A reflexive fear of AI doesn’t serve Christ

“Tortured fear and stupid confidence are both desirable states of mind,” the demon Screwtape opines in his famous letters, offering advice on enslaving the human mind to naive dreams of the future. Screwtape wanted humans to be “haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth.” The Christian discourse about artificial intelligence too often falls into one of these two visions.

It doesn’t take much digging to find examples of AI misuse in modern life. Take the host of academic institutions grappling with students using ChatGPT to punt on assignments, and the professors who apparently do it too. Or bizarre cases of people falling in love with chatbots, often to devastating effect. In that sense, “tortured fear” might be a natural reaction. On the other side, look at the prognostications of futurists like 47-year-old venture capitalist and immortality enthusiast Bryan Johnson, who claims that “we are building God in the form of superintelligence.”

Yet between the polar opposites of chatbot-inspired murder and transhumanist gambits at immortality is a simple question: Can Christians use tools of artificial intelligence in a way that both serves humanity and furthers the rule of the kingdom of Christ? The answer is a fairly obvious yes, unless you believe that using AI’s productive power to translate the Bible or combat child pornography is a misstep.

I reiterate this point because it speaks to the nature of the dominion mandate. If God means for us to exercise dominion & stewardship in the realm of artificial intelligence, then we ought to be just as unapologetic about the doing of good as we are unafraid to combat the doing of evil. The church believes this in every other arena where Christians live and work. To half-hide our convictions when it comes to AI is not a move that serves the church or the productive creators who uphold its mission.

By way of example: My day-to-day work involves working with investors to combat ESG, DEI, politicized policies, and anti-Christian bias at the largest companies on earth (in close collaboration with WORLD Opinions columnist Jerry Bowyer). AI models like Microsoft CoPilot don't tell us why fighting for corporate political neutrality, business success, and respect for religion is a good thing—we have the Bible to do that. But it does help us exponentially build our influence. And, as Christians, we are never called to be sheepish or apologetic about kingdom-building, or to nuance away the effect of such efforts.

In recent years I have spoken to countless inventors and investors, from small start-ups to funds working on behalf of some of the biggest names in the world, about how artificial intelligence can help them do everything from fight human trafficking to keep kids safe from online predators. The only people who truly want that work to stop are the people who profit from trafficking and prey on innocent children online. It is they who are misusing the God-given power of artificial intelligence, not the people who wake up every day to do good on behalf of God’s kingdom with that power.

I’m not asking you to ignore the misuses of AI. I’m not asking you to learn prompt engineering. I’m not saying you should toss out your books and using ChatGPT instead. What I am asking you, on behalf of the many faithful Christians involved in the realm of artificial intelligence, is to think seriously about this: The dominion mandate points to the rightful use of AI. There is a tangible kingdom gain that can come by this tool. And I’m asking you, especially if you’re an AI skeptic, to rethink some of that skepticism—especially about brothers and sisters in Christ.

Screwtape, in his demonic competence, understood that the worst thing for humans to do was think seriously about the tools that could challenge strongholds in the kingdom of Satan. “God wants men to think of the Future as is necessary, planning the acts of justice or charity which will be their duty tomorrow. He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do.”

We need a generation of Christians who are serious about using the unprecedented power of modern technology to challenge Satan’s reign. We need to see that task as a calling.