Category Archives: Arts

Artificial Intelligence, Arts, Society, Technology

Pope Leo’s encyclical on AI should be welcomed

MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS

Intro: Magnifica Humanitas is an important warning of the uses and misuses of a rapidly developing technology. Silicon Valley is wrong to dismiss it

When authors and creative writers are asked whether novels of the future will be written by AI, it’s not so much a question as a provocation. Do many worry that a machine can do what they do, only better? As Francine Prose, a prominent American writer and academic says: “No algorithm is going to write Anna Karenina!” which is also not a real answer.

Many will be grateful to Pope Leo XIV, the American pontiff, for his recently issued letter to the world, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. It’s a long (more than 40,000 words), intelligent, and thoughtful encyclical in which the pope addresses the uses and misuses of a rapidly developing technology. For anyone seeking an opinion on AI, they might like to be referred to the pope’s letter, or at least chapter three.

The encyclical begins with an appropriately biblical reference to the tragic consequences of a breakdown in human communication. Humanity faces a “pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build a city in which God and humanity dwell together”. What follows is a detailed account of the evolution of the views of Pope Leo’s predecessors, of the Church’s ideas about labour, authority, government, science, power, and our moral obligation to one another. It cites the work that the Church has done in defence of human dignity and freedom.

The third chapter concerns Technology and Dominance. The Grandeur of Humanity in Light of the Promises of AI, delivers on the promise of the encyclical’s title. In an eloquent (and most often quoted) passage explaining what AI is not, the pope essentially defines what it means to be human. “So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.” AI does not have a moral conscience nor does it show any guiding concern for the greater human good.

The letter proceeds to say the most important and necessary things about what is possibly the greatest threat posed by AI: it can be programmed solely to maximise profit, a situation that can only result in the suffering of the many for the benefit of the few. The pope warns against the “manipulation of privacy” and the “misuse of information”, against the uses of an algorithm to manage employment, to control access to public services and credit, and to elevate or damage one’s personal reputation.

Compassion, mercy, and forgiveness – not high on the machine’s list of priorities – will become obsolete. “‘Necessary sacrifices’ may begin to be justified, placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of the supposed optimisation of the species.” If the tools of this new power are placed in the hands of those who already possess wealth and influence, they will be used to elevate the comfort, health, and wellbeing of our wealthiest and most privileged citizens.

As the letter nears its end, the pope calls on us to remain faithful to the truth, to invest in education, to cultivate relationships, to live in justice and peace – to resist the way in which the new technologies can “exploit the most vulnerable, create new forms of slavery and derive profit from conflict”. What becomes clear is that the pope is not condemning AI outright but rather the way it can be used as a tool of political repression and as a guarantee of worsening economic inequality.

In theory, it’s possible to criticise the encyclical for not going far enough, for not using another biblical metaphor – the golden calf – to stigmatise the use of AI because of how it prioritises cost-saving over spiritual, individual, and communal growth. But that ship has already sailed, and there’s not much that Leo XIV – or any religious leader – can do to condemn the new advances as a 21st-century form of idolatry.

Even so, the encyclical’s vision of human nature, of the spirit of justice and empathy that needs to prevail, of the essential importance of the highest moral values – is ultimately so beneficent, so positive, so generous, so inarguably clear about our obligation to protect the weak and the poor, that it’s hard to find reasons to dismiss it.

And yet that’s the scary part. Apparently there’s been a certain amount of blowback from Silicon Valley, where the inventors and masters of the latest technology have suggested that the pope doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Jeremy Nixon, a founder of AGI House, a group dedicated to proving that AI is essentially equal to the human brain, was quoted in the New York Times as saying that the Church hadn’t “thought deeply about . . . AI”, adding: “They couldn’t have a position on it, because they don’t understand it.” And there seems to be a widespread belief that the end product of the current research will be, in effect a new God, or at least a convincing simulacrum. Concerned about the perils of the future, our society is choosing to overlook the evidence that the downsides of AI are already upon us. Many undergraduates in marketing and advertising are acutely aware that by the time they graduate, all the jobs in advertising will have been taken by AI.

If the masters of this new technology fail to agree with what the pope sees as its dangers and drawbacks, we are in very deep trouble indeed. The problem is not that we will have a robot writing Anna Karenina. The problem is that no one will see any possible need for a novel that so exquisitely portrays the sufferings of a woman, a singular human being.

There would be no point in a book like that unless that account of a life-changing mistake could be monetised by a forward-thinking tech bro and used to finance the purchase of a bigger and better yacht, presumably serviced by a permanent underclass, by workers whose dignity – whose formerly valued and valuable jobs – have been pirated by the rapacious manifestations of artificial intelligence.

Standard
Arts, Books, Literature

Book Review: Land by Maggie O’Farrell

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: Set in the decades after the Great Hunger, “Land” is a rich portrait of family life amid Ireland’s long struggle against British rule

Cartography has never been a neutral discipline. Maps offer a partial view of a landscape, informed by what the mapmaker wishes the reader to see. A colonising army will mark the features of the terrain that serves its purposes and exclude inconvenient signs of prior habitation. And they will do this in their own language.

“Land”, Maggie O’Farrell’s 10th novel, is set in Ireland in the 1860s. It has been more than a decade since the Great Hunger killed over a million people and forced an even higher number into exile, and the landscape is dotted with empty villages and over-full graves. Tomás – an Irish cartographer working for the British “redcoats” – and his young son, Liam, are charting a remote peninsula on the country’s west coast when Tomás has a sudden, revelatory experience at a pre-Christian holy spring.

What he encounters there inspires him to abandon his office job and counter the efforts of his erstwhile employers by drawing his own, dissident map of the area. It will reconstitute the terrain as its inhabitants understand it, in their language, honouring the communities that have been annihilated, the woods and waterways that rightly belong to them, and the old cultural landmarks the British have no use for.

The task, for Tomás, is personal: both he and his wife, Phina, were orphans of the Hunger, forced from their rural lives into urban workhouses. He moves his family from Dublin to the countryside as an act of reclamation and renewal. Phina, however, is more ambivalent. She worries about money now that her husband has foregone his regular salary, and about her daughters’ future prospects given that in their new village Catholic schooling is reserved for boys.

Like much of the author’s previous work, including her most famous, the 2020 book “Hamnet” – adapted into a 2025 film by Chloé Zhao – “Land” is a historical novel with O’Farrell’s signature interest in absorbing family relationships. The first half of the narrative sows the seeds of a defiant, multigenerational reckoning with the British Empire, and to an extent the Catholic Church. We encounter a windswept landscape; a menacing, nameless viscount; a kindly widow who represents all the grieving folk of the land; and a condescending priest. O’Farrell takes us on a lively deep dive into the land’s prehistory – a place of hill forts, druids, wanderers and wolfhounds, where virgins are ritually sacrificed to stave off bad weather.

Great period novels balance larger historical context with personal details and textures, and at first “Land” feels poised to do just that, deftly situating a rich portrait of family life amid Ireland’s centuries-long struggle against British rule.

But as the novel proceeds, this promise largely dissolves. Tomás’s cartographic ambitions, initially presented as the story’s engine, fall from focus as the story shifts to his children’s comings of age and their own varied relationships to the Irish diaspora across the British Empire.

Unfortunately, O’Farrell leaves these relationships and their wider ramifications mostly unexplored. Liam joins the Jesuits and travels as a missionary to South India, where he briefly considers the connection between his role and that of the British in Ireland, but ultimately loses his faith because of homesickness rather than any true engagement with the locals’ plight.

– A sweeping historical family saga set primarily in post-Famine Ireland. The novel blends themes of cartography, colonialism, family bonds, and the deep connection between people and the land

His sister Enda journeys to Quebec on an emigration permit she’s stolen from Liam, and struggles to make a living there as a domestic labourer and street musician. She meets her love interest in the immigration line: an Eastern European teacher turned cook who picks up work as a logger in the summers to make enough money to bring the rest of his family to Canada. But the novel pulls its punches when it comes to the parallels between deforestation in the Americas and that in Ireland.

Nonetheless, O’Farrell’s writing is propulsive and luscious throughout, and there are some emotive and moving passages told from the perspective of Phina’s nonverbal youngest child, Eugene. But the problems with “Land” stem from its reluctance to question the moral clarity of its core characters. They are all unimpeachably good. Tomás loses his grip on reality, and their other daughter, Rose, resents her siblings for leaving her behind on the peninsula; but the real darkness in the novel lies outside the family unit – with the redcoats, the viscount, and the church. The evils of imperialism do not require its victims, real or imagined, to be pure and incorruptible, especially when their own migrations make them the dominant presence in other colonies.

At its best, “Land” evokes weighty, time-slip novels like Alan Garner’s “Red Shift”, drawing associative lines across eras and grappling with the long afterlives of colonial violence. But there is no doubt it is deflated by characters whose confrontations with the forces around them are too shallow to constitute a serious reckoning with the moral dilemmas the novel poses at the start.

– Land by Maggie O’Farrell is published by Knopf (an imprint of Penguin), 384pp

Standard
Art, Arts, Exhibitions, Second World War

Exhibition – Winston Churchill: The Painter

WALLACE COLLECTION

Serenity: Winston Churchill’s Cap d’Ail, Alpes-Maritimes (1952)

Xavier Bray, the director of the Wallace Collection, recently described the London gallery’s new exhibition of Winston Churchill’s paintings as “provocative”.

Churchill didn’t take up painting as a hobby until he was 40 years of age, perhaps to distract himself following the disastrous Dardanelle campaign of 1915 (for which, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he was held responsible), but he became besotted with the medium, and sought out artistic instruction from masters including John Lavery, Walter Sickert, and William Nicholson. Before his death at the age of 90 in 1965, Churchill produced more than 500 oil paintings.

Yet, astonishingly, there hasn’t been a British retrospective of his work since 1959. According to one commonly held view, this is because his “daubs”, as he described them, simply aren’t up to scratch.

He may have won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 – writing was his main source of income for most of his life having authored dozens of books and penned countless journalistic pieces – but, surely, nobody in their right mind would honour his amateurish paintings, despite the enthusiasm with which he set about them while wearing a bespoke painting coat tailored by Henry Poole & Co. All of this done in his studio on Chartwell’s 80-acre estate, where he stored pigments in a cigar humidor presented to him by the Cuban government.

On the evidence, though, of Winston Churchill: The Painter, he was hardly as bad as all that. On occasion, he was even surprisingly decent, as demonstrated by a display of Moroccan landscapes, including a view of the Koutoubia Mosque in Marrakech that achieved £8.3m at auction when it was sold by Angelina Jolie in 2021.

Painted in 1943, it was the only canvas he produced during the Second World War. He gave it to his friend and fellow wartime leader Franklin D Roosevelt, whom he’d persuaded to accompany him on a trip to Marrakech immediately after the Casablanca conference – to, as he put it, “see the sunset on the snows of the Atlas Mountains”. According to Bray, Churchill often gifted his paintings to important people, including three consecutive American presidents, as a form of “soft power”.

You can tell that, like many artists before him, Churchill loved painting in North Africa, where, while working en plein air, he would attract a curious crowd. His Moroccan compositions may lack the blazing audacity of, say, those by Henri Matisse or others in the Fauvism movement, but their combinations of dusky pinks, cool lavenders and greens still satisfy.

While stick figures populate some of Churchill’s Moroccan views, Bray and his co-curator, Lucy Davis, wisely omit his paintings of people, which can appear ham-fisted. Instead, they prefer to present an attractive selection of about 60 of his still lifes and landscapes, including serene, sun-soaked vistas of holiday destinations in Italy and along the Côte d’Azur (as well as in Morocco).

This specific subject matter may reflect the fact that painting for Churchill was a way to relieve strain – which he wrote about brilliantly in his essay Painting as a Pastime. (He found similar solace in bricklaying.) His compositions in this mode are easy on the eye and inoffensive. The best examples are preoccupied with capturing complex reflections on the surface of water.

On occasions, there is a hint of warfare – although the exhibition sidesteps controversial talk about imperialism. A squat black Napoleonic cannon facing mainland Europe in the foreground of The Beach at Walmer is surely a sort of self-portrait, given the painting’s date of 1938. Otherwise, though, this is painting as escapism.

Sometimes, this means that Churchill’s pictures are insipid or banal. Too many appear like inexpert imitations of Post-Impressionist paintings, which he admired. Several are blighted by boring, unmodulated passages and feel stilted. With little to analyse aesthetically, the labels rely heavily on anecdotes (although this could invoke fun). A quarter bottle of Pol Roger is on show in the first gallery, alongside his spectacles. Supposedly, it contained the last bubbly he ever drank.

Yet, almost everything that Churchill brushed conveys his infectious passion for the art form and, occasionally, a painting by him really comes together. A view from about 1924 of sun-struck snow surrounding the Chartwell estate (which Churchill purchased in 1922 and loved dearly) is delicious.

A 1932 canvas of a goldfish pool fringed with greenery near the house – which Churchill often painted, possibly in homage to Claude Monet’s depictions of his water garden at Giverny – is enlivened with undulating curls and slivers of orange, like sinuous Wotsits, representing fish beneath its rippled surface.

Forget the august aura of the artist who produced it. Considered purely as a painting, it hits the mark.

– The Wallace Collection, London W1, runs until November 26                                                                                                                                                    

Standard