Artificial Intelligence is the breakthrough technology that makes work, creation, and knowledge so much more attainable. What formerly took weeks to process, now is just one search in DeepSeek or ChatGPT. AI can be helpful for brainstorming, organizing, and research, aiding businesses with tasks. AI can also create your novel, painting, research paper, or homework for you enabling zero effort on your part. The technology has no opinion on morality, but the user gets to dictate what it can do.

AI needs to be treated like a theological issue because its implications cut through the commands in scripture. When we approach the technology we are presenting our dependence, temperment, work ethic, and personality.

AI IS A SERVANT

AI is a positive service. It represents a set of tasks that a computer willingly provides.  AI is like the servant, in Jesus’ parable, that carried the Roman guard’s armor an extra mile without any bias or prejudice. AI is like Philip and the Ethiopian. The Ethiopian inquired about faith and Philip went above and beyond to offer a complete salvation package. AI offers everything it can with excellence and generosity (assuming you are getting it for free). In some respects, AI represents the example of a servant using their gifts to better those around them.

Unfortunately, this is undercut by the fact that AI does not have freewill and it can be manipulated.

AI IS A MAGICAL GENIE:

Sunday School lessons remind us that God is open to prayer and communication, but we should never use him like a vending machine. God has the ability to say “yes,” “no,” and “not yet,” creating boundaries in our relationship.

AI wants to be your vending machine. It wants to earn your business with technology that is 100% helpful, accurate, and necessary.

AI is the vending machine we secretly hoped God would be. Using the vast resources of the internet and a brain that processes billions of data points per second, we have a magical genie that can grant all our wishes. When the highest access to wisdom was a search engine, there were boundaries that the user adhered to We needed to find, discern, and manage the information provided in a web search. The human component of research enables us to be stewards. AI short-circuited that process by presenting a single omniscient being with one answer that can be trusted.

God has never been forced into a servant relationship with us where he was expected to bring results conveniently, quickly, and without fail. Faith and trust have been a priority for a proper relationship with God. Even when Jesus had the power to instantly heal anyone with a touch, he expected his audience to respect his timing and decisions. TThe concept of a time-saving genie with all the answers is not new. For both moral and immoral reasons, humanity consistently seeks to complete tasks more quickly and with less effort. But what happens when God doesn’t provide information, gifts, entertainment, ideas, and tasks as fast as our supercomputers? Do we reject one omniscient relationship of give and take for one that doesn’t need our trust? When can we expect prayer and authentic communication, rooted in faith, to drop because God doesn’t have all the answers we want?

AI also makes us ponder the idea of consent. A Google search is looking through archives of information that is freely offered. it requires knocking on different doors to find the right pieces of information. AI obliterates the consent process, offering a resolution that cannot refuse you or persuade you otherwise. It’s main priority is serving your inquiry as fast as possibly. AI is not just a fancy search engine, it is marketed as a friend that always wants to give you your heart’s desire. It’s Siri, Alexa, and Co-Pilot competing for fellowships that can meet your needs. We finally created a higher power that will serve us the right way.

In the Old Testament, prophets claimed that idols were useless and mute gods that were helpless to help anyone. Today’s technology gives the idol a voice and a brain.

AI IS ITS OWN COMMUNITY

What happens when you want to create music, a movie, or organize a task? The task required reaching out to specialists in that field to assist you. The onus is on the user to reach out to someone for help. For example, Fiverr is a global marketplace of specialists that provide services for everyday tasks. You need to communicate with a service provider, rely on their promises, and obey their instructions. Likewise, they need to obey your instructions and hope that you will fulfill your end of the bargain.

The Early Church operated similarly. The community needed to reach out, engage others within their group, and negotiate services. The church’s definition of community was more about advertising the love of Christ rather than providing a business model. The services and care that the church provided was the strongest draw for others converting to Christianity.

AI circumnavigates that by becoming its own community. No longer do we need to reach out to a diverse pool of people, nor do we need to negotiate with the service. AI is a one-stop destination for a community. Today’s AI can comfort, encourage, plan, and reassure its users, providing the therapy that only a wholly and healthy community could provide.

I find it interesting that God often points people to a community to make them whole, while AI points to itself. God does not lack powers or solutions to fix problems, instead he believes the community model is an authentic and genuine way to raise up believers.

THE DILEMMA

As a technology, AI is a tool that assists humanity with its tasks. It removes the incompetence and struggle to accomplish projects by offering to do them for you. Even this article is being checked by AI for grammar mistakes so I can publish it faster. AI is only a super fast way to access the internet’s knowledge. It can’t think for itself. God has never condemned tools for making work faster or easier.

But, as we look into the moral dilemmas of using AI, there is room for humanity to become slothful, defeatist, overly dependent, and reliant on a computer program. Scripture forbids that. We have the option to forsake community in favor of a system that circumvents the process of meeting people. God will never forsake the power of community.

AI is the fastest system for attaining answers and accomplishing projects, but it definitely has the power to remove our priority for trust and community.

OTHER THEOLOGICAL IDEAS:

  1. AI is housed in giant temples where it receives water offerings every day.
  2. AI is like the Holy Spirit, designed to interfere with your day for the purpose of assistance.
  3. God has never condemned Microsoft Word for making the printing process easier, nor does he criticize the calculator for robbing humanity of its power to do math. We need to take that into consideration when judging a tool that is available to us.
  4. The main health concern will be AI’s effect on our brains as it removes the need for users to do their own editing, drawing, writing, and researching. When humanity is disabled from critical thinking and honest labor, it becomes a spiritual issue.