THE Bishop of Leicester, the Rt Revd Martyn Snow, fresh from speaking alongside the Archbishop of Canterbury in a House of Lords debate on AI, outlined a Church of England position on the subject for William Crawley on Sunday (Radio 4).
Bishop Snow’s first worry was that people were turning, for spiritual advice, to AI chatbots that scraped vast amounts of data without quality control. Mr Crawley asked whether this was damning of the Church. But surely people are also turning to AI and web-based sources rather than the traditional authorities for advice on all sorts of matters? Mr Crawley would recognise it as problematic if people were asking chatbots for advice on political decisions or medical problems.
Bishop Snow said that the context of turning to bots for ghostly counsel was a “broader crisis of how we relate to one another” — which is, of course, a significant contributor to the emptying of the churches.
Mr Crawley wondered how many C of E congregations were listening to AI-assisted sermons without even knowing it. The Bishop replied that his diocese had organised a seminar with a local academic on the responsible use of AI for the clergy, but refused to be drawn when Mr Crawley asked whether an AI-generated first draft of a sermon would cross a line.
Sunday also discussed the Sikh ceremonial kirpan, but it was, perhaps, more enlightening to consider how non-specialist programme-makers discussed the issue in the aftermath of the Henry Nowak murder trial. Hugo Rifkind (Times Radio, Wednesday) interviewed his organisation’s columnist Sarah Ditum, who criticised Robert Jenrick and Nigel Farage for pushing misinformation about the case.
Ms Ditum rejected a ban on the kirpan, saying that the murder of Mr Nowak was an unprecedented event across generations of Sikh presence in this country. At the same time, she felt that the scope of the exemption needed to be more tightly defined, as there was a group of young Sikh men who were abusing the religious exemption from knife laws to carry lethal weaponry openly. Ms Ditum worried that if the Government did not engage proactively with policing the boundaries of a multicultural society, then “far-Right agitators” would have the opportunity to do so instead.
David Eubank’s organisation Free Burma Rangers, on Heart and Soul (World Service, Friday), might be described as an example of unarmed militarism. A son of missionaries in Thailand, the former US special-forces soldier and ordained pastor set up the group in 1997 to provide front-line medical assistance and document human-rights abuses in war zones, including Iraq, Sudan, and Syria, as well as Myanmar.
In a deeply personal conversation with Rajeev Gupta, Mr Eubank revealed — startlingly — that his deepest trauma seems to have been not war, but being sent to boarding school at the age of seven.