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Good morning. Google has just launched its latest form of Artificial Intelligence, a conversational system known as Bard which can apparently write a poem, explain the meaning of life, or research a topic, even if some fact-checking may be required.

I doubt if I’m alone in feeling some resistance to this capacity of increasingly sophisticated technology to mimic human creativity and ingenuity, and that’s not just because I’m a writer. Technology has enhanced our lives in many ways, but what about those aspects of life to do with imagination and creativity, wisdom and intuition? These enigmatic capacities seek expression in art and music, in literature and poetry, expressing yearnings and desires that resist rationalisation and elude even the most complex algorithms.

I think these are questions to do with the idea of the ‘soul’. In modernity, the soul has been seen as something abstract or disembodied, exclusively human, and associated with belief in an afterlife, or sometimes today interpreted as a superstitious belief in ghosts or supernatural beings.

But the word ‘soul’ used to be synonymous with life itself. In the Hebrew Bible, the word for soul, nephesh, is that which gives life to animals as well as humans. Medieval theologians, drawing on Aristotle, argued that every form of life including plants has a soul. Thomas Aquinas would say that while cabbages have a soul in common, every human soul is unique and inseparable from the body.

Philosophers sometimes ask: if your loved one died and could be replaced by a perfect clone, indistinguishable from the person you had lost, would you want it? My answer would be absolutely not, but why? Is it because of that elusive mystery, unique to every person, that we call the soul and which I believe cannot be generated by any machine or technological invention for it is given by God? Maybe it’s also about a sense that a loved one is irreplaceable, and love for a particular person makes us vulnerable to loss and sorrow, without which we are we are less than human. When science fiction explores the blurred boundary between humans and robots, it often focuses on our capacities for care and altruism, suffering and mourning, and not on rationality and intelligence.

I believe that all creativity is an expression of the soul of its creator, which in Catholic theology makes us co-creators with God in the work of creation.

So while I recognise the potential benefits of artificial intelligence, I would no more settle for a poem or a symphony generated by a computer, than I would settle for a clone of my beloved. There is I believe no soul in artifice, however intelligent it might be.

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