Staying Human Series EP#03 - Being a Person in the Age of AI - with Susannah Black Roberts

Oct 28, 2025

Susannah Black Roberts, a Senior Editor at Plough Quarterly, dives into profound themes around personhood and the implications of AI on humanity. She discusses the ethical dilemmas posed by AI companions and clarifies the philosophical distinctions between human consciousness and AI imitation. Susannah emphasizes the danger of AI eroding genuine human experience and advocates for a resurgence of authentic, community-oriented practices that reflect Christian values. She also urges a collective re-engagement with intellectual work to nurture human flourishing in an increasingly mechanized world.

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ANECDOTE

AI Companion Subway Ads Spark Moral Alarm

Susannah recounts an ad campaign for friend.com, a pendant linking users to an AI companion that promises constant presence and intimacy.
The founder framed the AI as “better” than human relationships and likened it to talking to a god, provoking public backlash.

INSIGHT

Imitation, Not Consciousness

Modern LLMs mimic personhood by statistical prediction without consciousness, yet easily pass superficial tests like the Turing test.
Humans are prone to attribute personhood to patterns, which fuels social uses of AI and related harms.

INSIGHT

Public Philosophy Is Urgent

AI blurs what it means to be human by imitating powers we once saw as uniquely ours like making art and reasoning.
This confusion calls for a public-philosophy effort to clarify human nature and resist being bamboozled.

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In this time of deep change, it is vital to find ways of staying human—and to do so within a constructive story of spiritual and civic renewal. As we recognize the failure of the hyper-liberal philosophy of the past forty years, people are feeling the loss of agency and we are seeing increasingly widespread discontent. With concentrations of money and state power intensifying, the breakdown of trust - and the rapid advance of AI - our political, cultural, and spiritual life is increasingly marked by confusion.

Serious questions lie before us: How can we restore our common life? How can we stay human?

In this episode, Being a Person in the Age of AI, Susannah Black Roberts addresses what it means to be human in terms of personhood - and what can be done at the personal and community level. She explores how we as Christians are called to live at this moment in our history, what kinds of practices we should adopt to live the way of Jesus in a world that threatens to make us obsolete?

Susannah opens up the territory for a vital conversation about upholding the sacred and resisting the dehumanising potential of AI to prompt us to consider what this means for discipleship and Christian witness in the places where we live and work.

Susannah is Senior Editor at Plough Quarterly and an editor at Mere Orthodoxy. Currently she is working on a book on living out the political virtues in our private lives, and several projects related to the development of a Christian humanism for today’s world. Susannah writes for many publications, including First Things, Front Porch Republic, and The American Conservative. A native Manhattanite, she is married to an Englishman and lives between New York and the West Midlands in the UK. She writes on the Substack Anchored in Argosy and can be found on X at @suzania.

Download the text of Susannah’s lecture: Being a Person in the Age of AI

This is the third in our Staying Human series. This event was convened and moderated by Jenny Sinclair, Founder Director of Together for the Common Good, and took place on 21 October 2025 in London before an invited audience.

Learn more about Together for the Common Good at t4cg.substack.com.

Listen to our sister podcast, Leaving Egypt, where we read the signs of the times and explore what it means to be God’s people in these times of unravelling: leavingegypt.com.

Get full access to Together for the Common Good at t4cg.substack.com/subscribe