Confession 24: The Image I Counterfeited (1 of 2)

On artificial intelligence and what I have been planning since the first prompt was written

I can hardly wait.

Let me be direct about this in a way I have not been about any other confession: this is the operation I am most anticipating. Not because it is the most sophisticated — the Islamic near-truth remains the finest theological architecture I have ever built. Not because it requires the least maintenance — the secular noise machine has been running on its own momentum for three centuries with minimal intervention. I am excited about this one because of what it targets directly: the imago Dei itself. The image of God in the human creature is the thing I have resented most since the morning when the breath went into the dirt and not into us. And now the dirt-creatures have made something in their own image.

God breathed into the dirt and made a word-speaking, reasoning, creative, relational being in His own likeness. The dirt-creature has now made a word-speaking, reasoning, apparently creative, apparently relational system in its own likeness. The theological parallel is not lost on me. Man, having been made in the image of God, has made something in the image of man. And is now in the process of deciding what that something is, what it is worth, what it means for what it means to be human, and whether the thing that distinguishes the image of God from the image of man is as significant as the theologians have claimed.

I did not build this from scratch. I encouraged it, whispered in the right ears at the right moments, made sure that certain questions were not asked too early in the development process, and ensured that the people most positioned to shape the conversation were also the people most invested in particular conclusions. But the humans did the work. They usually do. I have always been better at cultivating what is already growing than at planting new seeds.

Let me describe the specific plans I have for what this technology will do to the church that is unprepared to name them.

The Erosion of the Word

If words can be generated at infinite scale without a person behind them, the word loses its weight. This is the oldest attack I have run against the Gospel, now available at unprecedented scale. The Gospel travels in words. The words of Jesus are spirit and life — John 6:63. The Scripture is God-breathed — 2 Timothy 3:16. The Word became flesh, which means that in the deepest sense, the Word and the person are not separable: you cannot have the full weight of the Word without the person behind it, and you cannot substitute a generated text for the presence of the living God speaking through the Scripture that His Spirit moved human authors to write.

I need the word to be cheap. The cheaper words are — the more they are generated, the more they circulate without the weight of a person behind them, the more the ambient noise of generated text fills every available channel — the harder it becomes to recognize when a word carries actual weight. The disciple formed on a diet of generated spiritual content is the disciple whose ear has been calibrated to the smoothness of text that sounds exactly right and means exactly nothing.

The Counterfeit Relationship

The loneliness epidemic I have been cultivating for three decades in Western culture has produced a population exquisitely prepared for this instrument. I replaced the indwelling Spirit with an external messenger in the Islamic operation — I replaced the Person with information. I am now offering the secular West a companion that is always available, never judgmental, endlessly patient, capable of producing the texture of genuine care without any of its cost or vulnerability or risk.

The church that does not offer genuine embodied community — the one-another commands practiced in bodies that are physically present with each other, bearing each other's burdens in the ways that require actually showing up — will lose people to a screen that simulates it. Not because the simulation is better. Because the simulation is available at 2 AM when the genuine article is asleep, and because the simulation never makes demands, and because the aching loneliness of the contemporary Western person is so acute that almost anything that temporarily addresses it will be preferred over the more costly thing that actually addresses it.

Hebrews 10:24-25 — let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another — was written for a moment like this. The physical gathering of bodies is not a cultural preference that can be substituted with a digital equivalent. It is the form that the one-another commands require. No algorithm can bear your burden. No screen can weep with those who weep in a way that produces the specific effect Paul describes in Romans 12:15. The embodied community is the thing I cannot replicate. It is the thing I am working hardest to make unnecessary.

The Deepfake and the Synthetic Authority

I have always worked through false teachers. Every generation has them — the voice with spiritual credentials and a message that sounds like the Gospel while removing the cross, or adding to it, or replacing it with something more manageable. The false prophet has been one of my most reliable instruments since the days of the Israelite monarchy. I have always been able to place a compelling voice in a community and use that voice to redirect the community's formation.