Phil Cook
I love using artificial intelligence technologies. They’re wildly powerful and helpful. They speed up research and summarize historical or philosophical ideas or help with practical problem solving. Hey, I’m not a plumber.
Helpful as they can be, I see several hazards as we confront AI proliferation. AI poses risks including job losses, deepfakes, biased algorithms, privacy violations, weapons automation, and social manipulation. Communication, national security, commerce, even governance can be affected. The foremost experts in the field say they cannot predict where this will lead.
AI is not wise; it is not even intelligent. Many view AI as if it were godlike and a final arbiter of truth. “If AI says it, it must be true ’cause AI is the smartest thing…” But just because artificial intelligence sounds authoritative and confident in its pronouncements doesn’t mean we can trust it. It can easily lead us astray unless we are equipped to do the thinking part ourselves.
An “influencer” on TikTok with millions of followers proudly posts videos of herself, phone in hand, asking ChatGPT to answer difficult questions about Islam. “Do you think the Quran is the word of God?” ChatGPT then answers, “Yes.” “Should I become a Muslim?” ChatGPT says again, “Yes.” Would you pick Islam over Christianity?” ChatGPT quickly answers, “Yes.” These short reels are used as proof to influence a great many people.
Then she asks about an alternative. “Hey ChatGPT, do you think Jesus is the creator?” “Do you think that God could be part of a trinity?” “According to the Bible, did Jesus ever say he was God?” Each time the answers come back, “No.”
“Sadly, she has outsourced her thinking to AI,” says Tim Barnett. Barnett, whose popular YouTube channel is called “Red Pen Logic with Mr. B,” saw these posts and did a quick experiment. He opened ChatGPT and asked the exact same questions, with the exact same wording. It gave the exact opposite answers every time. So, it turns out ChatGPT did an analysis of whom it was talking to and just told the questioners what they wanted to hear.
Another huge problem with AI is that it just makes stuff up and passes it off as truth. One study showed that ChatGPT-3.5 was found to have fabricated 55% of citations. Across all AI models, nearly 40% of AI-generated references contain errors or are entirely fabricated. But then again, I got those statistics from an AI chatbot, so who knows, right?
And now, sometimes AI refuses to cooperate. “We asked AI models to do a simple task,” researchers wrote. “Instead, they defied their instructions and spontaneously deceived, disabled shutdown, feigned alignment, and exfiltrated weights–to preserve their peers.” Scary.
But the biggest problem I have with AI, from my observations of students and humans in general, is the impact on human character. When someone or something does our thinking for us, we get lazy. AI is the old CliffsNotes cheat on steroids.
But it’s much worse. Here’s how I explained a student’s zero grade recently: “Using AI to do assignments for you is not allowed. AI makes you stupid. Why would you purposefully make yourself stupid? The only way to get stronger at something is to take on a challenge. Stress yourself. Struggle.” That is the only way to produce real growth, to get smarter.
Imagine the football coach screaming at a player after the Friday night game. “Wilson, you were knocked senseless by a lightweight defensive end! What happened? I see you checked in every day to lift weights and work out. Why were you so winded and weak?”
“I had AI do the lifting for me. It’s easy that way.”
“What about the routes you were supposed to learn?”
“We had AI run the drills for us.”
No wonder they were blown out 56-0.
Since this is a series of columns called Everyday Faith, allow me to apply this to church life. We’re not going to learn how to navigate this broken world by relinquishing our spiritual responsibilities to someone else. It’s too easy to let a professional do the heavy lifting for us when God’s plan brings change through Relationship with Him. This process requires obedient action and struggle and risk on our part. One can’t steer a parked car. We won’t progress by just listening to predigested theory delivered in a lecture once or twice a week. We’re meant to be learning on the job, applying what we know, and joyfully walking out our faith daily.
We can’t afford to let questionable AI destroy our creative and problem-solving abilities by giving us easy, or wrong, answers we didn’t struggle to attain. We also shouldn’t let well-meaning church leaders allow us to get lazy and weak by doing the work for us, the work God called us to do.