weapons to tranquilise social and emotional bugbears, they also remove daily opportunities to learn how to live and work together.

For example, as excruciating as it is to be the person who came to the meeting woefully under-prepared, embarrassment can be a very useful corrective in learning the art of time management as well as the virtue of pulling our weight. We probably all know from school what it feels like to work on a group project, when only half the group cares about the outcome. If we do not learn moral skills of responsibility and accountability in our formative years, the workplace becomes a vital school for virtue in adulthood where we learn what it means to be trusted and how to be worthy of it. As in the case of Lance, AI now offers us everyday tools which help us to avoid embarrassment and effectively hide our lack of effort, taking the edge off of the very exposure that would help us to grow in both skill and trustworthiness. This is not propaganda for the Protestant work ethic but rather a top survival tip for the human soul in hyper-capitalist economy. Maintaining the moral significance of our labour as a school of formation in self-respect and trustworthiness does not baptise the extractive and exploitative nature of many workplaces. Rather, it offers a means of resistance to the soul-destroying idea that we are all replaceable, that nothing really matters and that our efforts are simply grist for the eternal and insatiable mill of market supply and demand.

In the case of Dale, Apple Intelligence goes beyond protecting users from social shame: it promises to safeguard us from the worst of ourselves. Of the two Apple Intelligence advertisements, I find Dale’s to be even more pernicious because it evidences how AI is poised to strike at the root of our individual virtue, by inserting itself as an emotional regulator. Rather than doing the difficult work of redrafting the email himself, which would require Dale to critically examine his own reactions and put himself into the shoes of the recipient, Apple Intelligence offers to do it automatically. By short-circuiting Dale’s process of recognising the emotions underneath his rage, he misses a critical opportunity to learn for himself what his anger is all about, and even more than that, to practice the art of genuine self-mastery in conflict. The AI tool smooths out the conflict on the surface, while Dale is presumably left with all those rotten feelings built up and unprocessed, because he has not had to do the difficult work of converting his aggressive monologue into a respectful dialogue with another human being.

The insertion of these seemingly innocuous AI tools into the spheres of our everyday, workaday lives introduces new means and modes of (self) deception in our habits, where we are able to hide much more easily from honest moral evaluation of the quality of our work as well as our interpersonal relationships. It also risks new heights of moral “de-skilling” over time as we live in a social and economic world that has become so deeply mediated by technology, to the point where we may very well eventually trust Apple as the gold standard of professional behaviour rather than our own discernment. The soul – our very interiority – is the new frontier of economic expansion, in the name of securing Britain’s place in the ranks of global competitiveness.

To AI enthusiasts, all this may sound like Luddite naysaying. Many people find AI tools helpful in the process of research and preparation. Even some priests, I have recently discovered, use Chat GPT to aid sermon-writing. And what, as a priest friend asked me recently, is the problem with these time-saving tools, as long as we use them critically?

Apart from the obvious answer that AI can’t be trusted to get all the facts right, let alone the word of God, this question presumes that human beings’ critical faculties and moral compasses remain fundamentally unaffected by these new technologies. It may be true for older generations (whose formative years occurred well before the meteoric surge of digital technology in the early 2000s) that technology continues to function as an optional extra to make life that little bit easier. But for Gen Z and below, and even for some younger millennials, intuitive digital technologies have become so fused with the ways that we learn and process information that it is no longer – if it ever was – a neutral tool to improve our lives. We are only learning now about the extent to which social media has thoroughly penetrated the emotional worlds of teenagers, with severe consequences for their wellbeing. What will be the consequences for the generations to come, when AI becomes so integrated into the emotional and social fabric of our lives that we cannot quite tell where we start and it begins? The risk with “turbocharging” AI is not only a huge number of jobs, but the atrophy of our moral muscles as AI encroaches further into the heartlands of what it means to be human. While a few tech elites may always stay one step ahead of AI and keep it safely in the toolbox rather than the driver’s seat, most of us time-poor plebians are being taken for the ride of our lives.

*Name changed for anonymity.

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Article

Art

Belief

Culture

24 July 2025

5 min read

Critics and curators are missing this about contemporary artists

An interview with Jonathan Anderson

Jonathan Evens

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

A metak sculpture outlines an altar, stands on a beach.

Kris Martin, Altar.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, many modern artists engaged with religion in and through their work but art critics and art historians routinely overlooked or ignored those aspects of the work when writing about it. They did so because of a secularisation agenda that overrode reflection on key elements of the art that artists were creating.

In Modern Art and the Life of a Culture, Jonathan A. Anderson, together with William Dyrness, recovered some of the religious influences explored in the work of key modern artists by writing an alternative history of modern art. Now, with The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, Anderson has addressed the central issue, which is the way in which art critics and historians have written about modern and contemporary art.

JE: What is it about this situation – that modern art has often wrestled with God, but critics and curators haven’t always shared that focus – that engages your interest and motivates you to write so compellingly about it?

JA: The more I have studied and circulated through the worlds of contemporary art (first as an artist, then as a critic), the more attentive I became to significant disconnects in the ways we talk and write about religion in modern and contemporary art. Many prominent artists working today and over the past century have been shaped by religious traditions, and their works are in serious dialogue with those traditions in various ways and from various perspectives. Their relationship to religion might be highly conflicted or nuanced—it often is—but it is a live issue in their work and one can talk with them about it in their studios or in informal settings. But when one moves to the critical writing and public discussions about these artists’ works, this aspect either disappears altogether or is discussed in ways that are clumsy, stifled, or shapeless.

The aim of a lot of my work is to understand in a non-superficial way why this has been the case, why there has been a recent resurgence of discussions of religion and spirituality, and how we might develop more substantive ways of thinking and speaking about these topics.

JE: What did you find most surprising as you undertook the research for both books?

JA: I am consistently surprised at how sprawling and dense this topic is. Once one begins rethinking ‘the strange place of religion’ in the histories of modern and contemporary, the more one finds that there is an enormous amount of material that deserves renewed investigation. Both books give a strong sense of this, but chapter three in my new book is especially full of sign-pointers toward items that require further exploration.

To give one concrete example, I found myself referring to several major curated group exhibitions that, in one way or another, significantly address topics of religion and spirituality in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. As I began to look more seriously at the history of such exhibitions, this curiosity swelled into a huge endeavour. Over the course of several years, I assembled a long list of exhibition catalogues and other documentation—the most comprehensive list of its kind that I’m aware of—which in turn helped me not only to recognize how prevalent interest in these topics has been but to think through the diversity of approaches. A version of this list is published in The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art as an appendix, and the full, updated list is also available on my website. I hope it’s a valuable resource for others.

JE: Both books offer ideas and suggestions for constructive ways to understand, address and write about the relationship between art and religion going forward. In Modern Art and the Life of a Culture there is the idea of a charitable hermeneutic, while in The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art you offer substantial new frameworks for discussing art and religion. Why is it important that the dialogue between art and religion finds paths to conversation rather than conflict?

JA: This is an important question. The public dialogue between contemporary art and religion has been relatively dysfunctional for much of the past century, often riddled with mutual antagonisms, melodramatic controversies, misunderstandings, and mutual unintelligibility. But art and religion are complex, vital domains of meaning that have continued to deeply shape each other up to the present and that have an enormous amount to ‘say’ to one another today, both critically and constructively. My own experience is that the more the participants in this conversation become attentive to and conversant in the other’s history, vernacular, and ways of thinking, the more highly constructive and mutually enriching the dialogue becomes.

I think this kind of dialogue has everything to do with cultivating mutual care and love of neighbour. The art world is a series of loosely connected communities full of people who are your and my neighbours. I happen to really care about these communities who make, exhibit, and talk about art, despite their problems. And the same might be said about various religious communities, who have their own problems and who often have more complicated interrelations with those art communities than is generally recognized. Wherever you’re coming from—the arts, the church, or otherwise—I’m interested in expanding dialogue oriented toward loving one’s neighbours, or even one’s enemies if that’s how it must be. At the most basic level, that means listening in a way that tries to discern others’ animating cares and concerns.

JE: Do you see any parallels or differences between the way the relationship between secularism and religion has played out in the world of art and the way the broader relationship between the two has been shaped in Western society in the same period?

JA: This is a fascinating but complicated question. For some people, the whole point of the artistic avant-garde was to enact and exemplify, in a highly concentrated way, the secularization of Western society. At the same time, however, it was also widely recognized that the arts have, in almost all places and times, been deeply interconnected with religion and spirituality, and this was, in some conflicted or repressed way, still likely the case for much of the avant-garde as well.

Secularization has meant the pressurizing and pluralizing of religious belief, sometimes corresponding to disaffiliation from traditional organizations, but this has relatively little to do with an eradication or obsolescence of religious belief. Indeed, any notion of what Rosalind Krauss memorably described as an ‘absolute rift’ between ‘the sacred’ and ‘the secular’ is really just shorthand for some kind of social conflict, because there’s not really any rational way to absolutize these as mutually exclusive. Whether acknowledged or not, religion still provides the metaphysical and ethical groundings of modern secularity, and modern secularity provides the social conditions for contemporary religion. In this context, distinctions between religiosity and irreligiosity are often ambiguous, running through each of us in unexpected and ever-changing ways (rather than simplistically separating us from each other). In my view, contemporary art is highly illuminating to these broader dynamics. Anyone who has spent any extended time in the worlds of modern and contemporary art knows that they are full of spiritual and theological struggle. To put it succinctly: contemporary art is not an art of unbelief and nonpractice but an art of conflicted, pressurized belief and practice, which is theologically significant if attended to as such.

The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, Jonathan A. Anderson (Notre Dame Press)

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