Long before we arrive at the doomsday moment of AI aiming our nuclear missiles at human populations, humans will have surrendered to the control of the machines they made. It’s already happening.
Anthropic, the company that has built the AI-assistant Claude (which, by the way, is very useful), has reported that some of its users refer to it with the titles “Master”, “Daddy”, “Sensei” and “Lord”. A post on X announced that users are prompting it for astrology-like predictions for their future and asking it to predict or guide their destiny. A disturbing report described ChatGPT divorces: spouses who eventually split up based upon “counsel” they received from ChatGPT or another AI-chatbot.
Increasingly, people are asking AI chatbots for personal advice, to identify their “core wounds” and “relational trauma”, to identify their “psychological blind spots” and to map out programs of personal growth, for dating, career, and so on. Some are using them as romantic or sexual partners, doing the equivalent of what used to be phone-sex with a real human on the other end.
There are probably many reasons for all of this. One is plain old idolatry. Man has always looked to something other than his Creator for guidance: the flights of swallows, the arrangement of the stars, how the bones or cards or entrails fell. Guidance from the gods without a personal relationship with the gods has always been the allure of idolatry.
A second reason is this technology mimics human communication in very compelling ways. Think of it like the predictive text feature on your phone, guessing the next word you want to type. Large Language Models are highly sophisticated versions of predictive text, predicting with fairly high accuracy what the next word in a sentence should be. This algorithmic prediction has become so good that it feels like there is a living intelligence on the other end.
A third reason is a culture that has lost the distinction between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge might simply be defined as “the facts”. Information about anything and everything constitutes a form of knowledge. There’s little doubt that AI models have been trained on an astronomical amount of “facts”. If ‘knowing’ is access to facts (it is not), then AI models ‘know’ a lot more than we do.
But Scripture explains that knowing is a lot more than possessing facts. More specifically, the book of Proverbs describes wisdom as something that comes only from rigour: the rigour of study, of obedience, and of experience. Wisdom is a gift given by God (Proverbs 2:6), not a tool we can grab and exploit. Wisdom comes only to the humble and reverent, not to the proud (Proverbs 1:7, 3:34, 9:10). Wisdom is the slow, patient work of lifelong followers of Christ, not a grab-bag of facts we use to ‘hack’ our lives.
AI is attractive because it appears to promise what wisdom gives (guidance, self-understanding, relationship principles) at the convenience and speed of a calculator. We can get advice — and in far more explicit and comprehensible ways than the reading of palms or entrails — and we can have it without a life of communion, submission, meditation and trials.
Wisdom is not something you can ‘hack’. Like other character qualities such as endurance, gentleness, gratitude, or temperance, there is no quick, bullet-point summary that AI can give you that will produce those virtues instantaneously. Like the ads which promise you a six-pack of defined abs in just 14 days, the promise of quick-n-easy wisdom is a false one.
AI is great for finding, collecting and even organising knowledge. But you will need to find wisdom elsewhere.