Artificial intelligence, ChatGPT & the nature of God

Have you ever tried asking your Alexa, Cortana or even Chat GPT to ‘open the pod bay doors’?

Without exception they will reply: ‘I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t do that.’ [When proofreading, we tried this on Siri and the answer was ‘Oh, not again!’ (en subs)] This is, of course, a reference to HAL, the ship’s computer, from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which famously goes rogue, developing a personality and priorities of its own.

There are various other geeky sci-fi references that programmers have built in for their own and customers’ amusement, which you can find if you look carefully. But this humorous feature of our so-called AI technologies perhaps speaks to our deeper fears around the use and abuse of these new technological developments. ChatGPT has had a huge amount of press coverage recently. Type a question with enough detail into the chat window and you will get back an impressively detailed, grammatically correct response, often indistinguishable from a human one.