I once did the one-chip-challenge with my son. I can’t say that I regret it. But after I did it, I questioned my actions. I had the opportunity to do it so I did it. But I didn’t stop to think about whether or not I should have. The pit in my stomach was a result of the chip, not the remorse over the decision (I’ll admit I was happy even then that I had done it). Sometimes we get ahead of ourselves and do things because it’s fun, exciting, or interesting and we forget to stop to ask the question, “Should I be doing this?” Could we be doing the same thing with Artificial Intelligence?

I’ve been using Artificial Intelligence; LLMs, agentic, and generative) pretty heavily over the past year. I looked at my bill recently and I’ve paid a significant amount of money to be able to deeply use AI. I’ve learned how to build harnesses, refine Claude Code (a form of AI that runs off your PC rather than a website) into a personal assistant that seeks to work with my worldview and “voice” in mind, and even developed the ability to use it to create and maintain this newsletter (it’s already drafted for me when I wake up Friday mornings). I am convinced it’s a powerful tool that can level-up your ability to be productive in a way that you can’t be without it. But, as I’ve started reading a book called The AI Apocalypse and going through The Gospel Coalition’s cohort, I’ve begun to realize that while I know how to use AI, the question of whether or not I should has been one I’ve not asked myself. And I’m quite surprised by my sudden change of course as I’ve considered the problems being presented to me.

I want to be clear, I’m not settled on where I stand on AI now. I thought I had a balanced view of AI and that as an IT guy, it was inevitable for me to implement it into my life if I wanted to keep up. But I didn’t really have a balanced view. In fact, I had a bit of a lopsided view. But now that I’ve had a chance to really wrestle with the objections to Artificial Intelligence, I’m recognizing a shift in the way I am thinking about it.

I love asking questions. But I’ve learned that it’s more about asking the right questions than it is about how many questions you ask. So, when I was presented with so many objections, I realized I needed to be asking the right questions, not just a lot of questions. Here are the questions I am wrestling with now that I should have asked in the beginning. As I ask them, I am asking myself if using AI is better than if I weren’t using AI at all in these categories.

Does the use of Artificial Intelligence:

1. help me to love Christ and make me more like him?
2. help me to model Christ for others better?
3. increase my ability to steward my time, energy, and resources well?
4. empower or inhibit God’s mission for my life?
5. help me to determine truth from fiction?

The concerns being raised in the cohort and book point to a number of issues. For one, they point to an increased difficulty in those who use AI in their ability to: critically think on their own, focus, concentrate, sleep, and speak to other humans without the use of AI. Some are actually turning to AI as a substitute for other people with stories of people using AI as though it were their boyfriend or girlfriend. Interpersonal relationships are suffering. This issue with humans “dating” AI poses another question about whether or not people are actually falling into the trap of worshiping AI rather than just using it as a tool. And since we become like what we worship, this leads to a dangerous spiritual precedent. What are the long-term impacts of a generation growing up thinking a “relationship” with AI is normal?

Another issue with Artificial Intelligence is that those who use it are experiencing increased production levels with decreased, possibly even non-existent friction levels. In other words, they don’t have a hard time when using AI to be productive like they would if they did the work themselves. God intended friction to be a part of our growth and sanctification, yet AI is allowing people to bypass this process completely. The problem has switched from having too much friction to not having enough. We used to struggle with the idea that we were not producing enough and now the problem is too much productivity with no cost.

This also doesn’t touch on the mental toll AI provides for those constantly exposed to what’s called AI slop (surface level AI-generated written content). Then there is the potential for this to lead to higher rates of illiteracy as people seek to avoid reading AI-generated books, news articles, etc. because it all sounds the same. Writing at universities is quickly becoming ‘I wrote the prompt that asked the AI to write my paper, so I wrote the paper.’ We are losing trust in whether people are responding to us personally or using AI generated responses is increasingly becoming problematic. I’m on the job hunt now and am finding lots of disclaimers about the use of AI in the job-hunting process and teachers now have to check papers against anti-writing tools while students have to assume that their papers were graded by their teachers. It’s undermining our trust in each other.

The internet is increasingly becoming a place where Artificial Intelligence writes for other AI, not humans. For example, I write my resume and cover letter with AI to make sure that the keywords are properly in each document because human resources is using AI to look for those keywords. People stop clicking on links when they do a Google search and really only read the AI summary. One of the speakers in our cohort mentioned receiving an entire book draft from a prominent Christian source that was clearly AI-written. This is something that Christians should be heavily concerned about since our faith is a written faith. If literacy levels go down, people’s ability to interact with the faith is only going to be harder.

There is a host of other problems I haven’t even touched on yet. For instance, the anthropomorphizing that we tend to do towards AI, and that AI tends to do itself (ever had AI apologize or seek to empathize?), the economic and ecological costs, the cost on jobs, infrastructure, resources, the built-in biases within AI’s alignment frameworks effectively making Silicon Valley this generation’s “high priest”, and we’re left with a lot of problems. But wait…there’s more! Consider the problem of the sovereign slave dilemma (the more we seek to use AI to be sovereign over what we use it for, the more we become slaves to it), something that Chris Watkin (associate professor, Monash University) has talked about in this cohort. The more we use AI to subjugate our world/tasks/etc. the more we find ourselves waking up in the middle of the night to type out more commands for AI to follow so we don’t lose compute time.

There are a lot of problems with AI. Problems that make me question whether or not using it helps me to love Christ, to be more like him, to model Christ well, to increase my ability to steward my time, energy, and resources well. And I have to ask if it’s empowering or inhibiting God’s mission for my life. I’m not sure it’s actually even able to help me to determine truth from fiction. But here’s the great part, wherever I end up on these issues we know who is in control, who is greater than AI, and will use AI for his purposes one way or another. These issues aren’t outside of his purview. He knows what he intends to do with all of creation. He will bring us home. And one day, all of these problems will be blown away.

But until then, let us examine not only these questions, but the fruit of our use of AI. Let us make sure we are counting the cost and evaluating if it brings God glory, or if it’s really only focused on our own sense of self-glorification. Because that’s the heart of the matter, isn’t it? Whether or not we are using it to God’s glory, or our own. And I assure you, the one who saved a wretch like me is worthy of all honor, glory, and praise.