The biggest temptation of AI is really the biggest temptation of technology generally, which is downstream from the original temptation in Eden. It’s the lure of shortcuts. It’s choosing to bypass valuable process in order to get what you want faster, easier, and on your terms.

AI already is, and will no doubt become better at, pumping out quick and marvelous “results” to whatever problem we’re trying to solve, question we’re asking, creation we’re dreaming up, or companionship void we’re wanting to fill. But in getting us to end results quicker, what are we losing? Will laborious, time-intensive, messy process (creating, contemplating, mulling over) become a bygone practice for humans?

I ponder this a bit in my recent TGC article on reading “AI book summaries” as an alternative to actually reading entire books. If this becomes a normalized practice in our AI future (and I expect that it will), how should Christians think about it? What value is there in the slow, inefficient human means of processing information in a world where that approach will look increasingly archaic? It’s good to reflect on these questions now. We’re only at the very beginning of AI’s reshaping of the world, after all.