Essay

AI - Artificial Intelligence

Culture

Identity

29 May 2024

8 min read

Roll on AI, you'll make us more human

I’m not necessarily stupidly optimistic about AI, but there’s a tentative case to be so.

Daniel Kim

Daniel is an advertising strategist turned vicar-in-training.

An AI-generated image of a man folding a paper plan in a relaxed lounger, around him are creative tools and screens giving status updates are visible.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

I still come across people who insist that there are simply things that AI (artificial intelligence) can’t and will never be able to do. Humans will always have an edge. They tend to be journalists or editors who will insist that ChatGPT’s got nothing on their persuasive intentionality and honed command of nuance, wit, and word play. Of course, machines can replace the humans at supermarket check-out tills but not them. What they do is far too complex and requires such emotional precision and incisive insight into the audience psyche. Okay then. I nod, rolling my eyes into the back of my head.

At this point, it’s just naive to put a limiter on the capabilities of what AI can do. It’s not even been two years since ChatGPT3 was released into the wild and started this whole furore. It’s only been 18 months and OpenAI have just launched ChatGPT4 which can produce a whole persona who can listen, look, and talk back in such a natural and convincing voice that it may as well be a scene from the 2013 film, Her. A future where Joachim Phoenix falls in love with the sultry AI voice of Scarlet Johannsson doesn’t seem too far off. We have been terrible at predicting the speed at which generative AI has developed. AI video generation was one of the clearest examples of that in the last year. In 2023, we were lauding it over the AI models for generating this surreal, nightmarish scene of Will Smith eating spaghetti. “Silly AI! aren’t you cute.” we said. We swallowed our words earlier this year, when Open AI came out with Sora, their video generation model, which spat out photorealistic film trailers that would feel at home on the screens of Cannes.

There might be limits, but that ‘might’ gets smaller and smaller every single month, and we’re probably better off presuming that there is no ‘might’. We’ll be in for less surprises if we live from the presumption that there will be AIs that will make better newspaper editors, diagnostic radiologists, children’s book writers, and art-directors than most, if not all, humans.

With the mass reproduction and generation capabilities of AI, we may recognise that we crave the human touch not because it’s better but because it’s human.

I promised you a “stupidly optimising” take on this. So far, I’ve given you nothing but the bleak dystopian future where the labour market collapses and humans are dispossessed of all our technical, editorial, and creative skills. Where’s the good news?

Well, the stupidly optimistic take is this: the dispossession of all our human faculties by AI will force us to embrace the truest and most fundamental core of what makes us valuable - nothing other than simply our humanity. The value of humanity goes up if we presume that everything can be done better by AI.

In 1936, the German art critic, Walter Benjamin, prophesied the apocalyptic collapse of the art market in the essay: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. It was at a time when photographic reproduction of paintings was becoming a mainstream technique and visitors to a gallery could buy a print of their favourite painting. He argued that the mass reproduction of paintings would devalue the original painting by stripping away the aura of work - its unique presence in space and cultural heritage; the je ne sais quoi of art that draws us to a place of encounter with it. Benjamin would gawp at the digital age where masterpieces would be reduced to default iPhone background screens, but he would also be surprised by the exponentially greater value the art market has placed on the original piece. The aura of the original is sought after, all the more, precisely because mechanical reproduction has become so cheap. Why? Because in a world of mass reproduction, we crave human authenticity and connection. With the mass reproduction and generation capabilities of AI, we may recognise that we crave the human touch not because it’s better but because it’s human. And for no other reason.

We continually place our identities in whatever talents we think make us uniquely worthwhile and value-creating for the world.

What are we to make of the AI trials happening in the NHS which spot cancer at rates significantly higher than any human doctor. The Royal College of Radiologists insists that “There is no question that real-life clinical radiologists are essential and irreplaceable”. But really? Apart from checking the AI’s work, what’s the “essential” and “irreplaceable” part? Well, it’s the human part. Somebody must deliver the bad news to the patient and that sure as hell shouldn’t be an AI. Even if an AI could emulate the trembling voice and calming tone of the most empathic consultant, it is the human-to-human interpersonal exchange that creates the space for grief, sorrow, and shock.

Think utopian with me for a moment. (I know, very counter-intuitive for us). In a society where all our technical skills are superseded, the most valuable skills that a human could possess might be the interpersonal ones. Empathy, compassion, intentionality, love even! The midwife who can hold the hand of a suffering first-time mother could be a more respected member of society than the editor of an edgy magazine or newspaper. As they should be! That’s a tantalising and stupidly optimistic vision of an AI future, but it’s a vision that aligns with what we know to be the true about ourselves. In our personal and spiritual lives, we already recognise that the most valuable aspects of our lives are our human relationships and the state of our inner selves. People on their death beds reflect on what kind of person they’ve been and reach out for the hands of their loved ones - not for their Q4, 2011 balance sheet. Our identities are shaped most deeply by our relationships and our character, and yet, we continually place our identities in whatever talents we think make us uniquely worthwhile and value-creating for the world. It’s good to create value, it’s nice to be good at something, and it’s meaningful to leave a lasting impact, but it is delusional to think that those things make us valuable. Our dispossession by AI might be the dispelling of these delusions!

In a few decades, there may be nothing that humans can do better than AI, other than simply being human in the world.

At least on a philosophical and spiritual level, being stripped of our human exceptionalism might be the most liberating experience for a society that has devalued and instrumentalised humanity to being glorified calculators. Being dispossessed is the truest thing about all of us. We are all being dispossessed daily by the slow march of time. The truest thing about us is that we will, one day, be wholly dispossessed by death itself. That was Heidegger’s fundamental insight into the human condition and this feeling of dispossession is the root of our anxiety and fear in the world. This might be part of the anxiety and ick we feel towards AI. Being dispossessed of our creativity and technical ability is a kind of violence and death against ourselves which we rage against. We can rage against it politically, socially, and economically, but there might be something helpful about resisting the rage from a psychological and spiritual point of view. Experiencing this dispossession might be the key to unlocking an authentic human existence in a world that we can’t control.

I believe in human creativity. I believe that what we make is valuable. I believe in the mesmerising aura of art, cinema, music, and every other beautiful thing that we get up to in the world. I believe in the unique connection between artist and audience and the power of blood, sweat, and tears. I believe in the beautiful and tortuous self-violence of creativity to make something that will make my heart tremble and transport me to places never imagined. I believe in the intuitions of an editor to make the cut at precisely the right moment that suspends the tension and has me gripping the seat. I believe in the bedroom teenagers recording their first demos on Garageband, or the gospel choir taking their congregations to heaven and back. Now, more than ever, I believe in these miracles.

But my belief is not anchored in any unique technical excellence, or some hubris about our exceptionalist mastery of craft. It is rooted in the profound humanity of it all, which radiates, however dimly, with the image of the divine. Writing poetry, humming a new melody, baking a cake or, even discovering a new mathematical conjecture can feel like “divine inspiration” as the leading mathematician, Thomas Fink, asserts. Or as the Romantic German theologian, Schleiermacher, so rhapsodically expressed, it can feel like the soul being “ignited from an ethereal fire, and the magic thunder of a charmed speech’" from above. This transcendent human experience is something that AI can’t usurp or supersede.

In a few decades, there may be nothing that humans can do better than AI, other than simply being human in the world. However, Once we are stripped of everything, we won’t find ourselves naked in the dark, or at least, we don’t have to. We can stand before the world and God with the works of our hands - finite, flawed, and dispossessed - and yet, inestimably valuable and worthwhile for the simple fact of our mere humanity.

*This article was something of a thought experiment. It’s far more natural to take a sandwich-board, bullhorn-wielding apocalyptic take on the rise of AI. The powers-to-be at Microsoft and OpenAI have their own ideological agendas, and it’s not unlikely that in this technological cycle, we’ll live through a profoundly destabilising labour market. We are right to fear the consolidation of wealth to supreme tech feudal lords with their companies of AI employees who cost a fraction of real humans. Civilisational collapse! What I wanted to suggest here is that there might be a unique spiritual and philosophical opportunity afforded to us as we continue to experience the break-neck development of AI and its encroachment into everything we once held as uniquely human skills.*

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Article

Art

Culture

13 August 2025

5 min read

Emily Young: the sculptor listening as the still stones speak

Unlocking the stillness, from underwater sculpture to St Paul's Cathedral

Jonathan Evens

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

A sculptor works on a carved face emerging from a stone larger than her

Young creating.

Emilyyoung.com

As a painter, Emily Young says she worked relatively quickly in her distinctive surreal style featuring penguins and figures with penguin heads. When she came to sculpture in the 1980s, what she most appreciated was the resistance she felt as she worked, meaning that she ‘had to slow down’ and ‘be super careful’. Right from her first works as a sculptor, the stone was speaking to her, teaching her the value of stillness.

The stones with which she works still speak to her. The stone ‘tells me what it is willing to do’ and ‘lets me know exactly what it can and cannot do, and I work with that’. ‘The stone’, she says, ‘leads me through into this zone where we’re working together’. Ultimately, she says, ‘what I’m showing is that the relationship between a human and the planet can be very, very respectful, and very, very beautiful’. In this way, she uses the beauty, history, and energy of stone to connect people to the natural world.

Her respect for the stones is, in part, because she moves ‘through layers of history in the stones’. Because of their age, stones bring ‘messages to us from a time before culture’; ‘nature has been making stones’ for millions of years meaning that ‘they are from deep time’. This is the ‘stillness of stone compared to me as a short-lived human being’. Her work, therefore, involves ‘throwing something out there that is more enduring than soft humans’.

Her most recent exhibition was entitled ‘Comparative Stillness’. This title was chosen because the way the faces and the bodies she carves ‘always come out, there’s peacefulness there, there’s stillness’. ‘If you sit in this stillness of the stone’, she says, ‘you can find a great joy and a great peace’. She has asked herself, ‘What is it that I’m doing when I’m carving a human head out of stone?’ Her answer is that she is ‘finding an essential core of being alive that has in it, stillness’. ‘It’s the stillness that I’m after’, she says, and ‘out of that stillness come good actions.’ As a result, she says, ‘what I’m completely dedicated to now is to show that we do have access to that stillness and it could be our saving grace’. Everyone, she thinks, ‘should have quiet, kind symbols of internality around them’.

Describing her symbols, she says that: her discs are translucent, holding light within while symbolising the wholeness of the universe; her heads are never of particular people and are embodied consciousnesses with a sweetness to their closed eyes; and her torsos show the beauty and vulnerability of the female form which holds the capacity to create life.

The ‘quietness inherent in stone can also found in our consciousnesses’, which is why she speaks of her stone heads as ‘embodied consciousnesses’. She thinks that religion leads towards this same stillness and, therefore, thinks her art is doing a similar job to that which religion does, ‘trying to give value to people’s lives, what you can and can’t do’. Christ, she says, ‘is a particularly fine example of a teacher’. Her works ‘seem at home within the quietness of churches’ because ‘churches are places that have something of time, deep time’. She has made many sculptures for ecclesiastical settings, including St Paul’s Churchyard and Salisbury Cathedral, while exhibitions of her work have been held at St James Piccadilly and St Pancras New Church.

When I met her, she was in London for the McDonald Agape Lecture in Theology and the Visual Arts 2025. ‘Theology and the Visual Arts: Firming Foundations; Firing Imaginations’ is a five-year project to strengthen the foundations of Theology and the Visual Arts as a discipline within academic Theology, and help to shape its future. The project’s work is showcased to a public audience through major public lectures in an internationally renowned arts venue.

This year’s lecture put Young in dialogue with US painter, Genesis Tramaine, an expressionist devotional painter deeply inspired by biblical texts. Like Young, Tramaine also creates monumental heads, and both speak of being led as they create their works; Young, by the stories in the stones, and Tramaine, by the Holy Spirit following prayer, worship and study of scripture. By being led in their work, both essentially agreed that, as Tramaine put it, you can't be present when creating, instead you ‘have to trust yourself to the process, surrender, and play in the space’. Whether creating the heads of angels or of saints, both are depicting ‘messengers from heaven’.

The good actions that have arisen out of stillness for Young include a project to re-diversify the Maremma seabed in Casa dei Pesci. The seabed in this area, as also in many other places, is being destroyed through illegal fishing by dredger trawlers which destroy the seagrass meadows that are the breeding grounds for marine life. A local fisherman Paolo Fanciulli decided to address the problem by asking artists, including Young, to sculpt huge blocks of Carrara marble as, once these lie on the seabed, they make it impossible for the dredger trawlers to operate in the area. 29 sculptures, including four Stone Guardians by Young, form the Talamone Underwater Museum, which has seen ‘the trawlers go away’ and ‘the seabed diversify’ once again.

Young also creates large sculptures in the grounds of Convento di Santa Croce, the ruined monastery in Tuscany where she now lives. She says she has ‘been quiet’ and ‘become reclusive’ living there because the place itself is ‘really peaceful and quiet’ with a ‘handmade stillness to everything’. When the rains come, ‘bits of the steep hills fall away’ revealing ancient stones formed of volcanic materials, while caves which had fallen in on themselves have filled up with rainwater creating over time ‘a layered geology’. In this way in this area, ‘the earth is giving great stones to work with’.

In this delightful, giving place of stillness, she can sit quietly, prayerfully. She notes ‘how difficult it is to find a place of stillness today because of the ‘cacophony of distraction’ we all experience. Her aim is to show the way we are ‘wasting the gift of life’ and to reveal ‘our one consciousness’ in the stillness of stone.

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