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My head was literally buzzing. I wanted to introduce him to the fresh idea that had been stirring me during our days apart. And so as we chatted over tea and chapati, I finally cleared my throat.

“It would be a podcast about… we could call it…” I opened up.

In that moment, I was basically plunging into the depths of human interaction with him. That sacred moment when you have a half-baked idea that has been boiling, and you want to be listened to, and maybe affirmed by a fellow creative.

Before I finished the sentence, he interrupted and said, “Let me see some name ideas here.”

Glancing down at his phone, he quickly spoke back about 3 “podcast name options.” They sounded “cool.” And so, stunned, I asked him how he got those so rapidly!

I was in awe!

“ChatGPT,” he quipped back.

My heart sank a little; I mean, it actually sank. I mean, he’s a wonderful friend (I still love his mind and expertise). But at that moment, his answer felt like a strange violation of a sacred conversation between humans; it felt like an assault against a conversation between creative friends.

It felt like my long-processed, organic, half-developed (and maybe still clumsy) ideas had only provided him some “good prompts” to feed a bot somewhere miles away.

Right there, as we continued speaking, he’d found an easy way out for both of us, a way out of God’s intention for our brains. We were both no longer willing to stretch our cognitive depths that God had made us for, in order to bring life out of nothing—Genesis style.

Yet as I later reflected, I couldn’t blame him; he didn’t mean bad.

Turning to ChatGPT was probably his new reflex (just like you blink without thinking); it’s probably how he often went about things he was curious about.

But what was that doing to his creativity and mine? In that moment, it was shutting out our brain’s ability to untangle great podcast names from terrible ones; we were getting robbed of the potential to synthesize, process, enjoy, and bring forth ideas germinating from a mind God made, let alone a renewed one.

Like the majority in this town, ChatGPT is competing with our brains; we no longer have to blink before consulting it. In fact, in that chat, the very ingredients of what makes a good conversation between two creative humans were being invaded by a bot miles away, somewhere in Silicon Valley.

Of course, many Gen Z’s will say back, “ChatGPT actually speeds up things.” (But at what cost?) “It actually delivers what you need. ” Who determines ‘need’? God or man?

My other lawyer friend recently pushed back too, saying,

“What about the nurse in the village who has to treat a patient without a doctor and only has ChatGPT?” I responded, “Maybe the nurse should be motivated to pursue a rigorous 5-plus-year medical education that demands more of her thinking, memory, and discipline.”

As creatures made in the image of God, we are built to process things by God, who didn’t need to process anything, but yet, for six days, he created so we humans would image him in our creativity. (Let me not talk about AI Christian songs topping the charts.)

He’s now placed a certain reality inside our skulls, where he wants us to process the world around us and produce labor that will not only appreciate a good conversation but also wrestle through tangled ideas in light of the greater commandments of loving God and neighbor.

On this side of the new creation, we admit that our renewed minds are not made to live and feed on data alone. Technologies, just like the flowers and grass Isaiah spoke about, come and go, but his word remains, and so does the call to set our minds on the things above, stewarding our thoughts and ideas as we imitate the great creator.

And maybe in this case, wrestling against every thought that exalts itself against the knowledge of Christ may include taking captive robot-generated ideas?

See, when I first worked in an advertising firm, we had one of those midday hours where everyone was ambushed off their desk to go into the boardroom. The point of those random sessions was to chiefly brainstorm and create; the organization depended on our thinking, so it was a sacred hour (thank God only button phones dominated then), so we just stood there facing a whiteboard, eyeball to eyeball, bringing up our silly ideas for dismissal and our killer ideas for execution!

Now, of course, my button-phone generation had its own sins, yet I am convinced those analog moments back in the day honored the God in whose image we are made more than my thumbs do these days.

By the way, to bring it home, in one Christian meeting the other day, the pastor sharing the devotion suddenly received a call on a gadget he was using and handed me (his neighbor) the phone to go out and tell the person on the end of the line that “he was busy.”

Indeed I did, and as soon as the call ended, his “preaching notes” splashed before me on his smartphone screen.

Whoah, guess what I saw? AI summaries of the Bible text he was explaining to us all back in the room. (Now maybe I needed forgiveness first for invading his gadget’s privacy), but let’s stick with the point first: artificial intelligence and Spirit illumination are two things, not one; otherwise our Sunday mornings and Bible studies are in danger too.

(As a disclaimer, by the way, I use AI-embedded tools like Grammarly that underline my spelling mistakes and help me catch typos, plus others that give me graphic design templates, for example, yet even then, I deliberately refuse to outsource my design creativity or entirely let bots rephrase my writing style and sentences, but what many AI tools do (when carelessly relied upon) is to make us idolize efficiency while defacing the image of God in us, humans.)

See, tearing your cloth was an Old Testament way of repenting; in fact, I read in Joel 2 the other day where God (fed up with his people merely “tearing” their garments without “tearing their hearts” in repentance) asked Israel to rend (tear) their hearts in repentance too.

If scripture requires that kind of brokenness, auto-generated prayers won’t cut it. God has made man in his image, given him a brain so he may imitate him, Old Testament and New. Any outsourcing of this human function continues to either confirm our need for spiritual rescue through Christ or confirm God’s judgment on those who have rejected him through the elevation of created things over the creator.

We can go on about AI until the chickens come home; we could even look up a transcript with the right repentant words, yet until our hearts, emotions, and words are torn up because God’s image in us is violated through our tech, sackcloth won’t cut it. We’ll need a deeply cleansing Jesus, not merely the citable one.

And like author John Piper explains, the purpose for which the world was created is so that humans can praise God’s glory (Eph 1:18).

Yet if ChatGPT generates deeper and more biblical, even theological, prayers than humans, then we must be careful that our worship does not consist of lips that are near and hearts that are afar.

You and I may need to soon repent from the heart; ChatGPT won’t do it for us.