Perspective on AI
Algorithms can do many things, but they can't replace the Holy Spirit.
May, 2025
Everything on the Got Questions network of ministries originates from human thinking and writing. We do not use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to craft answers or generate original responses. However, we believe AI can be used like any other machine. What's important is to keep machines doing machine things, and human spirits doing spiritual things. This is one way of applying this month's spotlight verse (Psalm 127:1). BibleRef and other branches of Got Questions ministries are also uniquely positioned to influence what AI produces, even if that influence is indirect.
Whether a person digs a ditch with their bare hands, a spoon, a shovel, or a 4-ton excavator, a human being controls what happens. The result is according to a human design. The tools are simply making that predetermined vision a reality. It's better for the person's unique intellect and skills to be applied where they are needed, rather than those being set aside for manual labor (Ephesians 5:16). AI parallels the role of hydraulics, robotics, and other heavy machinery. AI can rapidly sort and condense information or calculate things it would take a person hours or weeks to do. That is useful (1 Timothy 4:4).
Using AI for research is not the same as asking it to interpret a verse or write commentary. One way to understand this difference is to see how research methods have changed over time. In the ancient world, if you wanted to learn something without resorting to trial and error, you had to find a person with that information. Later, you could refer to scrolls and books. Books were then collected in libraries. Libraries were gradually sorted by subjects.
Librarians would come to create catalogs listing which books spoke about which subjects. Those were early versions of artificial intelligence. For those too young to remember, card catalogs were drawers filled with notecards. These were used to classify all the books in that library. Some of the cards were topical: they would list books which contained that card's keywords or ideas. Searching a card catalog meant getting results from a system based on what some designer thought was relevant information. This was a lot quicker than flipping through every book in the library.
The modern internet search engine does the same. It looks through web pages, associates them with words and ideas, and then tells a search user which of those matches the request. Of course, it does this absurdly fast compared to manual card catalogs. The user relying on what the human-designed system outputs. Every internet search engine is a computer algorithm that matches results to a request.
Generative AI does the same thing on a larger scale. It applies a much more complicated algorithm to relate a database of material to a request, and outputs the results. In that sense, every person who includes a computer for any kind of research or writing is "using" artificial machine intelligence for assistance. That's how the computer knows which links to show and which to omit.
So long as AI's weaknesses are understood, we're comfortable using those tools to accelerate our research. They are powerful, in the same way steam engines and nuclear reactors are when compared to doing things by hand. But AI has no access to the Holy Spirit. It is not a person. It is not created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). We do not, and will not, "trust" AI to produce answers in and of itself.
In short, we are comfortable using AI to accelerate research, but a human being always does the actual writing. We're OK with AI summarizing our content, as long as it's clear that what's presented is an AI summary. But we're staunchly against allowing AI to displace human discernment, wisdom, insight, gifting, and spirituality.
In all things, God has His way of making things work out. The recent burst in Artificial Intelligence has a positive side effect. The algorithms are "trained" on materials which the search engines have already noticed. More reliable sites are favored. This means Got Questions Ministries content, including commentary from BibleRef, is often a major source for AI-generated answers to biblical questions. The Lord's providence put those resources in the right place at the right time. Whether it's directly from us, or as salt and light in the digital database, His truth is being proclaimed (Philippians 1:15–18)!
--Editor
