Human beings are made in the image of God—computers never will be. We can use them as tools to glorify God, or to promote the Devil’s work. But at the end of the day our task remains exactly the same in the 21^st century as it was in the first—we proclaim Christ “admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone fully mature in Christ…” (Colossians 2:28). We need preachers, not programmers, to do that.

It is a fact of life that every major human invention is just a tool—which has the potential to be used for either good or evil.

The inventing of the printing press ensured the mass distribution of the Scriptures, and enabled the perversity of porn to spread throughout the whole of society. The internet enables me to share Christian teaching throughout the world; it also facilitates abuse and hate mail. It is little wonder that we view each new technological development with both a sense of anticipation and a sense of dread.

The latest is Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this article I want to offer some personal reflections on the use of AI, rather than an overview. For those who wish a better understanding and fuller introduction, from a Christian perspective, I would highly recommend John Lennox’s 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity.

But what is AI? According to Grok (X’s version of AI), “AI, or artificial intelligence, is generally understood as the ability of computers or robots to perform tasks typically requiring human intelligence, such as reasoning and learning.”

Like many Terminator watchers, or perhaps those of a religious bent, looking for yet another mark of the Beast, I too was, and am, deeply suspicious of unleashing a force which, whilst it could bring great good, could also do untold harm.

So I decided to do some digging. Chat GPT, Google’s Gemini, and Amazon’s Alexa are the most-used systems, with Grok quickly catching up. The first thing that became apparent to me was that AI depends upon the bias and prejudices of the programmers. In an infamous incident, Google offered a picture of black Nazis. This happened because the AI was programmed to include diverse representations, even in contexts where it didn’t fit, like historical depictions. That’s how we ended up with female popes and some of the US founding fathers being black!

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