In many ways, the rise of AI (Artificial Intelligence) is a great asset to humanity. Functioning as a fully-featured web trawler, it can navigate vast swaths of the worldwide web in seconds, retrieving information ranging from how to perform CPR in an emergency to the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. But there’s another perspective, and it’s just as valid: barreling down the chamber with terrifying velocity is a bullet headed straight to our nerve centers of creativity, ingenuity, and — far too often — our honesty and integrity.
Like so many other entities that can be used for good or bad (think sex or sports or alcohol), we tend to do a couple of things: first, we’ll typically huddle together on one end of the spectrum or another, declaring it either very good or very bad, and secondly, as a result, we will then either completely avoid it or use it to excess.1 There is, of course, plenty of room for balance, as with most things, but instead of focusing on the “balance” aspect, which would be better suited for my podcast anyway, I want to simply make a few observations.
Let’s start with an easy one
First: pastors and teachers are using AI to craft sermons, create illustrations, and critique doctrine. This is happening, and pretending that it’s not happening doesn’t help. Instead, we need to determine at what point the use of AI becomes unhelpful, uninspired, and often downright immoral. And — however disheartened this may make you, as it does me — we’re not ever all going to agree on what this point is.
In my case, I know of a couple of pastors, both in different states than I am in, who use AI strictly for generating sermon illustrations. You know, those introductory stories or parables that connect the world of the Bible to the world of the listener like a Venn Diagram. Well, is this immoral? Is it wrong to give AI a prompt that says, “hey, ChatGPT, generate an opening sermon illustration about someone stealing something and then being forgiven for it” or something like that? If it’s not outright wrong, is it proper to at least give credit to AI for this, since the assumption is that it’s original of the pastor? Apparently, many don’t seem to wrestle with these questions at all, given the abundance of people using AI for this, but I think this is pretty tricky territory at best. I don’t use AI for this, and I never, ever, ever will. If I’m not able to craft a sermon — from start to finish — with my own mind, while happily borrowing from the minds of others but giving due credit for their content, I don’t know how I could justify my existence as a pastor. Some will disagree, but I’d be willing to wager it’s the same group of people who have already had no problem mining commentaries and the internet for quips and quotes whose actual authors will never be mentioned from the pulpit once.
But let’s raise the stakes a bit. Let’s get a little bit more black and white. What about the pastor who groggily stumbles to his computer on Sunday morning and says, “Create a sermon on Joel chapter 1 complete with historical background, cross-references, and powerful application. Do this in three points.” Even as I typed this out, a little bile rose in my throat at the thought of thousands of pastors actually, literally, really typing something like this out and then delivering that dreck to their flocks. But it is happening, whether we like it or not. But here’s the rub: some pastors seem to have the intestinal fortitude (and strong enough gag reflex) to ask the question aloud: “is this really that wrong? After all, they’re getting better information than I could research by myself!” Answer: yes, it is wrong. If for no other reason than that you’re peddling cobbled-together research as though it were original of you. Those are not your thoughts. You are going far, far beyond using it as a research tool or even a generator of cutesy illustrations. You are allowing AI to pastor your church, at least as far as the preaching ministry goes. It is wrong.
You seem kinda upset
This is not only dishonest and discouraging — it’s outright dangerous for people and destructive to the lineage of human intellect. And this isn’t just a problem for pastors, of course. Perhaps you are an enjoyer of the arts, and your social media wall could use a little bit of attention. You love paintings of fall, so you ask AI to generate a painting of autumn for you as follows: “Gemini, please create a portrait in the style of Monet of this picture I took of my backyard.” And away Gemini goes, creating an original work of art for you to post on your Facebook feed, much to the admiration and applause of your followers. Never mind that AI drew this — the important thing is that you got 27 “likes” on your post. People say, “what a beautiful painting!” And you don’t say, “oh, it’s AI, but I gave it the prompt.” No, you just take it all in. This is, by the way, called lying.
What about poetry? Poems are beautiful, and they are a particular point of passion for me. I love poetry, and I write poems (of various genres and meter) often. The thought of using AI to write a poem is at once both revolting and staggeringly dishonest to me. But it clearly isn’t that way for everyone, as I continue to see AI slop being splattered around on social media timelines everywhere, and most people — is this where I say “bless their hearts” or something? — aren’t keen enough or educated enough to detect AI from human ingenuity if their lives depended on it2. So on and on they go, praising the poet, not knowing they’re giving credit to the Deus ex machina behind the disingenuous claimant online.
Or what about this very blog post? Could you be, right now, reading something written by AI3? How would you know? As AI becomes more adept in its ability to mimic human behaviors, skills, and tendencies (foibles and all), you’ll be able to tell less and less often. And here’s where I get to my point: All you’ll have is all you’ve ever really had to begin with: your trust in the person publishing their work as original, whether overtly stated as original or not.
In the end…
To the pastors and teachers who use AI to write their sermons, even if with a heart of “it does a better job than I do, so I might as well,” I call on you to repent and do the hard work of actual study and pastoring your church. To the dabblers in the arts who hang up your brushes and quills in favor of AI generating something that you’re sure sounds or looks better than something you could ever do: stop it. Rise to the occasion and create something that blows AI out of the water. You are a human. You have potential beyond AI’s widest and most advanced parameters. Stop being dishonest and start letting the words and images flow from your mind, not AI’s databases.
Look, if you use AI as a tool to aid your research, bolster your work with statistics, check your grammar, run permutations, or fact-check your claims, good for you. I do the very same, and I find AI to be a remarkably helpful tool. I use it at work, in the study, and I use it at least once a week. This very morning, I used it to figure out how to change the graphics settings on my son’s computer, finding out how to set the correct display adapter for use in a particular application. Extremely helpful stuff. What could have taken 20 minutes took only 2.
But if you’re the kind of person who allows AI to do creative work for you, and then sits back and takes credit for it as if it were original of you (whether by statement or by silence), you’re a plagiarizer, and I am very concerned about the state of your conscience and your very soul. I wouldn’t trust you in any area of life if I ever discovered that you took credit for work that wasn’t yours. I wouldn’t let you watch my kids, teach in my church, or be in a room alone with my wife — you have absolutely no integrity, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Wait, that’s it?
Yep. That’s it.
- I wrote about this a few years ago. ↩︎
- As an aside, you can always copy-to-clipboard any work you think is dubious and paste it into any given AI interface and ask it: “what are the chances, expressed in percentages, that his was written/drawn/etc. by AI? Please give your reasons for your conclusions.” ↩︎
- You’re not. ↩︎
