AI Is Not the Culprit

I have a confession to make: I use AI chatbots. A lot. I ask them questions about many things, from fixing the dishwasher (accurate) to who wrote what when (less accurate). I even have them rewrite letters. 

I also watch baseball highlights on YouTube in the morning and listen to music on Spotify while I jog. I’m reluctant to admit this. I recognize that these uses of technology have dulled aspects of my habitual life: looking, paying attention, slowing down, wondering. 

Though I know I need to combat these vices, I am far less worried about AI and related technological temptations than are many of my peers. There are good reasons to be wary of the economic and environmental costs of new technologies, and social and moral costs as well. But honestly, vices are legion and have been since Eden. What is AI’s real danger, then? Perhaps it is more ordinary than we want to admit.

Let me give some examples from a world I know well. Students and even scholars are replacing their own writing with AI-generated essays. This is viewed as a form of intellectual cheating, not to mention utter laziness. It raises questions of human creativity and imagination or something we like to call “thinking,” even “critical thinking.” We’re farming it out to a machine; our brains and faculties will atrophy!  

Time will tell. But in my view, academia has been so debased for so long that the harm done by the latest debasements through AI involves no great loss. In fact, maybe some good will come of AI disruption. It may force genuine thinking to the margins, which means a pause in the conveyor belt of economically driven “intellectual production.” That would be all to the good. For too long we have been mired in the futility of academic self-elaboration and the exhaustion of combinatory problem-solving. We’ve relied on pablum and on rote journalistic and routinized political thinking for so long that driving human intellectual interchange underground for a while will be helpful. We need a new “catacombs of thought.” Why not put academics out of work?  

Or just replace them with AI curators, the publishing mechanics of the future. Seems dystopian, but look again: It will mean that normal people won’t be seduced by the current academic-industrial complex, and they can learn to think again about things that actually matter without relying on the approbations of unthinking institutions. I hate saying this, in a way. I have contributed to the logorrhea of the university and the chattering church, and have even encouraged others to do so. Furthermore, many of the young (and even some of the older) academics I know really do enjoy thinking and writing, struggling with tough ideas, wending their way through thickets of challenging questions about God and the world. I shouldn’t discourage them. I’m just saying: We don’t need to write and deliver papers and fill the internet with essays about all of this all the time. Let AI do it! Then we’ll be freed from the present process that stokes an array of its own exhausting vices—pride, fear, indignation, hatred, arrogance, faithlessness—and leaves most of us perplexed and resentful rather than illumined.   

I realize that one area of concern is that of moral decision-making: leaving our targeting of combatants in war to a machine, creating cost-benefit simulations that take the place of careful discernment over healthcare, providing maps for redrawn political strategies that ignore how real people feel or what real people need. These worries would be more compelling were the machineless efforts of human governance and ethical analysis all that different in recent decades. They are not.

I don’t deny that these perhaps are civilizational perils, as some theologians seem to believe. There is a tradition for such anxiety about technology and the technological society: Romano Guardini, Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, Martin Heidegger, not to mention other ambiguous souls of humanist recovery, such as Mircea Eliade and Julius Evola. Some of what these folk wrote is useful to reflect upon. However, their larger visions over-externalize the true enemy. We must become different people, not different or incompetent (because disdainful) technicians.

Religious life has little to fear from AI. The liturgy is mostly repetitive—that’s good—and engaged by actual people. (Let’s leave aside its own contemporary degradations in musical form, superficial homiletics, and the intrusion of screens in church.) I don’t see AI getting in the way here: Petition, adoration, and praise from the lips and hearts of real persons, however squeezed in number, are here to stay. 

If people would prefer to create a virtual church complete with a choir of digitized monks singing Palestrina, and immersing themselves in its holograms on demand, I’ll be disappointed. But I’m not worried. It won’t last long. Real prayer and real praise will flourish elsewhere. They will require a long walk to church, uncomfortable pews or kneelers, creaking pipes, broken voices, and yes, broken people, who together somehow sing. “Somehow” is precisely where grace enters. 

So, when it comes to AI, two things need to be emphasized. First, our actual situation: We are already so far gone that AI is a kind of icing on the (cholesterol-laden) cake. The debilitating stroke has been crouching at the door for some time. Look to ourselves, not to AI, to see the truth of who we have become.

Second, the human dimensions—genuine thinking, real conversation, friendship, sacrifice, prayer, and praise—cannot so much be taken away as willfully repudiated; as indeed we have done. It’s not that the internet and the iPhone are neutral devices. They are not. They do indeed facilitate vice. But we are addicted to them because we actively dislike what these tools serve to veil and dissolve: the contemplation of our world and its Creator, of our world’s fragile beauty and lostness, including those around us, and of our God’s redemptive gift of himself.  

If you need to renounce the iPhone or other new technologies to recover your humanity and God, then by all means do so. But the lasting solution is to pray more deeply and more regularly and with more love, not to burn the iPhone. It is to have our hearts transformed by a grace we have somehow driven away or refused to seek. And the desire for grace is therefore our chief task to fan, however that can be done. By all means, avoid AI if that helps. I just don’t think it will. Remember St. Paul’s words: “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ!” (Rom. 7:25).