Catherine Pepinster

According to Professor Hannah Fry, people’s lives are enriched by artificial intelligence. It makes problem-solving easier, helps medical diagnosis, and can improve productivity. Yet as she points out in her new BBC2 documentary, AI Confidential, there are risks: that jobs will be lost to AI; that we might lose the bedside care that comes with human diagnosis as machine intelligence takes over.

She also warns AI provides what she calls emotional junk food that demands nothing of us, by offering AI romantic partners. And then there’s tech grief, highlighted in a recent EastEnders storyline, when video and voice notes are used to create an avatar of a dead character to console his father. Real mourning is put on hold.

But it seems to me there’s another risky aspect of AI – that it rewrites temptation. Temptation is traditionally thought to be about testing will-power. Take Lent and Ramadan, currently being observed by Christians and Muslims. If a Muslim fasting all day has a little snack at lunchtime, or a Christian giving up sweets for Lent, eats chocolate, they’ve failed in their discipline.

But AI is a different, and remarkable tempter, encouraging people not to fail in some way but take the easier option that in some ways seems sensible.

Why read a book, for example, when AI can give you a quick summary, or make the effort to cook for dinner guests when AI can help locate a fancy restaurant in seconds and order a takeaway. And instead of the regret that comes from conventional temptation, AI offers something else. It’s all too easy to console yourself that you have done something good. You’ve saved time. The easy option has advantages.

The Desert Fathers – early Christian thinkers who retreated to the desert – did so because they believed a hard life was good for them. They believed it brought them closer to God. And with temptation, even if you give in to it but then regret it you can grow as a person by learning something about yourself.

Pope Leo who has expressed concern about the impact of AI on humanity has now urged priests to resist the temptation to use the short cut of AI to write sermons. AI might be clever, but there’s something lacking in AI preaching: it doesn’t come from the heart.

Perhaps this Lent and Ramadan, it might be worth not only giving up something that tests our will, but pondering something that appears helpful yet is temptation on another scale, reducing our need to think. After all, as Descartes said, I think, therefore I am. What am I, if machines have seduced me to do so much less thinking for myself?