AG #005: AI and God - The Four Perspectives That Shape Everything I Build

AG #005: AI and God - The Four Perspectives That Shape Everything I Build

Faith and AI aren't separate conversations - and this episode proves why that matters for your business.

Episode Summary

In this episode of The Anti-Generic with Anna Powers, host Anna Powers tackles the question most AI conversations avoid entirely: where does God fit in all of this? She shares four perspectives on AI and faith that shape her approach to business, technology, and content - and explains why she refuses to separate her beliefs from her platform, even when told it would cost her audience.

Question of the Day 🗣️

How does your faith (or personal values) shape the way you approach AI in your work? Drop your perspective in the comments.

Key Take-aways

• The drive to create all-knowing AI mirrors humanity's oldest mistake - and recognizing that changes how you build
• God's sovereignty gives peace even when AI creates real problems like job loss and misinformation
• Biblical figures like Esther and Daniel prove you create more change from inside the system
• Fear-based resistance to AI is more dangerous than the technology itself
• Staying silent about your values for a bigger platform is a trade that isn't worth making

Timestamped Outline ⏱️

00:00 - Introduction and why this episode is different
00:41 - Setting up the topic: AI and God
01:49 - Why deeper moral questions about AI matter
02:59 - Perspective 1: When humans try to become all-knowing
04:20 - Perspective 2: God is sovereign over AI's development
07:56 - Perspective 3: We have more influence from inside the system
11:08 - Perspective 4: We do not need to fear AI
12:56 - Personal note: being told mentioning Jesus would alienate her audience
15:00 - Closing and invitation

Links & Resources 🔗

• Episode 1 of Anti-Generic (Anna's full AI disruption story) → https://youtu.be/r-DSYQ88Lws
• Romans 828 and Romans 831 (referenced verses)
• Subscribe to The Anti-Generic with Anna Powers → https://www.saraannapowers.com/anti-generic

Connect & CTA 🎯

👉 Enjoyed this? Subscribe & leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

🎁 Every week, Anna shares how to use AI to grow your business without sounding like everyone else. Human-first, AI-amplified. Subscribe so you don't miss the next issue: https://www.saraannapowers.com/anti-generic

Credits

Host: Anna Powers 

© 2026 Sara Anna Powers. All rights reserved.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey, it's Anna Powers and welcome to episode five of the Anti-Generic Podcast. We're on YouTube. I also send this out as a newsletter each week. So I'm so happy that you're here. And I can say right from the jump, this is going to be the most open, transparent, and possibly controversial episode yet. So this is titled Four Perspectives on AI and God. And we are heading into what most people refer to as Easter weekend. I call it Resurrection Sunday. And so I'm going to share my real thoughts on the intersection of faith and God and AI. So this Sunday, my family and I will be celebrating Resurrection Day. And I have always been open about my faith in Jesus, but I haven't shared much yet about how my faith affects my thoughts around AI. And that is partly because there is so much to share. And I really just started sharing very openly about AI about a month ago. So part of it is just that we're just getting to know each other. And I didn't want to dive straight into the deep end without giving you kind of the warm-up of what I'm seeing in major marketplace trends and how we can approach those wisely from a business perspective. If you are already subscribed to the anti-generic newsletter, you've heard my perspectives around how the widespread use of AI is affecting business and the economy. And if you haven't subscribed yet, I would love for you to do that. If you're listening on YouTube, you can just click that subscribe button. You'll get this an updated message every single week. And we're also putting up some little short snippets in YouTube Shorts. If you're listening on the podcast, just click that follow button so that you get all the new episodes dropped straight to your phone. Without considering deeper moral issues around AI, I believe that any conversation we have about it is just going to be incomplete. So today I'm going to be filling you in on exactly where I stand when it comes to God and faith and AI. Now you are welcome here, whether you agree with me or not. I am not going to be pushing my religious views on you, and nothing I share is meant to exclude anyone. Quite the opposite, because I believe we work best together when everyone is transparent and open about their beliefs and ideas. And in a civilized culture, we can have viewpoints that are opposing and still respect each other and still seek to understand each other. So everything I'm sharing is purely my perspective and my own understanding. And but I think it's important if you're going to be engaging with these videos or this podcast that you actually know who the person like doing the talking, where they're coming from. And so that's my goal here is to just be very open and honest about my thoughts on this. So I'm going to share four specific perspectives, and I'll start with the first one, which is when humans try to become all-knowing, bad things happen. So if we go all the way back to the account of the fall of man in Genesis, what we find at the heart of the story is man's desire to be like God and to know everything that God knows. And I see that same mentality in certain AI tech titans. They want to develop a tool that is smarter than humans and holds superior intelligence. One could make an effective argument that they are looking to create a God-like tool. Sam Altman, who is the CEO and co-founder of OpenAI, recently stated in a Forbes article that his children will never be smarter than AI. Altman frames this as a positive thing, where our own children will look back on these current times as almost prehistoric. When we have a group of ultra-wealthy individuals at the top of society actively trying to create something that is smarter than any human, that feels to me like humans trying to play God. And that did not pan out well in the Garden of Eden. And I think there will be many, many adverse consequences should we continue down the path of growing AI with the particular set of leaders who are at the top of it now. Humans were not created to be all-knowing. In fact, we were created to be dependent on God. And when we try to deny that, we actually suffer. Perspective number two: God is sovereign and he has a purpose for allowing AI to be developed. I am turning 46 years old on Easter Sunday this Sunday, or resurrection Sunday this Sunday. And one thing I have learned to accept in my multiple decades on planet Earth is that I will never fully understand the wisdom of God as long as I am in this human body and probably not in eternity either, because God is God and I am not God. And I'm actually really grateful that I'm not God because frankly, I would not want the responsibility of being God. What I do know is that I can take God at his word. Numerous times in the Bible, God allowed things to happen that would be nearly impossible to understand from a human perspective. For example, the entire book of Job shows Job as someone who is faithful to God. And yet God allowed Satan to test Job. Job lost almost everything. He lost his home, his family, his friends, and his health, but his faith in God did not waver. And God ultimately restored more than what Job lost. Now, I have asked myself a number of times, why was a faithful man like Job allowed to go through such horrific testing? It wasn't God that wanted to test him, Satan wanted to test him, and God allowed it. Okay, so there's that element, but still, like God's God. Why did God allow that? So I have come to the conclusion I will never understand that within my human brain. And I'm okay with not understanding that. I accept that God's wisdom is deeper than my own. And I have a peace that he is weaving a righteous plan together for all believers. And there's a verse, Romans 8, 28, that I encourage you to look up and read that talks about how God is working all things together for his glory and for the good of those who believe and are called according to his purpose. So I do see many problems inherent with the rise of AI. We have massive job losses. Oracle just announced another huge cut as right before I recorded, started recording this. There are bizarre parasocial relationships developing between individuals and these AI tools. One person has already lost their life because of this kind of a parasocial relationship and not being able to handle it when that relationship was damaged. There are lots of lies being touted as truth. There have been studies done on inherent biases in AI because it's pulling data from so many sources. It's pulling some truth, but it's also pulling a lot of lies, right? So who, how does it sift through? It's giving, um goodness, I'm an attorney still. It is hallucinating case law. There have been multiple lawyers who've received massive fines for citing um case law that doesn't exist because they're going to an AI tool, depending on that tool to give them accurate information. And it's not. So there's a lot of problems inherent with AI. But despite all of these problems, I know that God has a purpose for allowing this technology to be developed right now, in this time, and in this way. And I may not fully understand it, and that is okay. My purpose and my obligation is to trust God to lead me around how to use these tools with discernment and also how to teach others how to use these tools in a way that honor Him. Perspective number three, we have more influence from inside the system. So this one might be a little controversial. There are some faith-based business owners and executives who just want to bury their heads in the sand and pretend like AI will go away on its own. They don't want to have anything to do with it. They think it's actually a moral failure of yours if you use it. They say, um, and this isn't just conservatives, by the way, sometimes these are liberals. You're ruining the environment if you're using this at all. You are the everything that's wrong with society if you're using this tool at all. Time and time again throughout the Bible, we see that some of the greatest and most prolific changes to society were made when believers worked inside the systems that were oppressing them. For example, if you look at the story of Esther, Esther was only able to save the Jews as the wife of King Hazuerus. She had to gain access to power to be able to make a real impact in the lives of an entire nation of people. Daniel from the Bible also worked from the inside. He was a part of the royal court, and yet he still made requests to honor his faith, to be allowed to eat as God would have him eat, according to the dietary restrictions that he understood God to have given his people. And he proved that God's way was the best way as he grew stronger and healthier by following the dietary rules of God's people instead of eating all of the rich food that all of the other young men at the court were given. And in so doing, he actually became an example of the wisdom of God's plan. So he could only do that from the inside. If he had ostracized himself and separated himself and refused to even be a part of the court, he couldn't have shown that example. Even Moses, who led the Jews out of Egypt, even Moses was raised by Pharaoh's daughter. That is one of the wildest stories in the Bible. I read it again recently, but if you haven't heard that story, um, basically the uh Egyptian ruler wanted to kill all of the uh Israelite baby boys. And so Moses' mother, when he was born, did not want him to perish. So she hid him in a basket of reeds and put him in the river and place Moses' sister nearby to see what happened to Moses, the little baby in the river. And it just so happened that Pharaoh's daughter was bathing in the river and saw the little basket and went over and saw that there was a baby inside it and decided, oh, this is one of the Hebrew babies that was going to be killed. And it here it is, and I'm gonna raise this baby. And I think one of the coolest parts of the story is that she actually asked Moses' sister to find a lady who could nurse the baby until he was weaned. And so actually, Moses got to go back and be nursed by his mother until he was weaned and brought to Pharaoh's daughter. All that to say, Moses was raised by Pharaoh's daughter. He had to have a place inside Egyptian royalty in order to lead the Jews out of Egypt. So if believers want to make any sort of positive impact around the results of AI in modern society, we need to understand it as a tool. We need to be able to use it as well as or even better than those who do not follow Jesus who are currently setting policies and parameters around these tools. Perspective number four, we do not need to fear AI. God is abundantly clear that believers do not need to fear anything but God Himself, and that fear of God is to be a holy fear. We are not to be afraid of other people, of change, of financial policies, or of technology. My life verse is Romans 8.31, and it says, What then shall we say in response to this, my brothers? If God is for us, then who can be against us? We are not called to fear AI. I am in an industry of copywriting that was totally disrupted by AI. And I absolutely fell into the sin of fear. Um, and I talked about that actually in episode one, way back, the very first episode that I recorded. So you can go back and listen to episode one of the anti-generic podcast or the YouTube channel to see all of my feelings around it originally. But I um, look, I'm a I'm a human. I'm gonna get it wrong from time to time. And I realized as I fought with it over the couple of years that it took me to really wrestle with it, I should not be afraid of this tool. This is a tool. I do not have to be afraid of this tool. If you are a believer, you are called to serve God in all that you do. And your work is a form of worship. And if your work touches realms that AI touches, which mine certainly does with copywriting and messaging, I believe it's your responsibility to understand it and to use it according to the discernment that God gives you. I'll say that once more. If your work touches realms that AI touches, I believe it is your responsibility to understand it and to use it according to the discernment that God gives you. My final note on this is um very personal. So a person I very much respect in business told me that if I were to share about Jesus within this newsletter, podcast, YouTube channel, that it would be like dropping an F-bomb to some people. It would be so offensive to some people. And I believe that this person who told me this was well-intentioned and genuinely trying to help me. Um, because my goal with this recording is to help as many people as possible. I want to share my perspective from 12 years as a digital marketer, as well as my perspective as an attorney who's trained to objectively look at a lot of different issues of whatever's coming up in the marketplace. I want to shine light on pressing issues that are affecting people's businesses in a very real way. And so I'm not here to alienate people or I'm certainly not here to proselytize or push my religion on people. I don't believe I could do that, even if I wanted to. Ultimately, I think God is in control of um, God is in control of that. So I believe this person was well-intentioned and genuinely trying to help me make the biggest impact with this newsletter. But God did not give me a platform to deny that He is the only reason I have a business. Jesus is the only reason that I can feel secure in my work, in my relationships, in my life. No matter what stormy circumstances are going on around me, my faith is what brings me through. My belief that God has a purpose for me and a calling on my life and is shepherding me through all different kinds of work that I've done throughout my career and has his hand on my future too, long before, far before I can see it. Um, so I have to talk about Jesus. Like that it's just instrumental to who I am and the perspective that I bring to my work. So this will not be the last time that you will hear the word Jesus cross my lips. And I welcome people of all faiths to subscribe to this YouTube, this podcast, and to the newsletter. And my promise to you is that I will always be sincere and transparent about my own faith. As always, I am wishing you great success, and I'm really excited to bring you another issue of antigeneric next week. So please come back same day, same time next week, and I will see you then.