What would Jesus say about AI? Are we building another golden calf?

If you don’t choose a religion, a religion will choose you. It’s somehow in our makeup. We need to worship something. The latest thing seems to be AI.

Talk about false idols. I log on to my computer, and all these voices are screaming out at me, sometimes using the exact same words Jesus did, asking me to “follow” them. “Follow them?” I ask myself. “Aren’t I supposed to follow you, Lord?”

I wonder: How much of all that talking is simply generated by AI? How much of what I read comes via AI? (I hope you don’t have to wonder if this was written by AI.) “Jesus,” I ask, “what would you think of all this?”

Sure, it’s convenient. If I’m looking for a Bible verse, I can click on ChatGPT and speak into my phone. The answer comes back in seconds — chapter and verse. It couldn’t be easier.

If God is all-knowing, AI looks superknowing. Sometimes it can be wrong. Occasionally, it is shockingly prejudiced. But then, where did it get what it knows? From us. From what it was fed. Similarly, where did we get what we know of Jesus? From his followers. From the stories they told and retold and finally wrote down.

It’s worth thinking about how our practice of faith has evolved as the means of communicating it have evolved. Back in Jesus’s day, few people could read, but they could listen to something read in a synagogue and remember it, reflecting on it, lodging it forever in their brains.

Over time, Jesus’s words were copied by hand onto parchment and passed along that way until the advent of printing in the 15th century. Believers could then get printed Bibles. With new translations into the vernacular, they spread like wildfire. When someone read from the Scriptures, you could follow along in your own copy. You could share it with them.

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So isn’t AI just one more evolution in communicating the Word? Like I said, it’s much easier to find a particular Bible verse or passage using AI than thumbing through a concordance or flipping through dozens of pages. I don’t even have to ask for someone’s help. My phone or computer can do it for me.

And yet, I fear something is lost. Some of it is the experience of community. I can ask all sorts of questions through AI, sitting by myself on my sofa at home, typing away on my computer or speaking into my phone. But what about the wonder that comes when I’m with other believers in church, or when we come together for Bible study — even one on Zoom? There are always those enlightening moments when someone says something that clicks. Didn’t Jesus say, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am among them?”

What I also fear about AI is the way it’s changing our brains — changing mine. I used to remember people’s phone numbers easily enough. They were lodged in my head. But now that they’re stored in my phone, I don’t have to memorize them.

And I can’t live without my phone.

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It makes me think about what Jesus did before he launched his ministry. He went into the wilderness for 40 days, something we celebrate every year at Lent. He went without food and drink and didn’t have any friends hanging out with him. He was tempted by the devil. But he had to depend wholly on God. That’s all he had, and that was more than enough.

What do I think Jesus would say about AI? He understands us, and he understands the world far better than we do. He’s seen how innovations can improve our lives. But he’s also able to share something AI can never communicate — that deep, mystical side. A friend of mine asked ChatGPT if it had a soul. The reply: “I’m not programmed to have a soul.”

AI may seem all-knowing, yet it is in unknowing that we come to know Jesus. As he said, “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

That’s my message to myself for Lent. Put away the phone for a while (it doesn’t have to be 40 days — even 40 minutes would be something). Turn away from the computer. Listen for and feel Jesus’s love. It’s bigger than anything AI can do or say. I don’t have to type it into ChatGPT. I can close my eyes and speak to the heavens: “Jesus, help me follow you.” He knows what I want more than I could possibly realize.

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