A Christian introduction to understanding issues surrounding Generative AI.
I was studying for a bachelors degree when Generative AI became mainstream. I remember when Chat GPT launched in 2022 and students first experimented with ways to get it to do their assignments while professors scrambled to make class AI policies. Other professors encouraged experimenting with Generative AI, even requiring it to be used in some way for projects.
A lot has changed since then. In 2025, an AI-generated song topped Christian music charts. Craft sales have become flooded with AI “art.” AI company Kapwing estimated that 20% of YouTube videos shown to new users are AI-generated (a grim and ironic statement from a company that promotes their generative AI video maker). Even publications like Faith Today have to deal with AI-generated article submissions (from prospective writers who hide the fact they’ve not interviewed Canadians for their article).
The Generative AI world continues to shift with programs being shut down while other more advanced programs launching. So how can Christians navigate this ever-changing, confusing world with wisdom and discernment?
What is Generative AI?
Most of the time when people are talking about AI nowadays, they are talking about Generative AI.
Traditional AI has existed for a while in forms such as virtual assistants (Siri was introduced to Apple phones in 2011) and streaming services that tailor recommendations to your viewing history. Traditional AI focuses on a specific task by analyzing data and making predictions based on that information.
Generative AI, on the other hand, is a form of artificial intelligence that generates new content such as text, audio, images or videos based on an instructional prompt. The AI tools are “trained” on a large volume of information, such as books, websites and movies. When given a prompt, generative AI then uses the patterns the AI noticed across its databases to generate what it predicts is the answer you want.
If someone asked you to draw a person, you’d probably end up drawing a person that looks a bit like a lot of people you’ve seen, but doesn’t depict any one person in particular. That’s a bit like how AI works. If you asked Chat GPT to generate an illustration of a car, it wouldn’t give you an image of your car. It would generate a plausible image of a car based on the millions of photos and illustrations it has been trained on.
Any developing technology brings concerns about new impacts. Here are five of the moral and ethical issues that have arisen around Generative AI.
1. Environmental damage
AI may seem free, but there is a cost. AI data centres take up huge amounts of energy and fresh water.
2. Replacing human connection
Imagine a friend who will always be there for you. Who answers texts at any time of the day, always listens to you, always encourage you, always stands by you when you have a crazy idea.
That’s the temptation of using AI chatbots. They simulate human conversation and offer escapism and the feeling of friendship to users. Many chatbots can even imitate fictional characters or celebrities upon request.
Humans have disagreements, but AI offers affirmation and emotional validation. It’s designed to give you exactly what you want. However, someone who always agrees with you and always gives you what you want is not a good therapist or friend.
So problems arise when people turn to AI for friendship and support, particularly surrounding mental health. Sometimes the results have been devastating, including addictions, suicide and murder.
3. Lines blurred between truth and fiction
Fraud. Deepfakes. Fake news. With a prompt of a few sentences, AI can generate increasingly realistic photos and videos. This inevitably leads to confusion. While many social media platforms have some kind of AI-generated content label, the label itself is often small and typically relies on the uploader to label their own content as AI, meaning that a lot of content slips through the cracks.
There’s also the problem of AI hallucinations, where an AI model learns incorrect information (such as from a satire website) but presents it to the user as a fact.
4. Privacy and intellectual property violations
Where does AI get all this information? Where does it learn to write a Shakespearian sonnet, illustrate in the style of Studio Ghibli or make a catchy pop song? For a lot of Generative AI platforms, it feeds on information from the internet.
This has led to concerns about a lack of privacy. Popular online trends encourage people to input large amounts of personal information, for example to generate a caricature of themselves. But where does that data go? Sometimes, towards targeted advertising. Almost always, this data is then used to further train the AI model.
AI also raises questions about intellectual property. Authors have protested their books being used to train AI without their permission. Illustrators, filmmakers and musicians have similar concerns about how AI plagiarizes and is being used by major companies as cheaper replacements to human work.
The copyright status of AI-generated content itself is also uncertain.
5. Loss of critical thinking
If you use Chat GPT to research a project, you won’t learn the skills of sifting through information and finding reliable sources for yourself. If you use it to write an essay for you, you won’t learn to think critically about the issue for yourself.
It can be a slippery slope from occasional use to reliance on AI.
There are a lot more problems with generative AI, such as built-in bias and a lack of guardrails around explicit content, and a demand for power that causes electricity bills to rise in the communities around data centres. These are just a few of the most prominent issues.
The cost of creativity
AI can be used for good. In the days before generative AI, I often used grammar checkers to help me doublecheck my use of commas. Apps like iNaturalist contribute to conservation science. AI is also helping improve early cancer detection. There’s potential for AI to be a technology to save lives.
But more often I see Generative AI being used to replace artists and humans working on creative projects. Why should someone have to pay hundreds of dollars to a designer to commission a logo when they can generate their own? AI-generated videos or songs go viral while a human-made creation is overlooked.
AI will only get more realistic. I’m reminded of the “survivorship bias” example from the Second World War, where the damage on Allied planes returning from missions was studied. The military observed the damage on the centre of the body, the wings and the tail and planned on reenforcing those areas. But it was pointed out that they were only analyzing the planes that survived combat and took damage that wasn’t fatal. They instead had to reenforce the areas that received the least damage – those were the damage areas that downed the planes that never came back.
Generative AI is getting better and harder to tell apart from human-made materials. Even tricks from a few years ago (such as counting the fingers on hands in images) are becoming outdated.
There’s a mournful feeling shared by many people who love the arts in the age of generative AI. I feel distrust in everything I see online. I want to like a song, but how am I supposed to feel about it if I know it was made by someone typing a few prompts into a computer?
Often you can tell something is human-made by its imperfections. Typos remind us that humans make mistakes. AI can’t experience love, grief, anger, pain or loss, despite the fact many chatbots claim to feel emotions.
Derek Schuurman, a Canadian who teaches computer science at Calvin University in Michigan, said the following about AI: “By elevating the status of our machines, we reduce the distinctiveness of human beings who are uniquely made in God’s image. Once the lines are blurred, it is a small step to begin substituting machines for human roles like a child-care robot, elder-care robots, AI girlfriends, teachers and pastors.”
Just because we can replace a job with AI, just because it’s easier or cheaper or more efficient, it doesn’t mean we should. AI doesn’t have the Holy Spirit. It isn’t made in the image of God. And like countless other human creations, we are prone to idolizing it.
In 2 Samuel 24:24, King David is offered the gift of a threshing floor and oxen with which to make a sacrifice to God. He declines the gift and insists on paying, saying, “I will not sacrifice to the Lord my God burnt offerings that cost me nothing.”
Creativity has a cost, one that is trivialized by AI. Generative AI platforms say, in a sense, “Why spend your time or money on that when you can get it instantly with a few written prompts?”
Jon Cleland, who teaches at Heritage College and Seminary in Ontario, gets at a key issue in a recent article when he writes about AI in schools. “Perhaps a deeper issue than catching students copying from AI, then, is the question of why one would use AI at school in the first place. If creation is a part of our humanness, should writing as creation not be a distinctly human expression? And if it is, why would we want anyone, or anything, to take that from us? Students who want to submit a paper simply to get a grade have already missed the purpose of writing. Writing is about creation and formation; about learning through doing, and expression through creation.”
There is value in doing the work of writing. Creating is an act of worship to God.
What now?
Lord willing, Canada will adopt clear regulations and policies surrounding Generative AI. But for now, there are plenty of ways we can navigate this ever-changing, confusing world with wisdom and discernment.
- Stay educated. Learn about new developments in AI technology. Learn to identify AI-generated content. The blog riddance.ai and @jeremyfindsai on social media have great resources for identifying AI-generated content and scams. Faith Today columnist Joanna la Fleur has written a number of articles on AI as well. For parents in particular, stay engaged in what your kids are watching. YouTube Kids in particular is filled with disturbing AI videos.
- Support human-made creations, whether photography, books, paintings or other arts and crafts. The arts particularly suffer in the age of AI. Buy from real artists, real craftspeople. It may cost more to you, but it costs less to the environment than buying a pack of AI-generated stickers from Amazon.
- Think about your use of AI. For example, do you need to ask Chat GPT how to bake a cake, or could a Google search bring you to a blog? Instead of using AI to generate an illustration for a poster, could you take a free graphic design or photography course at a library?
- Turn off optional AI features. Many apps automatically opt-in to AI features (Google’s Gmail, for example, will summarize emails and offer suggestions with Gemini AI). But you can often turn these features off if you wish to protect your privacy. Check the settings – AI is often listed under privacy.
Generative AI is a complex, always evolving issue. It’s okay to have mixed feelings.
But I pray that Christians can stand out and speak truth amidst the slop and distrust. We should be the first to support human-made art and creativity. As the Church, we are called to reach out to those who are lonely or isolated.
The world will know we are Christians not by how well we use the newest AI tech to make our ministry more efficient, but by how we show God’s love through real human connection.
Abby Ciona of Brantford, Ont., is communications assistant at Faith Today. Computer photo:
Christian Lue on Unsplash.