Warning: many, many spiritual voices today are relying heavily on AI to almost entirely be their voice.
The other day I stumbled on a well-thought out piece by a spiritual leader, yet within a couple paragraphs my engagement became frustration. I recognized the telltale signs of content generated not by a human but Artificial Intelligence, and I felt deceived. Perhaps this writer was not trying to be deceptive — Artificial Intelligence has advanced to become an arsenal of powerful tools to help content creators — but at no point did this author acknowledge the words were not his own.
Today, many, many spiritual voices count on AI to create their content. From bloggers to pastors, AI is used for everything from idea-generation to creating the content entirely. Some will train AI with their previous written content and get results that sound like them, while others simply know how to write effective prompts. Sometimes it’s easy to spot (like when it has that classic “theme/paragraph/theme/paragraph” format), while other pieces pass as genuine.
Is using AI a problem? Depends on who you ask.Is posing something as your voice that is not? Yes.Is posing something as a spiritually-discerned voice that is actually a flawed learning machine? Absolutely.
“This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words…”1 Corinthians 2:13
“Jesus replied, ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven.'”Matthew 16:17
“Things that cause people to stumble are bound to come, but woe to anyone through whom they come. It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble. So watch yourselves.”
Luke 17:1-3
Am I saying that any pastor or faith-based creator that uses AI is a false teacher? Of course not! AI is simply a tool; however, using a tool in an unhealthy way can lead us to harm others, whether we realize it or not. I imagine there were many false teachers in Jesus’ time that knew exactly what they were doing when they misled others, though there may have been others that did not realize how they had slipped away from Jesus and into manipulation. Our practices and motives can shift our path quicker and more covertly than we’d expect. Leaning into AI can cause us to give power to the wrong thing; if we hand the car keys to AI, AI is the one driving, and if we take a nap in the passenger seat, we can find ourselves lost, in danger, or abandoned on the side of the road.
Recently, a leader of a ministry publicly repented for their AI use. Their entire ministry they had sought to be authentic in what they shared, and after a message went viral, they felt validated. The increased attention led to increased demand, and they sought the help of AI to move forward. At some point — it was subtle and sneaky — AI replaced not just their voice, but God’s, and when they realized what had happened, they were crushed. Fortunately, to their knowledge no major damage had been done, though they confessed there was no way to know the true impact of their false witness. They repented and promised to be genuinely present moving forward.
Why do spiritual leaders lean too heavily into AI? There’s a lot to be gained. Most innocently, it saves an immense amount of time and energy; AI can edit in seconds a document that would take a pastor an hour. However, what started as a resource can become a crutch, leading the spiritual leader to avoid “inconveniences” that could actually be invitations, and lower their guard for what words they send into the world. More nefarious, there is so much money to be made off of people seeking wisdom. Content creators are churning out and monetizing posts and books — passed off as genuinely human — at an alarming rate, and that is a huge issue when that content is posited as spiritual. People can be quick to celebrate and champion these AI-words, and the content-creator can find themselves led more by profit than Truth.
We take our content ministry to you seriously, and our responsibility as Ambassadors of Christ even more. As Jesus says in Luke 12:48, “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.” God has entrusted us with a platform; we want to sure it is the Spirit, not AI, who leads the way.
