AI Goes to Church

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AI Goes to Church

Chatbots and AI are rapidly becoming staples in our public consciousness. You can ask them questions, assign them tasks, and even entreat them for advice. There is a day coming when we may have constant companions in our ear buds or glasses guiding us through our days and making our decisions. What could possibly go wrong? 

One of the central questions stemming from AI advancement is which jobs, roles, and parts of society will be replaced by AI bots? Large Language Models (LLMs) have proven to be very good at summarizing, taking on task lists, and coding. The combination of virtual reality and AI is often difficult to tell from real video footage. Deep fakes are going to be a part of every presidential campaign going forward – spurring California to adopt new legislation cracking down on social media companies and users spreading fake videos heading into November’s presidential election. 

The cutting edge of AI, though, is not business applications, but personal interaction. Reporting for Vox, Sigal Samuel highlights the growing number of people attached to AI voices and companions. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT has warned of users developing “emotional reliance” on their newest talkative AI models. Mira Murati, OpenAI’s CTO, even extrapolated further, “With the capability and this enhanced capability comes the other side, the possibility that we design them in the wrong way and they become extremely addictive and we sort of become enslaved to them.” In a culture facing a loneliness epidemic, I’m predicting this is a much bigger risk than anyone is talking about. 

“AI Companions” will be here before we know it. In addition to OpenAI several other companies are eyeing this fall for their rollouts. Under the guise of providing digital assistants, these companies may find they are providing something much deeper. 

And then there’s the pornographic component to these technologies. If the Christian world was unready for rapid access internet pornography, we are certainly unready for the much more realistic new phase. A team of researchers at MIT found that already the second most common use of AI is sexual role-playing. Virtual and augmented reality technologies will quickly be filled with opportunities for life-like sexual experiences. 

What does this say about our society? How can the church navigate this new age with wisdom? 

Technology Is a Mirror

Technology always acts as a mirror for the society that produces it. We live in a society in deep relational and emotional peril, and our technological advances both showcase and perpetuate this trend. AI bots can be used to address our loneliness, but they will only deepen it in the long run.

The problem is called “sycophancy,” a well-known issue with AI bots. The concept is simple; AI is trained with human inputs and designed to give responses that receive positive feedback from the user. For example, when you rate a response to a question, you are telling the chatbot what you like to hear, how you like it to speak to you, and what you want it to do in the future. Much of AI training consists of optimizing the user experience to secure more usage in the future. So over time, what the AI will learn to do is tell you exactly what you want to hear, how you want to hear it. 

The problem is “human feedback may also encourage model responses that match user beliefs over truthful ones.” User experience and preference feedback is not the best way to ensure the truthfulness of the AI response. Instead, as the MIT group writes, “This creates an echo chamber of affection that threatens to be extremely addictive. Why engage in the give and take of being with another person when we can simply take? Repeated interactions with sycophantic companions may ultimately atrophy the part of us capable of engaging fully with other humans who have real desires and dreams of their own, leading to what we might call ‘digital attachment disorder.’”

If we thought social media was bad, just wait. The incentives of the companies making AI, the dopamine cycle, and our cultural inability to forego short-term pleasure for long-term goods, all add up to a daunting humanitarian crisis. 

What about the Church?

Enough with the bad news. What should the church be doing? 

While researchers and AI companies look to the government for regulation, we have a more sophisticated and more powerful anthropology to bring into these conversations. Behavioral determinists don’t see a light at the end of this tunnel. We will gravitate to what is most pleasurable, even to our own peril. 

Christians believe something more than this. Our behavior is influenced by stimuli and driven by incentives, but it is also guided by our God-given nature. We are made in the image of God and made for certain activities and outcomes. First, we were made for God and second, we were made for each other. We can pursue cheap imitations of what we were made for (sin and idolatry), but that does not mean our nature will go away, and it certainly does not mean that God will stop pulling us back toward his design. 

Andy Crouch has written thoughtfully about this topic in The Life We’re Looking For. He argues that human beings are in search of “magic,” or the ability to “do things with effortless power.” Instead of viewing technology as a tool to accomplish God’s goals on the earth, we search in vain for magic that will enable us to be like God, accomplishing our own desires with ease.  

Like all idolatry, this pursuit of magic through technology leads to enslavement and human diminishment. Instead of seeing technology as magic, or fulfilling in its own right, Crouch offers another goal, technology as instrument. In this story, technology extends “human capabilities, but without displacing or replacing people. Instruments—musical instruments, medical instruments, scientific instruments—do not take the person out of the loop. Instead, in more and more powerful ways, through the application of all that we have learned about the world and indeed ourselves, they put the person back into the world—ideally, as nothing less than an image bearer of God.”

Praxis Labs, the company Crouch now works for, released “A Thesis for Artificial Intelligence” earlier this year. I’d encourage you to read through it. In it, the authors trace both the risks and the redemptive opportunities with AI – and the diagnosis is far from all bad. There are significant risks, in addition to the few detailed above, but there are powerful advantages as well. The difference lies in the worldview of the users and developers. This is the arena of the church. 

Like every other technological development, AI will require is to bring our Christian worldview to bear with all the hard work and nuance we can muster. It’s going to require intense discipleship, prayer, and wisdom. But as this advance is inevitable, there is no option to sit this out. Pastors and ministry leaders should be discussing these topics with business leaders and entrepreneurs in their churches. Teenagers, while the most susceptible to the downsides of new technologies, are also the most familiar with the rapid changes taking place. Above all, our greatest resource is the Word of God, which is as applicable to the coming AI revolution as it has been to every human epoch of the past. 

I’ll conclude with a few summary questions to think about and discuss as we navigate this rapidly changing topic:

Resources:

Dr. Cole Feix is the founder and president of So We Speak and the Senior Pastor of Carlton Landing Community Church in Oklahoma.