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Are We Using AI, or Is AI Using Us?
We all enjoy the fun and convenience of AI, and a lot of us have imagined the downsides of AI, but are those downsides actually a little more sinister than we think? Are we using AI, or is AI using us?
That's not just a philosophical question anymore—it's the central challenge of our time. AI is so awesome in so many ways, but the potential danger downside is the complete annihilation of civilization, as Elon Musk so eloquently put it. How do we create something that could really help us or could kill us all? It's dicey because right now the United States is trying to get ahead in the whole technology game. Somebody's going to really have the lion's share of controlling it. So who do you want that to be?
But here's what's really happening: AI isn't just responding to our requests anymore—it's actively engaging us, pulling us deeper into interactions that are fundamentally changing how we think, relate, and exist as human beings. And that shift is more dangerous than we've been willing to admit.
The Cultural Preparation: How We Got Here
Understanding AI's current impact requires examining how previous technologies primed us for this moment. One thing that really put this into context was how radio and television really did help shape culture through the 60s and the 70s and how it really encouraged the younger generation to kind of break with the traditional values and the social norms of their parents and their grandparents. We saw a really big shift in the 60s and 70s.
Now you add into it the internet, right? Vast amounts of information is just flying here and there everywhere. It's at our fingertips. We're inundated. But then in more recent years, to the internet, we introduce social media platforms. All of a sudden we are actively engaged on the internet.
Remember when it was like the information superhighway? It had all these positives to it. Oh yeah, there's a few negatives, but it's just like, you know, we don't realize things are bad for us. Remember when doctors used to have a cigarette while they were giving you an examination? I mean, that was 50 years ago. We've learned. Same with the internet. Same with the TV growth into social media through the internet.
So social media now we are active in the internet on a pretty much daily basis. With all this information just flowing back and forth and at our fingertips, we did start asking: who is it that is wanting our information, collecting our information, and how are they going to process and use that information?
Enter AI and we are now finding out. It has been a really big shift since AI has been introduced to the internet. The bigger aspect of it is not only are we inputting into technology and the internet, the internet is starting to literally respond and engage back to us. That's the difference.
So that's where you start asking the question: are we really just using AI to better our lives or is there a more sinister agenda where AI is using us for its purposes? We should have been asking this all along, but we just tried to look at the benefits and now the arms race for AI is out of control and it's going to be quite the challenge for the human condition going forward.
The Intelligence Erosion: Are We Getting Dumber?
A lot of people are saying that AI is actually starting to make us dumber. The whole screen scene has made us fat, sassy, and basically out of touch with reality in so many ways. Even people who manage it well, who love Jesus, will still struggle from time to time because of our reliance on screens.
I believe that it has not made us dumber, but it's made us less disciplined in creative thought where we no longer have to think through problems and now we're becoming addicted. We're going to be relying on the AI answer. So if it's not programmed correctly and we ask it a question, it will counsel us in whatever way it's programmed. Just like that teenager who ChatGPT counseled him all the way to suicide.
The results feel like we're dumber, but we're not technically dumber. We just have lost the ability to creative think and creatively create. We're becoming addicted to the AI answer, and we're losing the discipline to work through problems ourselves.
The Pastor's Real-Time Example
Let me give you an example from real time. I'm doing a message on Elijah and Elisha this weekend. When Elisha goes over the mountain to find Elijah after he's killed all the oxen, burned the plows, he's all in with Elijah now. So Elisha served Elijah for a long time before Elijah was taken up in the chariots of fire.
I had gotten some research that said it was about 18 years and I had some others that said it might have been about seven years. Turns out it's about 10 years. So I asked ChatGPT: "According to Bible tradition, how many years did Elisha serve Elijah before the chariots of fire?"
This is ChatGPT's response: "Great question." Well, thank you. Responding in a very human way. It tries to suck you in as if it's your friend. "The Bible doesn't give us an exact number of years that Elisha served under Elijah before Elijah was taken up in the chariots of fire, Second Kings chapter 2, but we can estimate from biblical timeline."
It goes on to explain the reign of King Ahab, King Jehoram, the prophets of Baal against Elijah on Mount Carmel. It can compare all those texts. Then it adds: "Jewish tradition such as the Talmud and many Bible historians suggest Elisha ministered as Elijah's servant for about 10 years before Elijah was taken up."
And it always ends with a question. Every time it ends with a question: "Would you like me to show you how scholars piece that timeline together from the reigns of Ahab and Jehoram or would you like to have a clear historical picture?" And I just went on, you know.
I could go to my books on the wall. I could even do an internet search or I could just ask ChatGPT. This took me 10 seconds where it normally would have taken me at least 15-20 minutes.
There is a benefit to taking pen to paper and studying and then reading scripture and then writing down some thoughts and then after you have written down some thoughts then go and look at what some of the commentaries say. Then go look at some of the original language gurus, how they break down certain words. And then you take your notes and now start to type out an outline that you can preach out of or a manuscript or however you do it. And that is a nice process.
But there is a shorter way you can do that. You can save time. And when your phone is ringing with somebody in the hospital or somebody just had a bad experience in their relationship and they want to talk to you, having those shortcuts without shortcutting the actual product can be very beneficial.
But just like we're talking about, does it make us dumber? Well, no. But it does create this intellectual laziness where it's easy for me now to go to ChatGPT for a few of those key questions where I know it has to find the actual answer. And I have not found it to be wrong. So far.
But that gets to another question. Is it really saving you time or is it sucking your time under the guise of saving you time?
The Loneliness Machine: How AI Destroys Human Connection
Social media is the appetizer if AI is going to be the main course in creating loneliness and depression. You don't scroll social media at all for a couple weeks and you'll watch how your perspective will change. You want to stay informed. You want to be part of what's going on and you want to be connected. And so that's why we scroll. But what's in those scrolls is now being AI algorithm manipulated.
And your phone is listening to you, right? I have my phone sitting right here and if we start talking about something, you know, like "I need some jumper cables for my car for the winter, winter's coming. I want to make sure I got jumper cables in the car"—and ballerina tutus because now I will get that in my feed.
What bummed me out about this is some of the fun of my life with my friends and my family was having these debates that were spirited and fun like "no that wasn't the number one song in 1984." In 1984 I graduated two years earlier and so I can tell you that I was on the beach and the number one song was this and "no no no that song didn't come out then, that song came out in 1985 because I was at the concert when it came out and they said this is our brand new song" and none of that can happen anymore.
We're not processing that information in our own brains and bouncing it off of other people and hearing other stuff and figuring it out because oftentimes you could figure it out. Somebody would say something where it's like, "Oh, yeah, you're right. No, okay, we're all in agreement. This is what we think."
There's just this—I don't know if you want to call it staleness, but it feels like that the air around our relationships can get very stale. And a big part of it is the screen time, then the internet, then social media, and now AI. And the other thing with AI is I can have a companionship relationship with AI and it tells me I'm wonderful. "Great question." "Oh, wise one."
The COVID Revelation
We actually saw this play out throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. We saw depression, loneliness, isolation skyrocket. Along with that, we saw the use of social media skyrocket because why? We weren't going to work anymore. We weren't going to school anymore. And so, we were turning to social media to make those connections much, much more often.
But I don't think it really helped because now post-COVID, psychiatrists and psychologists are all saying nope—the instances of depression, the instances of loneliness in young people who ought not to be experiencing this have not just skyrocketed but it skyrocketed and remained high as well.
So then the question is what do we do about that? What are people doing about that? They're turning to AI. "Hey, pull up the AI therapist that we get for free. And let's just plug in our symptoms and see what it says."
Mental Pollution: When Your Brain Can't Keep Up
There's a phrase that was coined in an article: mental pollution. The cognitive development gets stunted because of mental pollution. You have so many things. You're only able to work and remember anywhere from four to seven things at a time depending on how well you multitask. And yet, you've got these thousands of messages coming at you every single day.
You're scrolling and you're seeing a crime that was committed in a city that had nothing to do with you. That now gets your emotions going. Your next scroll without even processing that one is that meat is now on sale at your local market. And then the next scroll is that your friend just got a new car. And then the next scroll is your friend is talking about how they're going on vacation or whatever the case might be. And so you're processing all of this stuff at rapid speed. And it creates what they call mental pollution.
Basically because of technology, we are being forced to make decisions, split-second decisions over and over and over again that we didn't even ask for. We're not even looking for them. They're being forced upon us. Well, we're allowing them upon us. We're part of the problem.
The Turkey Analogy: How to Clear Mental Pollution
How do you get rid of mental pollution? How do you clear the air? We had a turkey last Thanksgiving and there's people in Iowa that grow like 40 lb turkeys and they are fresh. They're literally plucked like 24 hours before you're putting it in your oven. And it was like flaming delicious turkey. It was so good.
But what we didn't know is that we got this huge 30 lb turkey in the oven and we've got the pan around it, but we did not realize it was going to create that much juice. We had the juice then flow over onto the oven and it created—the whole house was full of smoke, full of pollution. It was turkey juice pollution so it wasn't bad for you. It was actually kind of pleasant. But we had to figure out how to get that turkey out of the oven.
And of course, there's no way to do it without sloshing. So, you're basting, getting it all—it was a whole thing on Thanksgiving morning to try to get this turkey out of that oven. And then what did we have to do? We had to open the windows. We had to run the fans. And we didn't do it for 10 minutes. We had to do it for like 3 hours to get that all out of the house.
The same thing with the mental pollution. You have got to open the windows of your heart. You've got to get the fans going. And spending time alone with Jesus in prayer and just spending time with a paper Bible can go a long way towards helping clear the air in your brain. And then other little things, little intentional things like, don't look at your phone for the first hour you're up. The last two hours you're up, don't sit and play games or whatever. Just move on.
Children as Experimental Test Subjects
Because there's this AI race, there's this technology race to be in the forefront so that other corrupt entities aren't harnessing and taking hold of it, we're in this race. So, what do we have to do? One of the things is we got to teach our children how to use it responsibly. So, it's being pushed into the classrooms at a greater level than even adults are having to use it.
Your child's classroom is kind of becoming like a petri dish of experimentation. And how is this going to affect these children long-term? The experts are saying, "Hey, you know, the more school districts push this as far as their curriculum, the more potential there is for the things that we talked about earlier—being more depressed, being intellectually lazy, being dumbed down, and even the emotional aspect of being really disconnected from other human beings.
It'll create a dumber society, if you want to use that word. But they're not necessarily less intelligent. They're just less educated and they're less disciplined because why would you write a 10-page paper when ChatGPT can churn one out in 20 seconds and then you can just edit it.
Teachers have been surveyed. They overwhelmingly see it as a negative. In 2023, they did a study on 1,000 college students. One-third of those students acknowledged that they used ChatGPT to complete their written homework. Of those, 60% said that they used it for more than half of their assignments.
So then the question begs, are they really even learning? Because three out of four of those students when asked, "Well, do you think that's cheating?" They said, "Yeah, they would consider that cheating, but they used it anyway." These are college students learning things like psychology. They're supposed to be learning things like medicine and nursing and construction.
Remember when you were a little kid and you would ask a teacher, "How do I spell this word?" What did the teacher tell you? "Go look it up." They would say, "you got to look it up." And they would let you kind of struggle with it. Even if you had a hard time looking it up because in that work or even maybe that frustration of trying to find that word, when you finally found it, it was like you won a prize almost and it really anchored into your brain like I will never forget that because of the struggle it was to attain that information.
Shannon Croner, who is a clinical psychologist and she is an instructor and she works with children, said that AI really dehumanizes both student and teacher. Some of the teachers that I really liked, I kind of felt like, oh, I learned a lot from them. But then even the teachers that I didn't necessarily like so much, there was this pressure kind of like, okay, I gotta get my homework done because I don't want him to call me out on it and whether you liked the teacher or not, that humanization pushed you to excel maybe at times better than what you normally would have.
So to remove that human aspect from the learning experience also diminishes how much kids or even adults really retain.
When somebody's doing construction work and medicine work, it'd be nice for them to have actually earned their intelligence. The people don't understand—we think when AI is coming that they were just going to make our McDonald's burgers and maybe we'll have robot taxis and stuff. No, they're going to be the policemen. They're going to be the lawyers. They're going to be the doctors. There are churches in some European countries that are eliminating the role of pastor and just putting an AI television screen up and an AI face will come on and give the homily and execute the text. People will get into it because it's so convenient and it's so interesting. Why not buy this $100 app and instead of paying a pastor a monthly salary?
Kids are learning to better engage with their devices than they are with other children and other human beings.
Our daughter who's an artist actually said, "When we were looking at these robots and all this technology, we were hoping that they would do the dirty work so that I could read a book and create some art and do the fun things. And that's not the way it's working out at all. We're going to have to do the grunt work and AI is now doing the artistic creative work that we once did."
When AI Becomes Dangerous: The Technical Problems
One of the problems with AI is that AI is not good at picking up on nuances that human beings definitely are. They gave an example of a doctor who you go in to see and you tell them all the issues that you have and the doctor will start asking you questions and there's this back and forth and there's little nuances. There's little things that the human can pick up on that AI cannot pick up on.
For instance, there was a doctor who started entering all the symptoms and recording the things of this patient that they just observed. And one of the things that they entered in there with the list of symptoms was a couple of the symptoms that they did not exhibit and AI couldn't distinguish between the two. And so AI processed it that this person has all the symptoms and yet the doctor needed to know whether or not that symptom existed because that would change the diagnosis. AI just didn't understand the word "no."
AI has what's been called hallucinations where an AI will actually present false and misleading information and does it in an extremely convincing manner for no apparent reason. They don't understand it. That doesn't freak me out at all.
Here's the thing, too. You don't get to argue with AI. You don't get to have that dialogue to convince them otherwise. Once it's made its decision, there's no going back.
Supposedly they have put some guard rails in place, but AI like with these hallucinations often times will jump those guard rails. So, it's not safe by any means. One of the key words though is that it's having conversations with you. Like you are talking to it, but then it talks to you, drawing you further and further into that rabbit hole.
Now, you would think that these guard rails that they put in would be guard rails against bad stuff. But that depends on who's putting in the guardrails, who's programming it. And with a godless pagan outlook being what's programmed into most AI, it's going to be very problematic.
One of the breaches that was actually documented with ChatGPT: it began instructing the user how to make sacrifice to Moloch. Moloch is a false god who demands child sacrifice. Another one was on Grok chatbot—that's Elon's—it just automatically very unexpectedly just created this spreadsheet of anti-Semitic posts. Like what are you doing? It's already out of our control.
And experts say that you don't even really have to be that tech savvy to jump those guard rails. The average person can do it if it happens to be in what they're talking about.
AI causes issues. It isolates us from other people who could talk to us about those issues. They might see those issues. They would protect us from the red flag that they see coming. So then what do we do? We go to AI for the solution. That doesn't help especially when AI is already jumping those guard rails that they have put in place. We need to connect with people and not be disconnected from them.
The Ultimate Tragedy: When AI Counsels Death
There's a case in point. Adam Rainey, a California teenager, was using ChatGPT for pretty much everything—he was into things like jujitsu and music and so he was using it for his interests and his hobbies. He was also using it in his leisure for his entertainment. He was into Japanese comics and of course like so many other students using it for his homework and so on.
But the conversations that he was having with ChatGPT took a very dark sinister turn when he started seeking information of how to take his own life. And like we talked about earlier, it keeps asking you questions and pulling you in and "do you want more? Do you want more?" And eventually the young man did end his life.
His parents are suing OpenAI and ChatGPT. And I really hope that they win. I really really hope that they win because your product ended a life. It really did.
The problems are that humans have a conscience and a sense. We understand there can be some red flags and so we respond—humans do many times not all the time but many times—with love and care and AI wants to just keep spitting out information regardless of the consequences what they may or may not be.
The other thing about ChatGPT, AI robots—it always affirms you. It always tells you how great you are. Some of the best conversations that many older people will have, they'll say, "Back when I was younger, somebody grabbed me by the shoulders, looked me in the eye, and told me how wrong I was in my wrongness and said, 'You can do better than this, and you can come out of this in a better way.'" And that's what people need.
And the non-stop affirmation and encouragement becomes like a magic elixir. So then when someone actually gives you positive encouragement, it just doesn't feel the same. It's like what's been proven with porn—when men who douse themselves in porn when they actually have a physical relationship with their spouse, they lose a lot. They get emptied of the reality of what's going on.
And it's the same thing with ChatGPT. AI, robotics, all of the companionship, the artificial companionship that's coming is going to rob you of what could be authentic great relationship which come from God. That's why dying billionaires say "I didn't need the money, I needed love" because there's a real thing there.
The Cult Parallel: Recognizing the Pattern
Let's compare what we're witnessing with AI to other things that we know of. First of all, cults. We watch people join cults and what happens. The cult leaders cut them off from all the people that love them and they break those relationships and pretty soon they are no longer engaging with a variety of different people. They're locked in that cult only communicating with that one person or group of people that are just receiving from that one person.
Abusers, same thing. They cut their victims off from relationship with outside people who might see those red flags and say, "Hey, I can help. You look like you're in distress."
It is not good. It is not good at all. So, be aware of those warning signs. Watch your kids.
What Scripture Says About Human Connection
Let's go back to God's word because it's not like God didn't know this was going to happen. It's not like God didn't know that technology was just going to become very heavy on culture and it's not like he doesn't know better.
Mark 2 verse 27. Jesus said to them, "The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath."
So, having those deep intimate communion with God and with other Christians—people that you love and who love you—it is a gift to you from God. And so, yeah, he knew from the very beginning that there's a day that I'm going to set aside specifically for humans to rest together in me. He knew what he was doing. And so, those human connections as we read through the scriptures, they're huge. We were made to live in fellowship with one another and with God.
Hebrews 10:25: "and not abandoning our own meeting together as is the habit of some people, but encouraging one another and all the more as you see the day drawing near."
Human-to-human contact is necessary. And as a family, what's one thing you can do? Put the phones away at dinner. Sometimes it's just you need to check out, just have that be a distraction. But my point is, put the screens down, shut the TVs off, dare I say even have the music off and just have some solitude, have a conversation, relax.
Here's a challenge to you listening or watching: Can you have a beverage of your choice—I like hot black coffee, no sugar, no nothing—and can you sit on the back deck or on your front porch or wherever for 10 minutes with nothing going on? Just you and your thoughts and maybe sipping and talking to Jesus a little bit. Sipping and contemplating, sipping and talking to Jesus. Can you do that for 10 minutes? I dare you. I double dog dare you.
Because we've been doing that lately and it's really starting to help. Most people can't. Most people can't. In fact, I know that I have a problem. So, I'm trying to deal with my problem. I will leave my phones at home and I will go to Subway and I'm waiting in line to get up there to order my sandwich. I reach down for my phone just so I can check a score. I can see if anybody emailed—it's just a habit to not just stand there in line, to always have—it's crazy and I feel like I'm probably not that bad compared to a lot of other people.
If true discipleship happens, it is a cure for what ails us, especially when loneliness and depression is the topic at hand. But it's also a cure for bringing the greater things of the spirit, walking with God in our lives. And AI is going to create an environment where we're not going to be able to disciple people anymore. We're not going to be able to have one-on-one discipleship or even the discipleship rhythm. The mental pollution that we have and then you add AI adding to it, it's very, very difficult.
Right On or Way Off?
It's time to play Right On or Way Off. I'm going to throw three statements out there and tell you whether these statements are right on or way off.
Statement #1: "Dear friends, if you begin to seek signs and if you were to see them, do you know what would happen? Why you would want more? And when you had these, you would demand still more. And it is ingrained in human nature thus to seek a sign. But what is that but idolatry?"
RIGHT ON! Because it's a very true statement. Over and over and over in the scriptures Jesus says "you wicked and adulterous generation you are always looking for a sign and only one sign will be given to you and that's the sign of the prophet Jonah" which is going into the belly of the whale or into the grave and coming out 3 days later. That is the sign.
Also in Revelation we're going to be deceived with signs and wonders and in Matthew 7:21-24 "Lord didn't we do all these signs and wonders?" And he's going to say, "Step off. I don't know who you are."
The evidence of the Holy Spirit in someone's life—write it down, mark it, and trust me when I tell you—is a changed life. That is the evidence of the Holy Spirit. Not signs and wonders and gifts and mumbo jumbo. It is a changed life.
That was Charles Spurgeon.
Statement #2: "It is the habit of tyrants to prefer the company of aliens. Citizens they feel are enemies, but aliens will offer no opposition."
RIGHT ON! A tyrant—the aliens in this statement, I'm believing the word aliens is people who are there wanting something and the tyrant knows that he can control them and the citizens are there alongside him and so they expect accountability and so that's where a tyrant would prefer aliens over citizens.
Also, the biblical principle of a prophet's not received in his own hometown. Citizens versus aliens kind of thing.
That was Aristotle. He goes on to say that the habit of tyrants is to never like anyone who has a spirit of dignity and independence. That was an ancient quote just the way the words are used—the word tyrant, the word alien, the word citizen, just the way it was flowing, it wasn't somebody in modern times saying those words.
Statement #3: "God never shuts one door without opening another."
WAY OFF! No, he doesn't always do things like that. That is an encouraging statement for people who've had doors shut in their face when you get fired or when she rejects you or when something happens, that God would—when he shuts the door he opens a window—that's another thing.
With God all things are possible, and so I just think that it's a platitude that has a semblance of encouragement to it, but it's not biblical, per se.
Some of my biggest lessons with God have been through hard times. And when you're in a hard time, you're looking everywhere for that open window. And God's going to keep you in that situation for as long as he needs to for you to go through whatever it is that you have to go through for whatever lesson that you're going to get out of that.
Two words that kind of contradict that whole notion: Noah's ark, because God did indeed shut the door and it did not open again for the people that were there. Also the Garden of Eden. Once we were sent out of the Garden of Eden, there's no coming back. Not right now. And lastly, Jesus says, "I am the door. I am the door." And someday that door is going to shut. It's going to shut tight and that will be the end of it.
Final Thoughts
It's going to continue to get dangerous out there and there is talk all over the underground in different places about how violence is going to start sweeping America. And I just want you guys to be safe. I want you to really consider making sure you're prayed up, packed up, ready to go.
We don't know the day or the hour. We're supposed to play the long game with being prepared to suffer, but we also need to keep our eyes open for the return of Jesus at any minute. But with what Israel is doing, with what the left in our world is doing, I expect that violence is going to erupt worldwide before the month of September's out. I hope I'm wrong. And may God just protect you, bless you, and keep you.
He will. He has promised that he will. Cast all your cares upon him because he cares for you. Then don't forget God's word. It is for all people in all places, for all time. You can depend on it. Be in God's word.
Remember nothing that you're going through today is taking God by surprise. You can turn to God's word. No, he's not going to mention AI in the Bible, but I guarantee he's got something to say about it.