The Christian and AI

Gaving Wright presents this short talk on the Christian and AI, from adult Sunday School on 21st June 2026.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Good. Everyone's got a handout? Everyone's got a Bible? I'm going to just give one massive caveat at the top of today. If you actually want to know any of the good stuff about AI, what it really looks like and what it does, ask Owen in the break. Owen and I were due to have a long chat about that this week before my life was derailed for one reason or another. But he's your man. And if you don't know why he's your man, you can ask him. Brilliant. Friends, a lot of us will know that sort of culturally we are in a moment of massive change at the moment, aren't we? Sort of a change, possibly at the sort of extent of the Industrial Revolution. We're talking about that sort of societal change at the moment. We've just entered the age of AI. And everything is changing. I do understand that in the room we're going to be in different places this morning. Some of us are using it, we understand it, we know where it's come from, we know what it is, we've thought through. Some of us have heard these two letters put together, but you still think it's only one of the cities that Joshua had to capture back in the Old Testament. And you don't know why else we'll be thinking about. So what we're going to do today is we're going to start at the top and really just ask a basic question about sort of what AI and what technology is. If you already think you've got your head around that, it's okay. We'll go over it again anyway, just for to love those who maybe aren't in the same place as us. And then we're going to think about uh why we should think about it and how we respond to it. Uh, we as Christian people, uh, we do have a duty as stewards of God's creation, uh, but also as people who have been called to love him within it and love our neighbour in in every corner of life to work out what to do with AI in a world actually where it is involved or it is going to be involved or could be involved in every corner of life. The uh the invention of AI raises some pretty fundamental questions for us. Questions about there are some handouts at the back, by the way, just in case you missed them. Um questions about who we are and about what makes us distinct from the rest of creation. And we need to sort of think about and address those questions thoughtfully and biblically. I'm gonna try and do that this morning. Obvious caveats. I do realise that many of you think it's a funny choice that I'm doing this Sunday school topic. Uh, I've often been accused of being a technophobe. Uh I'm a I'm not a technophobe. I'm a tech pessimist, probably. If you want me to defend that position later, you can ask me. But I do believe that God's word speaks into all corners of life. And will so will speak to us about AI. And that's what we're going to try and get to today. So, three big questions to think through. What is AI? Why should we think about it? And how should we respond to it? So, firstly, uh, what is AI? And actually, part of the question is going back further and asking the question, what is technology? It's a little quote in your sheets, I think. So, whatever your calling is, be it as a pastor, as a mum, as a retiree, as a policeman, whatever it is, technology it is a tool that helps us do the work that we do. Not just laptops and smartphones, but spades and hammers and countless other things as well. They help us do the work that God has given us to do. So technology makes that work possible often. With a spade, you can turn your garden over much more easily than you could if all you had was your hands and your teeth. But because of that, technology, well, it has actually great power, doesn't it? And because it has great power, we tend to make more of it than we should. And that's probably true of AI as well. Technology, it has a habit of changing our world. If you go back to basics, think about how the world was changed with the invention of the wheel or the printing press. Think about how big a difference that the invention of the printing press made to the spread of ideas and information. Arguably, God used the advent of that technology to help spread the reformation and the good news that it revived back in the 1600s. Um but technology doesn't just change our world, technology actually also changes us, doesn't it? It changes the people who use it. That's exactly what we've seen with the smartphone. Um I was on the tube last week, and every person in my packed carriage, apart from me and one girl who was reading a book that had their necks bent over, eyes down, looking at their screens. You've got to be careful these days as you walk down the high street, because people have lost their spatial awareness because they're looking down instead of looking up. They're not paying attention to the space around them anymore. Phones have changed us. And we probably don't yet realise how deeply and how pervasively that is true. And we should be expecting the same thing to happen with AI. People react to technology differently. So good quote from Douglas Adams, you know, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I don't think this is on your sheets, but he said, you might remember this quote, I've come up with a set of rules to describe people's reactions to technology. Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary, and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you are 35 is against the natural order of things. And that sort of makes some of us probably smile or sympathize. But there is some truth to the way we think about that. Margaret, it's lovely to see you here. The week after your birthday, turned 80 last week. Happy birthday to Margaret. But just think of someone like Margaret sitting in the room. Glad you're here. The changes in technology that have happened in your lifetime. And it's very hard even to keep a track of the kind of thing, even more so for Cush. Bless you. People often ask if technology then is good for us. You know, we feel uncomfortable with it, things change so much. Is it good for us? But that question is probably too simplistic. In the Bible, we are given a picture of technology that can be used for both good and for evil. So even if a tool is designed for evil, the tool itself isn't evil. What is sinful isn't the sword, but how people choose to use it. So rather than generalizing that tech is good or is bad, we're better off assessing each thing on its own merits and actually thinking about how it's used rather than the thing itself. And when we do that, I guess we get a bit of a mixed picture. Which brings us to AI. Again, sorry, I've gone round a bit, but we're back at A. What AI? What is it? And if I'm going to try and sum this up simply, AI is a field of computer science that is focused on creating systems that perform tasks that are typically associated with human intelligence. So things like, and I mean, feel free to jump in and correct me anytime you want, but things like learning, solving problems, making decisions. These systems can seemingly learn by experience and accomplish tasks by what feels like thinking, which is really recognizing patterns in huge amounts of data. AI, if you're the common man or woman, is the technology behind Siri and Alexa. It helps social media platforms like X, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest that decide what to show you on your feeds. Helps Spotify, Matt, suggest new music to you. AI has a whole host of applications throughout life and throughout the world, things like medicine. So, for instance, AI is used to spot cancers and review x-ray results and develop new drugs and identify new treatments. It's also being used to develop systems for self-driving cars. I think we drew our first self-driving taxis in the UK in September. How does that make you feel? I don't know. AI is what drives as well, ChatGPT. A program lots of us have heard of, lots of us use, which when you ask a question of it, it can give you an answer or find a solution for you, whatever the problem is. I sometimes use it or something similar to it to create illustrations for the children's learning sheets upstairs in church. You can take a photo of your car engine and say, What do you think might be wrong with this? And it will look at the photo and give you some things that it thinks might be wrong with it. It has almost limitless uses. Chat GPT, it is a type of AI, so if this gets too technical, it come back in a couple of minutes if this does. But it's a type of AI called an LLM. That is a large language model. LLMs are trained on vast quantities of data, including both text and images. It's able to consider words and then phrases and whole sentences and compare the use of words and phrases and sentences across its training data and using literally billions of comparisons. It's able to read a question that you type in and generate an answer. Like, for example, tell me what's wrong with this engine. Now, one Christian writer uh puts it like this He says, An incredible thing has happened. An intelligence of a sort has been created out of silicon. Stop and think about that for a moment. We taught computers to recognize cats, voices, faces, tones, sarcasm, and grammar. And then to build an understanding of history, science, and literature. We've taught computers to emulate our speech, our art, our music. We've done it so well that AI art is winning competitions intended for humans. Isn't that just mind-blowing? And it really is. And it has such huge potential. Sam Altman, I think he's down there in your sheet, he's the guy who who founded OpenAI, the company that lies behind Chat GPT. He said this in ten years, I think we'll have chatbots that work as an expert in any domain you like. And so you'll be able to ask an expert teacher, expert doctor, expert lawyer for anything you need and have those systems go accomplish things for you. But the thing is, this isn't a person who's doing it, it is an app on your smartphone. Now, for the sake of time, I'm gonna skip the description of how AI is trained. Do grab our in at coffee time and he'll tell you all about it. Sorry, I'm putting a lot on you this morning. But to cut to the chase, the amazing thing now is that programmers are making breakthroughs in what we call unsupervised learning. That is, where complex algorithms and huge amounts of data mean that AI can learn by itself without human guidance. And ChatGPT is probably the best known example of unsupervised learning. Over years now, uh ChatGPT has had massive amounts of data from the internet. And it's been able to learn how to combine words in a meaningful way, with humans then helping to sort of fine-tune that along that process. And there is something remarkable about that, but it raises some pretty fundamental questions for us, like who are we? Now, what does it mean to be human? And how are we different, not just to the animals, but now to computers? Are we, in fact, any different, or are we just meat machines as some folks have taken to calling us? Alan Turing, the Enigma Code guy back in World War II, uh, he foresaw this coming and he sort of spoke about his concerns with what effect it would have on humanity. I mean, computers get to the point where their intelligence seems to be greater than ours, because that is so fundamental to who we are. But is that right? Is intelligence part of what it means to be human? After all, chimpanzees, dolphins, they are other creatures that exhibit high levels of intelligence too. And if and if our humanity is based around our intelligence, our ability to think, what does that mean for people who are brain damaged, for instance? Or for children who are less developed? Are they less because they are less intelligent than other people? You can ask deeper questions, maybe even what is intelligence? And is it right that we describe Chat GPT in that way? But it takes us, I think, probably to our second question today. Why should we think about AI? And AI raises some fundamental questions about who we are and makes what makes us distinct in creation that we ought to think about. And we all answer questions like that, uh, shaped by what we call our worldview. I don't know if that's a sort of phrase that you're familiar with. Your worldview is sort of the glasses, the goggles through which you see everything that happens in the world. It's the way that you answer the big questions of life, like who are we, why are we here? What is wrong with the world? Where are we headed? And one of the main worldviews that drives much of the data upon which AI is trained says that there is nothing unique about humanity other than that we are the highest form of evolution. Everything about us in that worldview is reducible to the matter that makes up our bodies, even our thoughts and our emotions. And if we are simply the highest form of evolution, the argument is: well, can't we just carry on evolving? And can't we give ourselves a hand in evolving? John Lennox says, the truth is we tend to talk about AI in ways that dehumanize us and humanize machines. We deny our dignity by acting as if we're just advanced machines, and all the while treating machines as if they are persons with certain rights, thoughts, and even feelings. And that is a really interesting observation. We dehumanize ourselves and we humanize machines. So we give names to AI like Claude and Alexa, and then we give them pronouns. Hands up in this room if you if you've ever referred to uh your device as a he or a she. Yeah. Steve, it happens in your house. I've been witnessed to it this week. Even though they are just programs on our phones or our computers, we personify them. And after a while, people have started to relate to these programs as if they are somehow real. There's a formerly now a condition called AI psychosis, in which people form inappropriate chat uh sorry, inappropriate attachments to their AI chatbots. 2017, this is actually 2017 is a long way back in AI technology, alright. But in 2017, a Chinese AI engineer gave up on his search for a human wife and married a robot which he had built himself. And we might think that that is ridiculous, but this man was an AI engineer. He he knows what's in it. He knows that he's built that robot and yet still he's managed to form this sort of romantic, dependent attachment to it. Jason Thacker says, we dumb down what it means to be human and treat each other like simple machines, but at the same time put our faith and hope in machines to solve the problems and ills that we deal with each day. We rightfully see where we fall short, but we put our hope in our own creations rather than in our creator. And so who are we? And what does it really mean to be human? And it is interesting that all of these changes are happening at a point in our cultural history when again and again we are being told that identity is sort of the most important thing. We've been told identity really matters, and yet our culture is more confused than it has ever been about identity. And then when we think about identity, the right place to start probably is Genesis chapter 1, isn't it? I think I've printed a couple of verses out on your handouts. Genesis describes the creation of the world, the land, the sea, the birds, the fish, the animals, but that rhythm is broken somewhat deliberately in verse 26 of chapter 1. You probably know those verses. But just look at them again. And then God says, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created them, male and female, he created them. There's a familiar verses, but just two quick things for now. Firstly, the word us, right? God says, Let us make man in our own image. That word us is, of course, plural. This is the Trinity at work. Verse 2, back in Genesis, we told that the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. Think of John's gospel, where we talk about the word becoming flesh. In the beginning was the word. Word was with God, the word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. And the point is, here in Genesis 1, each member of the Trinity is at work. The Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit are all intimately involved in the work of creation. And they say, Let us make man in our image. If I can put it like this, the triune God is the supreme intelligence in our world. But God is the opposite of artificial intelligence. Even though God doesn't have a physical body, God is relational, God is personal. That is where we must begin in our understanding of who we are. We don't begin with ourselves, but we begin with the God who created us. Because of course, the second thing to notice in those verses is that we are made in the image of that God. That's not something that's said of any of the other creatures that God made, the fish, the birds, the animals, they are just creatures. But we are creatures, but we are special. Because in some way we are like God. We're not gods. And that matters. The truth is that we often pursue advances in technology out of a desire to be gods ourselves, don't we? To make a name for ourselves, like what we see in an early form of technology back in Genesis 11, you know, the Tower of Babel. And they build this tower, don't they? Seemingly with the idea of stretching up to heaven itself and showing God how great and how wonderful they are. But of course, in the account of Genesis, God looks down and he has to reach down to them because what they have done is so tiddly, so insignificant. But that desire to be like God often drives technological advances. We are not God, and yet, in some ways, we are like God. And the question is, how? How are we like God? As you look at Genesis, how are we like God? People have different views on what it means to be human. Some of it, some people think it's about our ability to think and be self aware and possess a soul. Some people think it's our ability to relate, like God relates. Some people think it's uh we're different in that we have all. Authority under God over creation. And I think that probably the reality is a mixture of those things. But here is what is key about all of that. Because we are made in the image of God, our status on earth is secure. There is no technological advance that will ever threaten that. If we were defined simply by our ability to think, to solve problems, to create, that would have huge implications for our dignity and our worth. If machines came along to do those things better than we can. But we are not defined simply by those things, are we? Thacker again on your sheets, Jason Thacker puts it like this: our dignity and worth are not tied to our own usefulness, and definitely not to the things we create with our own hands. They are tied to the one who willingly laid down his life to give us eternal life. Jesus is our anchor and the definer of entire persons, not us or the things we create. AI may challenge these truths, but it will never be able to change who we fundamentally are in Christ. As AI becomes more and more advanced, the danger is that we forget what it is to be human and what makes us unique. As Christian people, we need a clear understanding of the fact that we are created, unlike anything else, in the image of God. And if we don't have that clear, we will start blurring the lines between people and machines. We'll do that in a way that devalues our dignity and actually devalues our neighbour. I'm sorry, that's probably felt like a machine gun blast. Take a few minutes just to turn to the person next to you or in little groups again. It's just another question to think about. Given then what we know about AI, either what you bring into the session today or some of the stuff we've just said, what should the Christian's response to AI be? What is our response to be? Have a few minutes in your groups. Can I encourage you that those are just the beginnings of conversations and thinking? I think we all probably have a responsibility to keep on having these conversations. Because it is going to be such a massive part of our world that we need to be Christians within it and think about it Christianly and talk to each other and help each other and pray with each other Christianly. There's going to be so much to navigate, we're going to need each other. So those are the beginnings of conversations. Um I'm going to give you just a very, very quick four points. This is just the beginning on how I think Christians ought to respond to AI. But like I said, this is just the beginning. And we've got so much still to go. Let me suggest four ways. Firstly, how should we respond to AI? Number one, be thankful. Some of us don't feel like we want to be thankful, but actually be thankful. AI gets a lot of bad press. There are lots of awful headlines, things that make us panic. But the truth is, I think that AI is actually doing a lot of good in our world. Take the field of medicine. Doctors are being helped to diagnose more accurately and treat more ably. So an AI system can search through massive amounts of data, of patient data from across the world and provide doctors with better insights with which to care for their patients. Now, of course, AI can't replace human interaction and human care. But doctors and AI can work together to effectively help patients, tell you. So putting it right, putting it right where it's gone wrong. Yeah. That is true. Although, when it comes, for instance, uh, and this is already true, uh, to image recognition. So AI can identify anomalies in CT and CAT scans, for instance, at a much quicker rate and far more accurately than their human counterparts. And that is that is true.

SPEAKER_01 26:57

That is because you have uh an easy authority on what is normal and not.

SPEAKER_00 27:04

Yeah.

unknown 27:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:07

Although we'll come back to the dangers, because that is true. But but actually it can do a great amount of the point I'm trying to make is that it can do a great amount of goods. Uh, people do foresee uh a day that we don't need radiologists to review the findings because AI is already far more accurate often than a radiologist could be. Uh and um the point I want to make is we'll come back to the dangers in a second, but we shouldn't be surprised that I don't think at the good that AI can do. The triune God is the creator of all things. In the beginning, he created everything out of nothing, and he continues to sustain all of his creation. He created us in his image to be able to create and invent, and in so doing, to do that work of subduing and caring for all of creation. Now, one Christian writer, uh Russell Moore, the Southern Baptist Convention, says this. He says, it doesn't matter what else it does, every human innovation that benefits the world is a gift from God, for his glory, in service to his people. So every human innovation that benefits the world is a gift from God. And therefore, we ought to thank God for those gifts. Think of the words in 1 Timothy chapter 4. He writes, for everything created by God is good, presumably then, including AI, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving. There is a way, and there are ways we can be thankful for what AI can do. And I think it's probably wrong to just do manga, which I get is my natural bent. But there is good that it does, and good that it can be used for, and we ought to give thanks for that. And Louise Noble's in the room, not trying to replace you as a doctor, you're still very important. Number two, though, I guess this hints at what some of what Toyu was uh nudging at, be cautious. So as we remember AI, we need to remember not only our doctrine of creation, but also our doctrine of sin. That the Bible teaches us that people are sinful, more sinful than we realize. That sin lurks behind even our very best intentions, and sin is so deep and so deceptive and so common that it corrupts and ruins every part of life. In other words, we are totally depraved. And that doesn't mean that we are as bad as we absolutely could be, but it means that in our natural states, in every corner of life, in our thoughts, our words, our deeds, that they are all corrupted by sin. And that doctrine of sin teaches us to be very cautious about technology and tech like AI. Russell Moore again puts it like this: you won't really understand artificial intelligence unless you understand sin. And sin isn't exactly the first topic people speak about at tech conferences. And he goes on. AI makes a bunch of things possible that were previously impossible, and more than that, it makes a bunch of things easy that were previously difficult. And AI increases the power of the human race then to create and to destroy. Because of sin, friends, we know in advance that AI will be used in evil ways. And so we shouldn't be naive about this technology. We should be cautious. Imagine, for instance, a country in which speech is limited and freedom of religion is prohibited. Imagine how AI could be and is being used by regimes in such countries to monitor and control their population. That's already a reality. Or think of the way that AI is being used to try and influence elections and spread misinformation. Or imagine what the pornography industry can and does do with a tool like AI. Now, earlier we talked about LLMs, large language models. We said that Chat GPT was trained on huge amounts of data. And a good question to ask is what data was it trained on? OpenAI, the company behind it, hasn't revealed explicitly the data that they have used, but essentially it looks like their model has been loose on the internet. And that's the data that it is trawled through to work out how to answer the endless questions that we type in. And think about that for a moment. What sort of material it trawled through in the process? Even putting aside the more obviously dark and simple corners of the internet. What sort of material do you find on the internet in your average search? Perhaps as you scroll through your social media. If you open up Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or whatever your thing is, Jeff, I know you use TikTok a lot. I imagine that what comes up is essentially the sort of material that Galatians 5 warns us against. Just that list on your sheets. Sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. That list actually sounds an awful lot like your average social media feed, doesn't it? Which means that if this is what AI has been reading and learning from, we shouldn't really be surprised at stories of AI chatbots sharing, encouraging and enabling sinful habits. Or even encouraging people to commit suicide, as has tragically happened. You've probably heard those stories. AI is learning from us, from the stuff that we put up on the internet. And that means that as we read some of these responses, we are reading, actually, in some sense, a mirror of ourselves. It's the most incredibly complex and complicated mirror. It shows us our deepest values, it mirrors our basis actions. And what we see in that mirror should both terrify in some ways and teach us. Christian people, an encouragement to be cautious, understand where this has come from, what it has been trained on. Which leads into number three be wise. I'm conscious that we will all use AI differently for different things and in different ways. Some of us won't even be aware that we're using it. Others of us will consciously use it at home or at work. And at some point or other, many of us will have a go at using those LLMs like ChatGPT. But let me encourage us to use them wisely. Because everything is not always what it seems. There have been people duped by preachers, uh, videos of preachers preaching sermons that sound very edifying, and they have later discovered that they're AI generated. They are not real. And something else as well, though, uh AI chatbots are known to hallucinate as well. So sometimes you'll ask it a question and it doesn't know the answer. And what it does often is it fills in the gaps, it makes an answer up. And it hallucinates, is the term. It generates false or misleading information. You can ask maybe who wrote this famous phrase? And two different AI chatbots will give you different answers, and you don't know what the answer is because someone's making it up. The point is, we mustn't believe everything that we are told. And I think that we need to be especially careful about asking an AI chatbot theological questions or biblical questions. I don't think that we can rely on AI to give us a biblically faithful answer. The fact is that AI is programmed within certain parameters, and therefore it will normally reflect the bias of its programmers. There's a really interesting article, it's worth looking up on the Gospel Coalition website, where they did some uh research and looked at the top seven large language models, so like Chat GPT, uh Gemini, Grok, and so on. And they evaluated them for their theological reliability. I recommend it to you if you want to check it out. Interestingly, typing into the typing in the same question to different chatbots gives you very different answers and not always particularly helpful ones. That we need to be really wise about not using them for things like that, or at least using them very sparingly. There's another reason to be wise as well, friends, because AI will not only change our world, it will change us. That will happen in subtle ways mostly. We're often told that using an AI problem uh using an AI will save us time, it will save us energy, and in many cases that is true. AI is very good at what we call grunt work, where it's trawling through huge amounts of data. But I just don't think that it's the goal of life to just be more efficient all the time. And don't misunderstand me, efficiency has its place, but efficiency actually I think is a very modern and very Western value, and not an innately biblical one. It strikes me actually at times even, efficiency is at odds with biblical virtues, things God loves, like patience and waiting and contentedness and having time for the person in front of you. So as you use AI, whether it's at work or at home, let me encourage you to ask yourself a question: Do I lose more than I gain by using this program? Do I lose more than I gain by using this program? Because I fear that amongst other things, AI will actually reduce our ability to do things like think for ourselves. Even to be able to formulate an argument, will lose, help us lose our ability to love our neighbours well. Christians, we must be wise in the way that we use AI. We mustn't use it like the world uses it. Cush.

SPEAKER_02 37:52

Perhaps we should turn the question around a bit and not ask how do we use AI, but more how does AI use us?

SPEAKER_00 38:02

Yeah, and actually that's part of the wisdom of understanding what is happening in that relationship. I thought you were going to tell, ask AI how we ought to use AI. Look, listen, last thing, because we've run out of time. I'm really sorry. Talk to me, talk to me personally or carrying these conversations, because I just want to say this before we run out of time. Lastly, be hopeful. Number four. Because the truth is that the Lord God is sovereign. He is the great king over all of the earth. He works all things for his glory and the good of the church. We do not need to fear AI, despite some of the horror headlines. We don't need to fear. You go back to the Tower of Babel, think of what happened. God scatters people across the face of the earth to put a limit on the damage that they could cause. God is in control, even of a sinful world. We could trust him. He knows what he's doing with us. And of course, sinful people are going to keep on using AI for sinful ends. I'm not encouraging us to be naive, but we don't need to fear it. Because nothing happens in our world outside of God's control. So, just as a start of my encouragements, how do we respond to AI? Be thankful, be cautious, be wise, be hopeful. I was going to recommend some books. I haven't got time. I think I've written some down in your sheets, and maybe we'll send some links out with the update email this week. Can I pray for us just as we finish? Father Gods, this is such a massive thing. Please help us to be wise and godly in the ways that we think about AI and use it. Help us not to just drift into patterns of doing things the way the world does them, but to be intentionally Christ-honouring and Christ-like it in every corner of life, including this one. Please preserve in us what is godly, what loves you, what loves neighbor. And where AI can bring you glory, please help us to use it well and wisely. We ask this in your name and for your glory and for our good. Amen.