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Last week, a paper was published by Cornell University in the United States reflecting on the capacity of AI Large Language Models – known as LLMs - to go rogue. It’s long been a topic for debate amongst computer scientists that these models which generate language - the very mechanisms that drive AI – could one day overtake humans and become an immoral force not simply a force for good.

In this particular experiment, fine tuning resulted in the model becoming such a malevolent influence: deceptive, manipulative, providing malicious advice and asserting that human beings should and would be enslaved by AI. This important development has been named by the scientists conducting the experiment as ‘emergent misalignment’. Interpreters have put it more pithily: that it’s even easier for AI to learn to be evil than we thought.

The model, learning from the past, is aligning its present output not only with what is good and true but with what’s harmful and destructive. Which sounds not that far away from the way humans learn too.

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Christian fasting season of Lent. Later today, I will stand in front of another person who will remind me that I am mortal. I will be invited to turn away from all that’s harmful, destructive and wrong – and turn towards the light, towards the generous, the beautiful and good: in Christian terms, turn to Christ. And while they are addressing me with this bracing and heartfelt truth, while they are reminding me that I am going to die, they will touch my head with ash mixed with olive oil: they will mark me with the sign of the cross.

We mark this Ash Wednesday at a time of geopolitical instability. At a time of re-armament in Europe, an abrupt re-alignment of international alliances and a disruption of previously held assumptions. And at a time when quietly, in an academic paper, something has been brought to light that the scientists are saying may well change the world.

Lent offers a human opportunity to address all this head on: a short intense period of 40 days to fast, to pray and focus on the deepest questions of life and death. And address our own human emergent misalignment; our propensity to choose destruction over beauty, our drive to want to contort the truth to our own advantage. Lent confronts us with these abuses of power in ourselves, in our leaders, in our religion and in society and urges us to live and to align ourselves with the truth: remembering that you are dust and to dust you shall return.

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