While we were excited about all that AI could do just a year ago, now we’ve coined the term “AI slop” and lament the “AI gloss” detectable in its pictures and written work. Maybe what Paul is saying explains this reaction. Someone could use AI to produce a “new” Rembrandt or maybe a “new” piece by Bach, manufactured in seconds by having these artists’ styles convincingly mimicked. The result could be beautiful, and we might not detect even a hint of “AI gloss.” Yet would we treasure these new works like the old?

The Preacher declares in Ecclesiastes 1:9 that “there is nothing new under the sun.” He was saying it with a sense of despair, but there’s a reality there that can prove helpful too. Even with something newfangled like AI, the issues aren’t all new. And because we’ve seen some of this before, we can look to history for guidance.

So here are three questions to help us look to the past to see how we can best use today’s AI.

Q. 1: Am I Using AI to Skip My Exercise?

For as long as there have been schools, there’s probably been boys learning how to do division in ways their math teacher wasn’t intending. If little Timmy and a couple of his third grade buddies did their homework together, the three of them would quickly realize that an assignment of 15 questions could be done 3 times as quickly if they did 5 questions each and shared their answers.

That gets the assignment done in record time, but these “get ‘er done” boys misunderstood the point. The teacher’s goal isn’t simply to get 15 right answers from them – she could go to the back of the teacher’s edition if that was all she was after. What she wants is for her students to go through the struggle of working through each of the 15 questions so that their brain muscles will grow. What Timmy has done instead is the equivalent of recruiting his two friends to each attend a third of his basketball practice for him. That’d be a better cheat actually, because it wouldn’t take him long to figure out that his shooting percentage isn’t going to improve so long as he isn’t putting up the shots.

The issue is older even than schools, addressed in various ways throughout Scripture, but maybe most pointedly in Proverbs 10:4: “Lazy hands make for poverty, but diligent hands bring wealth” and Galatians 6:7: “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows.”

Now, in our AI age, there are students using ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to skip their school “workouts” in this updated fashion, and still not making the connection as to how that’ll keep them mentally and spiritually flabby, stopping them from growing in knowledge, wisdom, and capacity.

Adults have their own version of this problem, complicated by the reality that sometimes it is just about “getting ‘er done,” while other times it’s about needing to get stretched and refined by the work you put in.

Need a pile of rocks moved? Then having a couple of friends help is a great idea. Got access to some tech that will do the heavy lifting for you? Great, go drive that tractor over here.

In an office setting, AI can help us move all sorts of “rocks,” by doing the big-effort-but-little-thought tasks of quickly compiling your week’s billable hours, assembling your spreadsheets into an array of insightful, colorful pie charts, or gathering and summarizing vast amounts of research material.

But if, like little Timmy, we thought it was always about the results, we’d miss out on when it’s important to put in the sweat. There’s a Stephen King quote about how “I write to find out what I think” and it’s exactly there that AI might be most harming us. We don’t all have to be writers, but if we’re going to be thinkers, then we need to be able to get our thoughts down on paper, or up on a computer, or batted around with our coworkers.

Read More