This is a talking point published in the Hereford Times on September 26.

Rt Rev Richard Jackson, Bishop of Hereford

FOR the first time last week I tried Chat GPT.

I had the germ of an idea for this column and typed it in. I was astonished at what came back in a microsecond.

It was a pretty soulless piece but expressed the outline of what I might have said. What’s more, it was precisely the 380-word maximum the editor asks for!

I wondered what would have happened if I’d just sent it in? I doubt many people would have noticed. You might even have thought the Bishop’s grammar and punctuation had improved.

What it struggled with was anything vaguely spiritual, which I think is why I’m askedto write this in the first place.

Artificial intelligence is– well artificial. Through analysing the patterns in billions of pages of text it can produce something in the style and tone you ask it to.

It can summarise long emails and give you the essence of them. What it can’t do is understand what it is doing.

It can’t show empathy or sympathy, and it can’t know anything beyond the pages of text it is trained on.

It is also worrying that if it trains on racist or sexist material, that is the sort of thing it will reproduce.

There is a long way to go, if ever, before these algorithms can replace human creativity. They can never love. They can never sense deeper realities than those we detect with our five senses.

Jesus told a lot of agricultural stories. He once told his disciples that the harvest was plentiful but the workers were few.

I think he was trying to help them through a time when they were finding sharing the message difficult.

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What are your thoughts?

You can send a letter to the editor to have your say by clicking here.

Letters should not exceed 250 words and local issues take precedence.

Christians have taken it as reassurance that human beings have an innate spiritual sensitivity. However much our secular culture tries to squeeze it out of us, we need somewhere to go with the feelings we get going round the corner of a Herefordshire road and having our breath taken away by the beauty of the landscape.

Wonder is a spiritual thing. It is our spirit responding to the deeper reality that lies behind the beauty of the world.

We Christians believe that is a personal God whom we can know. You’ll never get that from Chat GPT.