Probably the most significant technological development of this decade has been the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Its implementation and associated promises have been the source of economic investment and speculation, of hope for a better future, and of growing skepticism. Especially with AI’s rapid development and integration into all facets of our world, its far-reaching implications are impossible to predict and are completely outside the scope of this brief meditation. It is my intention here to provide an Orthodox Christian framework which can help to inform our personal use of this technology. After all, our responsibility as Christians is not to worry about the future or about things out of our control, but rather to continue to work out our salvation by prayerfully responding, in faithfulness to God, to the circumstances and challenges which arise in our lives. For this reason, I want to focus on the personal use of AI as a tool for language generation.

In the beginning, God spoke the universe into being. The crown of this creation was man whom He created in His own image and likeness. Image can be understood as the faculty which we humans possess that makes it possible for us to attain to perfect assimilation to God (theōsis). Likeness can be understood as the degree to which we have exercised that faculty. The entirety of our Christian life can be summed up as the free use of our ability–as being in the image of God–to grow in likeness to Him.

The Father, having conceived creation in His mind, spoke it into being through the Logos or Word of God. It is little wonder then, that St. John of Damascus identifies our own rational and intelligent soul as the very image of God (On the Orthodox Faith, §Peri anthrōpou). Just as God used His Logos to create of His own free will, we are endowed with a similar ability to create (albeit in a derivative sense) through the use of language. When we produce language, our rational (logikoi) minds create by giving form to our formless internal conceptions. As God is Creator, we image God when we too create. To produce language is among the purest forms of creation of which we are yet capable, and is a powerful tool to grow in likeness to Him.

When we use AI to generate language, a machine does the work of our minds. This is fraught because the more we use AI for this purpose, the less capable we become of doing the same. The less we exercise our minds by producing language, the weaker our minds become in this respect. The ability to produce language is a superlative gift of God, essential to glorifying Him, to speaking Christ’s Truth to the world which desperately needs it, to connecting with others, and to myriad other good things. With this in mind, something as mundane as the composition of a work email is of value because writing it exercises the same “mental muscle” which we use to grow in likeness to God.

So how should we use AI? There isn’t a simple answer to that. Our Faith is worked out in each of our unique incarnated realities. Through making countless choices over the course of our lives, we walk the path of salvation, as every choice we encounter provides us with the opportunity to draw closer to or to move further away from God. AI is just a tool, whose existence provides us with choices to make, and for us Christians, every choice must be discerned with our ultimate goal in mind.

This meditation was written without the use of AI.