I don’t know where AI is heading.

I don’t know what it’s going to be capable of in five years. I don’t know what it’s going to be capable of in five months. I don’t think anyone does, no matter how confident they sound.

But I do see a lot of things that worry me.

I scroll through social media and I see perfectly-posed photos that were never taken accompanied by feel-good stories that never happened—all generated by AI. I can’t tell if the people sharing them don’t know or just don’t care.

I see people confronted with evidence challenging their deeply held beliefs and artfully avoiding any real introspection or critical thinking by hand-waving the whole thing away. “That’s probably AI,” they say. What they mean is, “I don’t want that to be true, so I’m happy to believe someone fabricated it because I don’t like the alternative.” And on the other side of the ditch are people so desperate for evidence to support their preexisting beliefs that they’ll take any answer an AI model churns out as the gospel truth. They want to believe, and so they will.

I see queries asking AI not to simply track down and collate information for further inspection, but to do the actual inspecting and thinking.

People are leaning on AI to sort through job applications, respond to emails, summarize emails (that were probably themselves created with AI), create important reports, do complicated calculations. Fewer people are stopping to see whether the AI output is true or logical or even coherent.

We’re outsourcing creativity.

We’re outsourcing critical thought.

We’re outsourcing the fundamental gifts our Creator bestowed upon the human race, and we’re calling it a step forward. And I’m not even talking about the environmental and economic impact of AI, although it exists and it’s unsettling. I’m just talking about the damage that’s being done to our brains as we rely on a series of increasingly inscrutable algorithms to think and create for us.

But AI isn’t actually the problem. AI is an accelerant raining down on a preexisting dumpster fire of our own making.

People have been making up stories and passing them off as true events for a long time now. People have been doctoring photos (or fabricating them whole cloth) and seeing if others will believe them for a long time now. People have been allowing others to think for them, stealing the creative work of others, and ignoring inconvenient evidence for a long, long, long time now.

AI just lets us move through the cycle a whole lot quicker. What took days or months takes minutes. It’s easy. Everyone can do it. No one has time to think about the implications or ethics because it’s all happening so fast and easy and convenient.

Merriam Webster’s Word of the Year for 2025 is slop: “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” I would personally argue that AI may be a powerful tool, but it’s one that tends toward producing slop almost exclusively.

The flood of slop in 2025 included absurd videos, off-kilter advertising images, cheesy propaganda, fake news that looks pretty real, junky AI-written books, “workslop” reports that waste coworkers’ time… and lots of talking cats. People found it annoying, and people ate it up.

The world is in a headlong race to fine-tune the slop machines—to churn it all out faster and more efficiently, to make the distinguishing lines between reality and machine hallucination harder and harder to distinguish—and at this point I’m convinced the momentum is self-sustaining. There’s no stopping it. This is the disconcerting future we’re plowing toward at full speed, and we’re all going to be living in it whether we want it or not.

There are, I suspect, perfectly valid applications of AI as a tool to speed up the monotonous elements of a workflow that we do on autopilot anyway. But there a great deal more applications offering to outsource the hard things—the precious things.

Oh, family. Fellow children of God. I have a request of you.

No. A plea.

Resist.

As much as you can, resist the pressure to offload the things that make you human.

When you have a choice between asking AI to make something for you and making it yourself, make it yourself. Even if you think AI can do a better job. Create. Write it yourself. Draw it yourself. Compose it yourself. Imagine it yourself.

Fiddling with prompts until a screen spits out something close to what you were hoping for isn’t the same as creating. It might feel like it, but it’s not. You’re just playing a fancy game of autocomplete with a program that sucks the soul out of the hard work of others and Frankensteins the whole thing together on your behalf. That might be fun for a lark or a gag, but don’t confuse it with a creative endeavor.

Our Creator—THE Creator—made you in His image, and He imbued you with an inclination to create that sets you apart form every other living creature on this planet. Don’t hand that over to a machine. I believe the more we let a machine create for us, the less inclined (and less capable) we are to create for ourselves.

But more importantly, God gave you a mind to think. To reason. To weigh and evaluate. “Does not the ear test words as the palate tastes food?” (Job 12:11, ESV). It should, but people have always found ways to shirk that function. AI invites you to shirk it at lightspeed.

For thousands of years, God has preserved His inspired word for us in the pages of the Bible. But engaging with that word requires us to listen and think and process. We can’t do these things if we’ve trained ourselves to let an algorithm do it for us. We cannot possibly hope to learn and grow as Christians, as children of God, if we abdicate our ability to create and think.

A lot of people think Amos prophesied about a famine of the word. But he didn’t. He prophesied about a famine “of hearing the words of the LORD” (Amos 8:11).

It doesn’t mean the words are necessarily gone. It means our ability to hear them is gone. That’s different.

“Behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord GOD,
“That I will send a famine on the land,
Not a famine of bread,
Nor a thirst for water,
But of hearing the words of the LORD.
They shall wander from sea to sea,
And from north to east;
They shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the LORD,
But shall not find it.

(Amos 8:11-12)

What if, when this prophecy unfolds, the words are still there, still hearable—but we’ve forgotten how to listen? What if we’ve gotten so comfortable letting something else do the hearing and the thinking for us?

The only way around that is to do the hard work ourselves. To make the time to sit and read and think and sing and write and paint and study and listen and reason and push through all the difficult roadblocks that make it tempting to ask ChatGPT to do it for us.

At the end of the day, I have to believe that most applications of AI are not offering to save you time. They’re offering to hijack your humanity, conscript your attention, and fundamentally erode your ability to connect with your Creator.

Family, please.

Resist.