Article

AI - Artificial Intelligence

Creed

Wisdom

7 November 2025

6 min read

Forget AI: I want a computer that says ‘no’

Chatbots only tell us what we want to hear. If we genuinely want to grow, we need to be OK with offence

Paul Bradbury

Paul is a pioneer minister, writer and researcher based in Poole, Dorset.

A person hold their phone on their desk, a think bubble from it says 'no'.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

It is three years since the public release of Open AI’s ChatGPT. In those early months, this new technology felt apocalyptic. There was excitement, yes – but also genuine concern that ChatGPT, and other AI bots like it, had been released on an unsuspecting public with little assessment or reflection on the unintended consequences they might have the potential to make. In March 2023, 1,300 experts signed an open letter calling for a six month pause in AI labs training of the most advanced systems arguing that they represent an ‘existential risk’ to humanity. In the same month Time magazine published an article by a leading AI researcher which went further, saying that the risks presented by AI had been underplayed. The article visualised a civilisation in which AI had liberated itself from computers to dominate ‘a world of creatures, that are, from its perspective, very stupid and very slow.’

But then we all started running our essays through it, creating emails, and generating the kind of boring documentation demanded by the modern world. AI is now part of life. We can no more avoid it than we can avoid the internet. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle.

I will confess at this point to having distinctly Luddite tendencies when it comes to technology. I read Wendell Berry’s famous essay ‘Why I will not buy a computer’ and hungered after the agrarian, writerly world he appeared to inhabit; all kitchen tables, musty bookshelves, sharpened pencils and blank pieces of paper. Certainly, Berry is on to something. Technology promises much, delivers some, but leaves a large bill on the doormat. Something is lost, which for Berry included the kind of attention that writing by hand provides for deep, reflective work.

This is the paradox of technology – it gives and takes away. What is required of us as a society is to take the time to discern the balance of this equation. On the other side of the equation from those heralding the analytical speed and power of AI are those deeply concerned for ways in which our humanity is threatened by its ubiquity.

In Thailand, where clairvoyancy is big business, fortune tellers are reportedly seeing their market disrupted by AI as a growing number of people turn to chat bots to give them insights into their future instead.

A friend of mine uses an AI chatbot to discuss his feelings and dilemmas. The way he described his relationship with AI was not unlike that of a spiritual director or mentor.

There are also examples of deeply concerning incidents where chat bots have reportedly encouraged and affirmed a person’s decision to take their own life. Adam took his own life in April this year. His parents have since filed a lawsuit against OpenAI after discovering that ChatGPT had discouraged Adam from seeking help from them and had even offered to help him write a suicide note. Such stories raise the critical question of whether it is life-giving and humane for people to develop relationships of dependence and significance with a machine. AI chat bots are highly powerful tools masquerading behind the visage of human personality. They are, one could argue, sophisticated clairvoyants mining the vast landscape of the internet, data laid down in the past, and presenting what they extract as information and advice. Such an intelligence is undoubtedly game changing for diagnosing diseases, when the pace of medical research advances faster than any GP can cope with. But is it the kind of intelligence we need for the deeper work of our intimate selves, the soul-work of life?

Of course, AI assistants are more than just a highly advanced search engines. They get better at predicting what we want to know. Chatbots essentially learn to please their users. They become our sycophantic friends, giving us insights from their vast store of available knowledge, but only ever along the grain of our desires and needs. Is it any wonder people form such positive relationships with them? They are forever telling us what we want to hear.

Or at least what we think we want to hear. Because any truly loving relationship should have the capacity and freedom to include saying things which the other does not want to hear. Relationships of true worth are ones which take the risk of surprising the other with offence in order to move toward deeper life. This is where user’s experience suggests AI is not proficient. Indeed, it is an area I suggest chatbots are not capable of being proficient in. To appreciate this, we need to explore a little of the philosophy of knowledge generation.

Most of us probably recognise the concepts of deduction and induction as modes of thought. Deduction is the application of a predetermined rule (‘A always means B…’) to a given experience which then confidently predicts an outcome (‘therefore C’). Induction is the inference of a rule from series of varying (but similar) experiences (‘look at all these slightly different C’s – it must mean that A always means B’). However, the nineteenth century philosopher CS Pierce described a third mode of thought that he called abduction.

Abduction works by offering a provisional explanatory context to a surprising experience or piece of information. It postulates, often very creatively and imaginatively, a hypothesis, or way of seeing things, that offers to make sense of new experience. The distinctives of abduction include intuition, imagination, even spiritual insight in the working towards a deeper understanding of things. Abductive reasoning for example includes the kind of ‘eureka!’ moment of explanation which points to a deeper intelligence, a deeper connectivity in all things that feels out of reach to the human mind but which we grasp at with imaginative and often metaphorical leaps.

The distinctive thing about abductive reasoning, as far as AI chatbots are concerned, lies in the fact that it works by introducing an idea that isn’t contained within the existing data and which offers an explanation that the data would not otherwise have. The ‘wisdom’ of chatbots on the other hand is really only a very sophisticated synthesis of existing data, shaped by a desire to offer knowledge that pleases its end user. It lacks the imaginative insight, the intuitive perspective that might confront, challenge, but ultimately be for our benefit.

If we want to grow in the understanding of ourselves, if we genuinely want to do soul-work, we need to be open to the surprise of offence; the disruption of challenge; the insight from elsewhere; the pain of having to reimagine our perspective. The Christian tradition sometimes calls this wisdom prophecy. It might also be a way of understanding what St Paul meant by the ‘sword of the Spirit’. It is that voice, that insight of deep wisdom, which doesn’t sooth but often smarts, but which we come to appreciate in time as a word of life. Such wisdom may be conveyed by a human person, a prophet. And the Old Testament’s stories suggests that its delivery is not without costs to the prophet, and never without relationship. A prophet speaks as one alongside in community, sharing something of the same pain, the same confusion. Ultimately such wisdom is understood to be drawn from divine wisdom, God speaking in the midst of humanity

You don’t get that from a chatbot, you get that from person-to-person relationships. I do have the computer (sorry Wendell!), but I will do my soul-work with fellow humans. And I will not be using an AI assistant.

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Culture

Education

Justice

S&U interviews

17 February 2025

8 min read

How justice shaped a world of rights

Historian John Coffey talks about his contribution to a new book: Justice & Rights.

Nick Jones

Nick is the senior editor of Seen & Unseen.

A statue of a woman holding a spear in one hand a lightening bolt in the others that reads: 'Droits de l'homme'.

A French statute celebrating Human Rights.

DDP on Unsplash.

In our networked world old problems, and new ideas to solve them, flash across our minds and screens. It can be a hectic and dis-orientating feeling that occurs when we try to make sense of it all. Whether it's the global order changing or yet another injustice occurring.

Seeking insights on all this means crossing boundaries, and that’s what over 160 scholars do by sharing with each other. The members of the Global Faculty Initiative (GFI), drawn from all faculties usual in great universities, integrate faith and scholarship through dialogues. They examine the themes of justice, order, flourishing and beauty - mixing subject matter expertise in everything from physics to public policy.

The GFI has just published the results of one such dialogue in a book Justice and Rights. Among the contributors is Professor John Coffey. His work explores the history of religion and the big ideas like justice and rights. Recently he talked with GFI coordinator Bethan Willis, on its Justice podcast series. Here’s an extract of the discussion that looks at the ‘genealogy of rights.’

Bethan Willis So, shifting focus now to the question of rights, particularly. So, you talk in your Brief about the genealogy of rights, and in his Theology Brief, Nicholas Wolterstorff makes a case for placing rights at the centre of our understanding of justice, but that's obviously not an uncontested move. And some people would see a focus on rights as problematic, and part of the debate about the legitimacy or the value of rights can sometimes centre around the question of where rights actually come from. So which period in history, which philosophy and vision of human life and justice gives rise to this language. So can you tell us a little bit about that kind of trajectory that you've set out in your Brief , the different points at which people might identify rights as coming to the fore and why that happens and the various interests at play in these discussions of where rights come from?

John Coffey So it can be very confusing if you read the scholarship on this subject because if you listen to someone like Samuel Moyne, he will argue that the human rights revolution of the 1970s really invents human rights or maybe grudgingly the 1940s and the conservative statesmen who created the UN declaration of human rights in that period. Others, of course, would root it in the enlightenment. And I guess this is a classic answer. It's the enlightenment and the French Revolution with its Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, which is really at the heart of the story of rights. But then early modernists and medievalists pushback, they see natural rights language, the idea of individual subjective rights that one has simply on the basis of one's humanity. These are distinct from legal rights, but they're individual natural rights that they would see this concept emerging in the Middle Ages with canon lawyers and Juris and so on, and then being embraced by various 17th, 16th, 17th century groups up to Locke.

And I think there are different things going on here. One, of course, is that there are turf wars between historians in different periods who want to draw attention to their period as being really seminal in various ways. People have talked about the revenge of the medievalists, the early modernists and the Renaissance specialists who made so much emphasis on this being a radical break from the dark mediaeval past that mediaevalists have always been keen to push back against that and to point to the mediaeval roots of a lot of modern concepts. But I think there's also more going on here. I think in some ways it's part of a bigger argument about political and to some extent economic liberalism as well, because rights language has been so important for liberals, whether they're talking about politics or talking about economics. So, you have an example of rival genealogies being used for political purposes, if you like, to both problematize and legitimize, right?

BW Your work is focused on the contributions that religious groups have made to politics and ideas. And you particularly reference the Levellers in the 17th century and the abolitionists at the turn of the 18th, 19th century. Can you tell us a bit about the contribution that Christians may have made to the development of rights and particularly to the rights of freedom of conscious thought and belief in particular?

JC Yeah, yeah. I think it's important to emphasize this because there's also been a long tradition of suspicion of rights language among Christians, especially in the wake of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. I mean, this has obviously been true in the Catholic church in the 19th century where there was deep suspicion of liberalism and the individualism associated with it and rights language was regarded with a great deal of suspicion by many traditionalist Catholics. But it's also true in Protestant circles as well, among some high Anglicans. But you could see it in the Dutch Calvinist tradition, they founded an anti-revolutionary party after the French Revolution, which is very critical of the political language which emerges from that event. So, it's interesting to see how historians and intellectual historians in recent decades have recovered what you might call the theological origins of rights talk. And that's true of people like Brian Tierney writing about the mediaeval era and showing the kind of seminal influence of various mediaeval theorists of natural law, but also natural rights.

And certainly, when you get to the period I'm most familiar with from the 17th century onwards, groups like the Levellers are not just talking about native rights or legal rights that they have as Freeborn Englishmen. They're also talking about universal natural human rights that individuals have on the basis of their humanity. And it's in that period in the 17th century that people begin really for the first time to talk about freedom of religion as a natural right. I mean, you don't see that in the Middle Ages. It's a development that emerges within particularly radical Protestantism in the 17th century. Though interestingly, it's also tied to the idea of duties. So because we have a duty to worship God according to our conscience, consciences must be left free and the individual must have a natural right to worship God according to their conscience, because otherwise they wouldn't be able to please God if they just follow the dictates of the state or the state church that they wouldn't be able to worship in a way that's pleasing to God. So, it is interesting the way the argument works. It's theistic grounded in a sense, but it applies not just to Christians, it applies to other kinds of religious worship, to Jews, to Muslims, to heathens and so on.

And you can see more widely a theological grounding for rights in figures like Locke. And that's encapsulated, obviously famously in the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson drafted in 1776, that ‘all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights’. So, this idea that we have certain rights that we cannot transfer over to the state, that we can alienate them over to the state, they're inalienable, and we have a solemn responsibility before God to protect them. So yeah, I mean, it's certainly by the 18th century, this rights language is absolutely flourishing within Protestant circles, and you can see it being taken up quite significantly in the abolitionist movement in the 1780s, though people are also shying away from it in the 1790s because of the French Revolution and Tom Payne's rights of man and so on. But if you read 19th century American religious abolitionists, people like Frederick Douglas or William Lloyd Garrison or others, they're using the language of natural rights, pretty insistently.

BC And it's often to articulate the kind of victim's perspective, isn't it, to defend the weak against the mighty and to say there's a bigger kind of justice that is beyond the state or the law. Is that right? Can you tell us a bit about how that works?

JC Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right, and it's one reason why we should be wary about just tossing, tossing rights language out as some kind of secular poisoning of the, well, a, it does have some deep roots in Christian thought, but it also, rights language is also designed as one of the weapons of the weak, if you like. It's a way to defend those whose claims are often ignored and to assert their human dignity. So, it's why it gets taken up so much by religious minorities, by those who are pushing for widening the vote and suffrage maybe to all men, maybe eventually to women. The anti-slavery movement is using it, and of course, by the 20th century, the Civil Rights movement.

BC But as you said, Wilberforce himself doesn't really use this language much, partly because the arenas he's speaking in and partly because of these associations with the French Revolution. Is that right?

JC Yeah, and if you look in the 1790s, it's interesting because it's from that period really the language of left and right starts to emerge, and those on the right are very much concerned about law and order. They look across at France and they see disorder and the guillotine and regicide and Civil War and the exile of Catholic priests and so on, and it's extremely alarming for them. So, the emphasis very much shown law and order, and they become extremely alarmed by the way that rights language has been used to undermine order. So, it's classically articulated at that divide between Edmund Burke on the one side and Tom Payne on the other. What's interesting in the British context, is you'll find sort of devout Protestant Christians on both sides of that. So, Wilberforce would be very much on Burke's side in this argument, but the founder of the London corresponding society in the 1790s, a man called Thomas Hardy, he's actually a devout Scottish Calvinist, and he's absolutely on board with this rights language. And so different religious groups will be divided over this.

Follow the rest of John and Bethan's conversation on the GFI podcast.

John Coffey on Justice.