# Michael Hurley

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/thought-for-the-day-385283/michael-hurley-2
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/thought-for-the-day-385283/michael-hurley-2.md
Podcast: [Thought for the Day](https://stenobird.com/podcast/thought-for-the-day-385283)
Published: 2026-06-10T15:28:00+00:00
Episode link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0nr64tn
Audio file: http://open.live.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/6/redir/version/2.0/mediaset/audio-nondrm-download-rss/proto/http/vpid/p0nr645n.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/thought-for-the-day-385283/episodes/michael-hurley-2
Duration seconds: 194

## Resource

Good morning. What would you do if you came across a man in a park, sitting in front of a typewriter, offering to write a poem with you? I would avoid eye contact and walk away as quickly as possible. After all, the offer might just be a ruse to rob me, or worse. And even if its genuine, I suspect the outcome of our poetic collaboration would be cringingly bad. But there is such a man in the park, and I have, on reflection, come to think he’s doing a good thing. Patrick Kruse, a Master’s student in Belfast, has set himself up in the city’s botanic gardens, encouraging passersby to write poems – every day for the next year. Perfect strangers report being charmed and moved by the experience. AI offers something similar, of course. Feed it key words and it can spit out verses in any style you like. So, what’s the difference? Most discussions about AI focus on its supposed capabilities. But another approach would be to ask what it means for us humans when we give up certain of our own capabilities so that AI can perform them instead. Pope Leo XIV recently published an encyclical warning against creating a technological “Tower of Babel”. He emphasized that human dignity does not derive from productivity, that no machine can replace “the grandeur of humanity” revealed in the human heart. It’s very well said. Yet there is, it seems to me, much more that still needs to said; in particular, on how AI is changing the way human beings relate to language. One of the greatest minds and prose stylists of the 19th century, Cardinal (now Saint) John Henry Newman described writing as a “thinking out into language”. Writing is not, he believed, simply a matter of expressing thoughts that are already in our heads. The act of writing is itself a form of thinking. As humans, we don’t passi…

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## Transcript

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