Was this newsletter written by a robot?

A new website, tons of podcasts and telling the difference between human and artificial content

Dear friends,

I hope you are all keeping well. Firstly, I can only apologise for how long it has taken me to produce another email newsletter, and thank you for your patience in bearing with me. There’s been plenty of change since I last wrote: you may notice this newsletter is coming in a slightly different format as it now hosted by a different platform (but the content should be the same!).

More excitingly, I’m pleased to say that my personal website - johnwyatt.com - has recently been extensively redesigned with a new appearance, and navigation system. All the same material and resources from before are there, but you should find it much easier to get around. I’m extremely grateful for the hard work over many months of webmaster Tim Wyatt, and web designer Jon Bradley of ninefootone creative. I’m in the process of creating a series of curated pathways through the site for visitors who wish to explore particular ethical topics such as abortion, euthanasia or artificial intelligence.

That’s probably enough housekeeping for now - but please do get in touch with any feedback on the new site or suggestions for more material you’d like to see.

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Was this written by a robot?

The tech world is abuzz with the extraordinary power of what is now called ‘generative AI’, algorithms that can create new content, including text, audio and images, on the basis of patterns learned from vast amounts of training data.

ChatGPT, a text generating program, was made available to the general public in December 2022 and it is said to be the fastest-growing internet service ever, reaching 100 million users two months after launch. OpenAI, the company that created the program, has struck a $10 billion deal with Microsoft, and this technology is now being built into Office software and the Bing search engine. Google is fast-tracking the rollout of its own chatbot, LaMDA. 

Other tech companies are about to launch generative programs which are said to be even more sophisticated and human-like than ChatGPT. We are about to move into a world where we may never know whether an article, a sermon, a student essay, a scientific paper, even a book, was created by a human being, or a mindless AI system or some combination of the two. And AIs are not only becoming scarily good at creating original text but also images, document design, architectural plans, music, computer code, you name it. And yes, this newsletter was generated by ChatGPT, which was asked to create a newsletter in the style of John Wyatt. Or perhaps it was created by John Wyatt pretending to be ChatGPT pretending to be John Wyatt… You can see the problem.

Way back in 1950 the computer genius Alan Turing wrote a seminal research paper entitled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”. The paper posed a fundamental question “Can a machine think?” Turing’s answer was that if a machine could produce written text in response to human questioners which was indistinguishable from that of a real human, then the machine could be described as ‘intelligent’. It’s pretty clear that ChatGPT has aced the Turing Test. I have already been fooled on more than one occasion by being asked to comment on articles about Christian responses to AI which turned out to have been created by the program!

The US sci fi television series Westworld is set in an amusement theme park populated by highly realistic humanoid robots. In an early episode a human visitor to the park is greeted by a beautiful young woman who asks if she can be of assistance. He stares at her, “Are you one of them or are you real?”. She replies “If you can’t tell, does it matter?”.

That’s a question we are going to face repeatedly over the coming months and years. If you can’t tell the difference between wonderful, original, even profound creations manufactured by mindless machines simulating humans and those invented by genuine loving, thinking, caring human beings, does it really matter?

I think most people reading these words would want to say ‘Yes, it does matter’. Authenticity, integrity, honesty, truthfulness matter. However clever and undetectable the simulation may be, it’s not the same. But we are going to have to find reasons to say why authenticity matters. On reflection it’s not a new question. Throughout the Bible we find the distinction between the person who maintains an appearance of righteousness and those who live with integrity ‘from the heart’, the hidden core of personal identity that only God truly sees and knows. David was called on more than one occasion a ‘man after God’s own heart’, and Samuel had to learn that ‘….the LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.’ (1 Samuel 16:7)

So perhaps those of us who want to defend human authenticity and integrity will have to take a solemn vow that we will never use AI-generated material without clearly marking out what is genuinely human and what is artificial. So OK, I’ll be frank. I did actually create all the words in this entire newsletter just by myself. Honest.

Go Deeper

• I recently joined Justin Brierley and Ruth Jackson on the Premier Unbelievable? podcast for a live show discussing ChatGPT and the implications of this fast-evolving technology, whether machines could ever become truly conscious, and how to raise children in this brave new world. Listen to it here.

• The robot revolution is coming…But are Christians ready?
  Advances in technology mean intelligent machines are likely to play an increasingly important role in our future

• Podcast: AI sentience

  Blake Lemoine and LaMDA, trillions of words, mute idols, and the God who speaks

• Book: The Robot Will See You Now

  How can Christians understand and prepare for the challenges posed by the development of AI and robotics?

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What I’ve been reading

• Strange Rites: new religions for a godless world, Tara Isabella Burton.
  An extremely informative and insightful review of the religious beliefs and attitudes of the ‘Nones’, ‘spiritual but not religious’, the religiously unaffiliated, described as the fastest growing religious demographic in America. Tara Burton describes this as ‘religion decoupled from institutions, from creeds, from metaphysical truth claims about God….but one that still seeks to provide us with the pillars of what religion always has: meaning, purpose, community, ritual.’ Interestingly Burton highlights how cynical surveillance capitalists are now reinforcing and even driving many of the new religious trends. The book was published in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic and I suspect it has had less of an impact than it deserves. There seems little doubt that, for the foreseeable future, these trends will continue to develop both in the US and around the world.

• Surveillance State: inside China’s quest to launch a new era of social control, Josh Chin and Liza Lin.
  An extremely detailed and chilling account of how technological surveillance inside China has spread and magnified the relentless grip of the Communist Party, based on five years research by two Wall Street Journal researchers.

• Biblical Critical Theory: how the Bible’s unfolding story makes sense of modern life and culture, Christopher Watkin.
  Another big book (648 pages!) by a Christian academic, but it’s fantastic and worth every page. Don’t take my word for it, the book has eulogistic recommendations from Tim Keller, Kevin Vanhoozer, William Edgar, Dan Strange, Glen Scrivener and many other worthies. Vanhoozer even describes the book as “..an important update on Augustine’s City of God”(!). It’s a brilliant example of ‘double listening’ – weaving the biblical plot line into fruitful engagement with contemporary culture, thinkers and movements, and showing how biblical ideas subvert and rearrange false cultural dichotomies.

• Good grief: living with sorrow and loss, Malcolm Duncan.
  A very different book, passionate personal, and spiritually profound. Malcolm Duncan has lived and wept through a litany of personal loss and bereavements. This book resonates with personal grief mingled with the goodness of God revealed in darkness, and the pastoral depth that these lived experiences can bring.    

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My latest podcast

Surveillance capitalism 1: Trillions of data points, clickbait, an advertising arms race, and BF Skinner’s pigeons

Every tap, swipe and click we make on our phones, tablets and laptops is being recorded by big tech firms. This is often called surveillance capitalism – a network of products and services we use every day which sucks up large quantities of data about us and then sells it on to advertisers at huge profits. It’s garnering increasing concern from citizens and regulators around the world, but should we care as Christians? What impact is this system having on once flourishing industries such as journalism or bookselling, let alone on us as human beings? And why have tech companies made their products so addictively hard to put down and stop tapping, swiping and clicking?

You can subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast platform you use to receive each installment sent directly to your phone or tablet when they are released.

Here are a handful of other recent episodes Tim and I enjoyed recording:

• Medical Assistance in Dying: Judicial activism, a ‘reasonably foreseeable’ death, the unacceptability of suffering, and reasons to stay alive

• Mental health: Power dynamics, the psychiatrist as brick wall, casualties of social media, and over-pathologising distress

• Evolution: Finding common ground, the cosmic watchmaker, interpreting Genesis, and a 6,000-year-old Earth?

• Archie Battersbee: The invention of ‘brain death’, a breakdown in trust, the child’s best interests, and how to turn off life support

• Suffering: 'Adamah’, mystery and presence, the ever-smiling Buddha, and the lamb slain from the creation of the world

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The latest resources on my website

• The robot revolution is coming…But are Christians ready?

  Advances in technology mean intelligent machines are likely to play an increasingly important role in our future

• Podcast conversation with the Astronomer Royal Martin Rees

  The Eliza effect, algorithms reading lung X-rays, the problem of other minds, and adventurers on Mars

• Protestant Social Teaching: A chapter on death and dying in a new multi-author book

  Do Protestants have answers to the pressing social questions of the day?

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Find many more articles, videos, talks and books to stimulate your own thinking at:

Thanks for reading, and with very best wishes,