The Spiritual Life of AI, as Imagined by Way of R. S. Thomas

A famous poem by R. S. Thomas, “The Empty Church,” one of the poems that widely associates him with Holy Saturday, describes an existential search for God in a post-religious age. But today, the poem also captures something telling about spiritual life in our era of artificial intelligence—indeed, perhaps the spiritual life of artificial intelligence itself. This is because, in addition to its existential theme, the poem takes the form of a broken sonnet. The sonnet form evokes completion, closure, harmony, though in “The Empty Church” its fracture instead registers as noise, mimicry, simulation. The poem thus functions as an allegory of artificial intelligence, mimicking the quest for God in a search for the poet who might complete or repair its busted form. Thomas’s poem helps us understand the emergence of AI as a neural network with its own pathologies, its spiritual life a weakened version of our own.