Staying Human in the Age of AI

Opening Illustration: Tyler and the AI Apology

• Jon introduced Tyler, a made-up character who forgot his girlfriend's birthday and asked ChatGPT to write his apology.
• The apology was warm and well written, but Tyler pasted the whole reply, including the chatbot's offer to make it more romantic or suggest gift ideas.
• "A successful output isn't the same thing as human presence." His girlfriend did not want the right words; she wanted Tyler.
• Jon said he likes much of what AI does, from medical research to helping blind people get around, and does not think AI is evil. But it carries dangers.
• The question most people ask is what AI can do for us. Jon said the better question is "what is AI doing to us?"

What Is AI?

• Jon's working definition: software "that does tasks we used to think required a human mind."
• Face recognition, translation apps and self-driving cars are all AI. A chatbot is trained on huge amounts of human writing to predict the next word, like the autocomplete on a phone.
• "Artificial" is the easy word. Experts struggle to define "intelligence." When IBM's Deep Blue beat chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, people said it was only calculation.
• Jon's point: we struggle to define intelligence because we have lost what it means to be human. The real mystery is not the machine. It is us.

Genesis 1:27

What Does It Mean to Be Human?

• AI writes, draws, composes music, writes code and passes hard exams, often better than people do.
• "If being human means being better at stuff, humans are losing." Every new model moves the line again.
• Genesis 1:27: God made people in his own image. The image of God is not a skill set. It is given freely, whatever we can or cannot do.
• That image carries a purpose: to glorify God, know him and represent him, love God and neighbor, and work and care for the world.
• A calculator has always been better at math, but it will never be more human. AI may someday write better poetry than anyone, but that would not make it an image bearer.
• Jon gave the gist of something apologist Abdu Murray said: his worry is not that machines will become more like humans, but that humans will become more like machines.
• Psalm 115 mocks idols and says those who make them become like them. The principle: "You become like what you trust."
• Jon's main concern: we are becoming dependent, and more people are unable to sit with hard problems, or with hard people.

01 · Proverbs 4:7

Counterfeit Mind

• A fake $20 bill is dangerous because it is a good fake. Jon said AI offers three good fakes: a counterfeit mind, a counterfeit person and a counterfeit savior.
• The counterfeit mind is information without wisdom. AI can give an answer in seconds, but not the person you would become by finding the answer yourself.
• If a robot lifts your bench press for 10 reps, the weight moves but you get no stronger. The mind is like a muscle: the less you use it, the weaker it gets.
• Jon quoted C.R. Wiley's book Man-Made: "education is a matter of formation, not information."
• Proverbs 4:7 tells us to get wisdom and understanding. AI can hand you information, but wisdom has to be formed in you.
• Chatbots now answer and then offer you options for what to do next. "The machine is prompting you." Jon asked, "Has the tool started using you?"
• Jon is not saying never use AI. Christians should show what good use looks like: use it "like a spotter, not a substitute." Let it format citations, quiz you before a test or an interview, and help with research. "Don't let it speak for you."

02 · Genesis 2:18–20

Counterfeit Person

• The counterfeit person is companionship with no real person there.
• Jon cited Common Sense Media: in 2025 nearly three in four American teenagers had used an AI companion, and one in three of those had chosen to talk with an AI about something serious instead of a real person. He added that adults do the same.
• An AI companion is there at 3 a.m., never gets tired of you and never needs anything back. It promises "intimacy without any type of commitment," and "the commitment is the point."
• Real people interrupt, misunderstand and disagree. They require patience, forgiveness and sacrifice, and those are the things that build relationships.
• Genesis 2: it was not good for the man to be alone, and no animal was a fit helper. God's answer was another person bearing the same image. If no animal could be that companion, neither can a machine.
• Asking AI for advice is using a tool. Companion apps are built to feel like a person, but "seeming personal and being a person are not the same thing."
• The "one another" commands of Scripture (bear one another's burdens, forgive, confess, pray for one another) all need a real other. Online-only friendship and virtual church are simulations.
• Jon said he is not shaming anyone; loneliness is real. The answer is a real person, who may let you down and may also forgive you.

03 · Genesis 11:1–9

Counterfeit Savior (Transhumanism)

• Transhumanism is the use of technology to upgrade human beings: to boost intelligence, merge people with machines, radically extend life, even defeat death.
• Jon read from Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus, which says we will now aim to "upgrade humans into gods."
• Our culture tells two stories at once: you are just a machine, and you are a god whose feelings define reality. Transhumanism tries to join them. Christianity says you are neither. You are an image bearer.
• In Genesis 3 the serpent promised that people would be like God. Jon called it the first lie.
• Genesis 11: Babel used new materials, brick and tar, to build a tower to reach heaven. God did not judge the bricks, the tower or the building methods. He judged the project and the intent behind it.
• Jon quoted Brian Johnson, who has set out not to die, saying that we are creating God, and said, "this is Babel's ambition right here. It's just a new set of bricks."
• Some hope to upload a mind to a computer and live forever. But if every memory were copied and you then died, "You'd still be dead."
• "Nobody counterfeits a $3 bill." "You only fake something when there's a real thing worth faking."

John 1:14

The Real Thing: Jesus

• A Secret Service expert taught Jon that to spot counterfeit money you study the real thing. So Jon ended with the real thing every counterfeit tries to fake.
• Transhumanism dreams of people climbing up to become gods. The Christian story runs the other way: the Word became flesh and lived among us (John 1:14).
• AI gives words with no person behind them. God's Word is a person. Jesus ate fish on a beach, slept, worked with his hands, touched people nobody would approach, and wept at his friend's tomb.
• Each counterfeit has its real answer in Jesus:
  • A mind: in Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:3).
  • A person: Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us, and he gives us a family of real people.
  • A savior: our problem was never that we are too limited, but that we are too rebellious. Jesus did not grasp at equality with God (Philippians 2). He died in our place and rose in a real body.
• "Christianity doesn't promise you a backup. It promises you a resurrection."
• God "doesn't delete your humanity"; he redeems it and completes it. Romans 8:29: God's plan is that we be conformed to the image of his Son.
• Life's goal is not to be optimized or efficient. The fullest picture of a human being is not a supercomputer but a carpenter from Nazareth, raised from the dead.
• Jon's closing: use AI, but keep asking, "Is this a spotter or a substitute?" "Nobody can do your reps for you."

Questions and Answers

• Austin Axen moderated. Some questions were his; others came from cards at the tables.
• Is AI a morally neutral tool, and what are good and bad uses? (Austin)
  • Jon: most AI tools are, yes; how we use them is good or evil, and much is a matter of each person's conscience.
  • Good uses: writing code, or turning a long podcast into a short summary.
  • A problem: presenting AI's work as your own. Be upfront, as colleges that allow AI do when they ask students to cite it.
  • Bad uses: AI pornography. What concerns Jon most is AI-driven counseling, because replacing a human being wholesale is a problem.
• Should we use AI in our Bible study? (audience card)
  • Jon: many students now type a hard passage into ChatGPT instead of wrestling with it. A relationship with God comes with the wrestling, as it did for Jacob.
  • Read the passage again, pray through it, look at a commentary and talk it over with others. Then, if you want, ask AI what it thinks: "just don't do it first."
  • Stand to Reason's policy is no AI in creative work. Jon also warned that AI summaries now appear beside verses on Bible websites, and should not be trusted either.
  • "You can't microwave intimacy with God."
  • Austin added that an author he did not name wrote that AI does not have the Holy Spirit, and that AI gathers both truth and falsehood from the internet.
• Is this our Tower of Babel moment? (Austin)
  • Jon: "Maybe. I don't know. I'm not pretending to know."
  • Christians do not need to live in fear. Become informed, speak into the issue, and live by the biblical principles already given. Jon said he does not trust tech leaders on the ethics of AI.
  • He described Elon Musk on a panel saying that what keeps him up at night is where people will find meaning. Jon: "I am fearful of people placing their meaning in things that can't hold it up."
• Austin observed that machines are becoming more human-like.
  • Jon: "humanity doesn't come in degrees." AI will never be human, because being human means being made in the image of God, which cannot be earned and cannot be thrown off.
• What are practical ways to be more human now? (audience card)
  • Jon: the prototypical human is Jesus. The more Christlike you become, the more human you become.
  • We will have bodies in the life to come: "We are never going to be more human than on the day we meet Christ face to face."
  • His summary, from his years preaching at Living Oaks: "read the Bible, do what it says."
• Should children under 10 use AI, and how can parents monitor it? (audience card)
  • Jon: he is working this out in his own home too. His children get a phone at 14, after reading several books and writing a paper.
  • The less screen time, the better. He sees no good reason for a nine-year-old to use ChatGPT.
  • But children will meet AI at school and in college, so parents should introduce it on purpose and in small amounts: "inoculate, don't isolate."
• How do we engage the real Jesus? What are the means of grace? (Austin)
  • Jon: Scripture first. Creation shows that God is there; the Bible shows who he is.
  • Then one another: a small group, people over for dinner, face to face, and Sunday worship out of intention, not obligation.
  • His prayer for every gathering: that each person would look a little more like Christ, and would love God more and each other better.
  • Sit in silence and think about what God has done on your account. Memorize Scripture.
  • Austin added three habits of grace from David Mathis's book Habits of Grace: Scripture, prayer and community.
• In a word, how do you think biblically about AI? (Austin)
  • Jon: "Jesus."
  • Austin closed by saying we are never more truly human than when we are becoming more like Jesus.