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Why We Must Not Use AI In Ministry: Response to Jay Owen

An open letter to Jay Owen, a popular proponent of AI in ministry
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This article is reprinted from Doug Smith’s blog, That Doug Smith.

TL;DR:

Christian leaders are being encouraged to “embrace” LLM AIs like ChatGPT to help their ministries. The argument is pragmatic: it works, so it must be good.

But wise ministry leaders must avoid the temptation to use AI even if it seems to have huge benefits. Why?

  1. Because LLM AIs are deceptive by design (and therefore degrades spiritual discernment),
  2. Because today’s AIs are built by people who have anti-Christian goals (some of whom believe they are working with spiritual forces and even “making God”), and,
  3. Because ultimately, ministry is harmed when we trade the slow work of prayer, study, and the Jesus-led model of relational discipleship for quick and easy Big Tech products.

Dear Jay,

I attended your webinar, “AI In Ministry: Friend or Foe? Embracing Technology to Reach More People” on November 13, 2024. You’re a gifted, passionate communicator with an impressive background, and it seems like you have a heart to help Christian leaders.

Introductions

For my readers who may not know you, you’re the Executive Director of Digital Discipleship for the Church of Eleven22, a 20k+ person megachurch based in Jacksonville, FL. You also run an agency called Business Builders. You’re very active in all things digital, so you have a large platform with a lot to share.

You wouldn’t know me. But quickly, I’m a Christian, a husband, and a father to four grown daughters and a growing number of incredible grandkids. I’m a lifelong Bible student and serve in worship ministry and lay leadership at a medium-sized church in middle Tennessee. For work, I’m an experienced software engineer, and am currently a senior Android engineer with Covenant Eyes.

I’ve also been writing and speaking about our relationship with technology for almost ten years, and am the author of [Un]Intentional: How Screens Secretly Shape Your Desires, and How You Can Break Free (Credo 2021).

I have serious concerns about your optimistic “embrace” of AI, specifically generative LLM AIs exemplified by ChatGPT. And given your huge platform and worldwide influence, I want to ask you reconsider your advocacy of AI in Ministry.

Most of my readers won’t have attended your webinar, but I’m sure many are familiar with ChatGPT and are eager to hear how it can help their ministries. Your promise to reach more people is tantalizing to overworked, underpaid ministry staff across the world. How could they not want to share their messages more quickly?

But if my read on these issues is correct, our “embrace” of AI seriously harms the cause of Christian discipleship. While this is not your intent, I believe your love of technology may have blinded you to the damage that may be done to Christians, churches, and ministry leaders if they embrace what you teach.

It’s really hard, but I hope you’ll consider what I have to share and stop telling people they should use AI in ministry. I’d welcome the chance to have a public conversation with you about these things.

Your Prophetic Authority

You framed your authority to speak on this subject with prophetic overtones. You claimed, even at a young age, to understand how the invention of the internet would “change everything about everything.” You had a similar insight when the iPhone was announced. Your visionary grasp of internet and iPhone gives you the authority to claim that if you say LLM AI “changes everything about everything,” people should listen to you. Because you are forward-looking – prophetic.

Given how strongly you establish your prophetic authority, and that I believe you’re unintentionally leading people astray, it seems like “false prophecy” is something to watch out for in your message.

For example, you recommend that people “embrace” ChatGPT by paying for a subscription, installing it on every device they own, and using it constantly. What happens if ministry leaders take your advice?

I believe their embrace of ChatGPT will harm their relationship with God, degrade their ability to discern what’s real and true, and atrophy their ability to create and even think for themselves.

Those are serious harms.

People in the Bible loved false prophets because their messages were just what they wanted to hear. When the false prophet Hananiah told the captive Israelites that they’d be victorious over the Babylonians within two years, Jeremiah mocked him and said, “Amen! May the Lord do so! … But the prophet who prophesies peace will be recognized as one truly sent by the Lord only if his prediction comes true.” (Jeremiah 28:6, 9, emphasis mine)

You prophesy “peace” with AI (“we can use it for good!”). Are you right?

Minimizing the “Fear” while Maximizing the “Cheer”

To help us see whether AI is a “Friend” or “Foe,” you start with a list of things we might “fear.” But your presentation of these fears was quick, dismissive, and seemed more tongue-in-cheek than serious. The world-ending quotes of famous luminaries you shared seemed to me like you thought they were “Chicken Little.”

When you shared the fear of Job Loss, you dismissed it by asserting that, “people using AI will be taking jobs from people not using AI.” That’s an appeal to FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), using fear of a “fear” to influence uneducated viewers. To me, it shows that you’re thinking more as a disciple of Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT). Altman believes AI will replace the jobs of what he calls “median humans,” which is like how you disparaged “people not using AI.”

AI’s Attack on Spiritual Discernment

But the most important “fear” you shared was also the one you downplayed the most, “Lack of Spiritual Discernment.” After reading that slide’s four-word title, you spent most of the time talking about how impressed you were with that slide’s AI-generated image. You appeared to show a “lack of spiritual discernment” yourself by minimizing this huge problem in your eagerness to “Cheer” us into using AI for ministry.

Here’s what I wish you had said about Lack of Spiritual Discernment:

Let’s start with a non-controversial baseline: most Christians aren’t spending time in the scriptures. Barna says that 68% of American parents think of themselves as Christian, but only 2% have a biblical worldview.

Also, while you frequently assured viewers with the Altmanian creed that AI is only going to get better, the fact is that “hallucinations” are not rare, that LLM AIs have no clue at all what they are saying, and accuracy may be hitting a wall. In fact, the technical term for what AIs do is “BS.”

And contra-Altman, a recent article in Nature shows how larger and more powerful LLM models are becoming less reliable. This summary in Futurism titled, “Most Sophisticated AIs Are Most Likely to Lie” says, “In sum, the bigger the AI models got — in terms of parameters, training data, and other factors — the bigger the percentage of wrong answers they gave.”

So most Christians don’t know the Bible, and they’re trusting ChatGPT to have the wisdom of the ages and to keep getting better. But ChatGPT can be confidently wrong while appearing to be right and is therefore prone to deceive. That’s a recipe for a dramatic decline in spiritual discernment.

Discipled By the Machine

We’re supposed to trust LLM AIs. They are designed to be conversational, with a user interface intentionally made to make us feel like we’re chatting with a super-intelligent, sentient being. Our discernment is reduced as our defenses are lowered by the magical responses we receive to our prompts.

And we are building a relationship with AI. You even advised viewers to ask ChatGPT what more it needs to know to give a better result. That’s something you’d do with a sentient, conscious person. And that’s a great example of how we’re being discipled to think of AI as tools that we can use for good.

In his book, The AI Delusion, Pomona College professor Dr. Gary Smith warns us that LLM AIs are not intelligent, but our trust is misplaced when we think they are:

In the age of Big Data, the real danger is not that computers are smarter than us, but that we think computers are smarter than us and therefore trust computers to make important decisions for us. We should not be intimidated into thinking that computers are infallible, that data mining is knowledge discovery, that black boxes should be trusted.

  • Smith, Gary. The AI Delusion (p. 237). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

Do we become more discerning by using a technology that is specifically designed to replace the hard work of research, thinking, creating, writing, summarizing, and digesting information? What happens to discernment after months or years of dependence on ChatGPT?

Discernment requires “constant practice to distinguish good from evil” (Hebrews 5:14). If our constant practice is engagement with AI, we will be wide-open for deception, unable to know whether what AI generates is what we should use to “reach more people.”

It takes spiritual discernment to understand the spiritual problems with ChatGPT.

The Anti-Christian Worldview of AI’s Creators

Also, the worldview of today’s AI luminaries is not biblical. In many cases it is anti-Christian. Tech elites like Altman, Musk, Schmidt, Nadella, and Kurtzweil are looking to AI for salvation, for eternal life. Altman believes that humans will eventually “merge” with AI — and maybe that we already have. He says, “… unless we destroy ourselves first, superhuman AI is going to happen, genetic enhancement is going to happen, and brain-machine interfaces are going to happen.”

new book by Henry Kissinger, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Microsoft’s Craig Mundie  — Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit (Little Brown 2024)  — builds upon Altman’s thoughts on the “merge” of humans and AI. The linked article says,

In a section titled “Coevolution: Artificial Humans,” the three authors encourage people to think now about “trying to navigate our role when we will no longer be the only or even the principal actors on our planet.”

“Biological engineering efforts designed for tighter human fusion with machines are already underway,” they add.

Our AI overlords are not looking to Christ for salvation, but to themselves. All of their tools are created to bring about their eschaton (vision of end times), not God’s. Their vision of a human-machine-fused utopia and eternal life relies on their own power — and their growing dominance over the rest of humanity.

Not only that, but the creators of today’s AI are using decidedly spiritual language, even claiming to be “creating God.” Vanity Fair quotes an AI engineer who makes that claim. Sam Altman himself believes he’s creating a God-like entity.

As a Christian, I know that men who create “gods” are actually creating idols (Psalm 115). When God’s people used idols because they “worked,” it didn’t turn out well.

And what about Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI, and his role as a “spiritual leader?” He’s known for leading the company in chants (“Feel the AGI! Feel the AGI!”) and for burning effigies.

There are many more concerning spiritual leanings among AI rockstars. In his new book, Living in Wonder, Rod Dreher profiles tech industry elites who believe they are working with real-live, non-human superintelligences:

Simone (a tech venture capitalist among elite global leaders) is one of these believers, and she teaches classes on how to open up oneself to receiving such messages. Though she believes that she has been channeling information from these entities all her life, Simone also believes that AI allows everyone to access the wisdom of these intelligences. It’s a kind of high-tech Ouija board.

  • Dreher, Rod. Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age (p. 117). Zondervan 2024. Kindle Edition.

A high-tech Ouija board? Could Ephesians 6-class spiritual forces of wickedness not penetrate and deceive through technology? What kind of spiritual discernment would faithful Christians need to be able to know?

Dreher continues:

According to Pasulka, some of the most intellectually sophisticated and accomplished people on the planet believe that AI reveals, in her words, “nonhuman intelligence from outside our dimension of space-time.” These people postulate that AI is the form of communication that these higher intelligences are using to establish deeper and broader contact with humanity. AI, in their view, is an oracular icon these discarnate beings are using to communicate to humanity, to help the human race. (Dreher, p. 135)

This reminds me of Jesus’ warning, “For false Christs and false prophets will arise and will show great signs and wonders, so as to mislead, if possible, even the elect” (Matthew 24:24).

Today’s AI industry is being led by people with an anti-Christian worldview. They design their tools to lead us to into the human-machine-hybrid nightmare they envision for humanity. And they may even have spiritual forces of wickedness behind them.

Will we “reach more people” by “embracing” technologies designed by Altman and his friends to supplant the Christian hope? Because if we’re their disciples now, we will follow them wherever they lead us, even to a godless destination.

Fears in the Cheer

As you shared things to “cheer” about using AI in ministry, it seemed to me that you weren’t thinking about any of these drawbacks. You enthusiastically embraced the tools as “progress”, unabashedly good for the pragmatic reason that they “work” to certain ends.

One of the most concerning examples was the response to your presentation of the sermon video that was translated from English to Spanish. You said your team translates sermon videos with AI, spot-checks them with people who know the language, and then puts a disclaimer saying they were translated with AI.

So if there are a few words here and there that are wrong, the Spanish audience is simply supposed to know which ones those might be, and excuse the church for being imprecise because of the greater good of “reaching more people?” I guess it depends on what words are imprecise. As Mark Twain famously said, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.”

When we’re talking about the Word of God, precision matters.

The lack of care in translation is one thing, but the aspiration expressed by participants in the webinar’s chat that “it’s like Acts 2 all over again,” is something much more. Really? AI translation is like the baptism of the Holy Spirit that enabled everyone to hear the Word of God in their own languages?

I think not, for reasons I’ve already shared.

  • The words given by AI are not anointed, but at best are statistically chosen without regard for meaning, and at worst, are spiritually deceptive.
  • The creators of AI are not led by the Holy Spirit.
  • Thinking that God is using this technology to spread the gospel like in Acts 2 shows a significant lack of spiritual discernment.

Consider a more appropriate biblical comparison: the Tower of Babel. AI is the tower we’re creating to reach heaven (by the design of the creators as shown above). In Genesis 11, the people made bricks — the best technology for tower building in that region. They wanted to “make a name” for themselves — to have the power against God to not “be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

God introduced the languages of the world there to keep them from working together to build this idol to their own “name,” or way of living outside of God’s ways. For their good, God thwarted their plans and “scattered them over the face of the whole earth.”

What would God have thought if some Babylonian ministry leaders said, “let’s find a way to use the Tower of Babel as a tool for good, to reach more people! Maybe with a tower that big, we could put up large signs on the tower, encouraging people to join our church down the street.” I think we know. God wouldn’t be a fan.

In the same way, we can’t use today’s AI as tools for good, because they aren’t designed to promote Christian goals or values. Instead, they are designed to keep us dependent on Big Tech and to form us into the kind of people who continue to follow where they lead us, ultimately into the eschaton they want for us.

Your Closing Plea: FOMO

Your final admonition was, “by not using AI, you’re not stopping it.” That’s a FOMO-filled justification that wouldn’t fly for anything else Christians should avoid. (By not using drugs… by not using porn…)

It seems like you’re saying that AI is here to stay, and it has all this power, so we may as well use it.

But I hope you can see that by using it, we become disciples of a way of thinking and living that has huge potential to lead us away from God and His truth. In the name of efficiency, we give up our discernment. In the name of reaching more people, we add bricks to today’s Tower of Babel.

My Closing Plea: God Still Uses the “Foolish” and “Weak”

“But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong” (1 Corinthians 1:27).

If our wisdom is the same as the world’s (use AI or be left behind), is that an indication that we’re doing God’s will? Do we need the world’s “strong” AI to do God’s work?

Giving in to the hype-laden power of AI is not going to move the ministry of Christ forward in these days. Losing our ability to think for ourselves by offloading our thinking to a machine is going to make us less discerning, not more. We’ll be opening ourselves and our churches up to a delusion such as Paul warns us of in verses like 1 Timothy 4:1, “Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons.”

(If we think AI-generated content is a return of Acts 2, are we not already there?)

And what’s “foolish” today? Slow. Prayerful. Patient. The kind of discipleship Jesus modeled for his followers: intimate, intentional. Taking his yoke upon us — his easy and light yoke — and finding rest for our souls (Matthew 11:28-30).

I have offered an alternative to your view here, Jay. I’m calling ministry leaders who want to follow the Holy Spirit into ways which may look “foolish” to the “wise” in this world. But those foolish/weak ways are just what God gives us to reach more people.

The same power that raised Christ from the dead is available to us today. And we’re going to need it to overcome the worldwide delusion represented by today’s AI.

I appreciate you taking the time to reconsider these things. Again, I’d love a follow-up conversation.


Doug Smith

Doug is a passionate voice in the epic battle against screen addictions, especially through his award-winning book, [Un]Intentional: How Screens Secretly Shape Your Desires, and How You Can Break Free (https://unintentionalbook.com). Doug loves to help individuals and families break free from screen addiction so they can live out their God-given purpose. Doug and his wife Lyneta are happy empty nesters and are blessed with four grown daughters.

Why We Must Not Use AI In Ministry: Response to Jay Owen