ChatGPT is making more ripples across more industries than any other artificial intelligence innovation. Will it take our jobs or solve our problems? Though our headlines and feeds are soaked with anxiety and speculation, we’re asking the wrong questions.

If ChatGPT flooded an entire industry and sunk the human workforce today, its daily and eternal impact is deeper still.

In this episode of the Good Faith podcast, host Curtis Chang sits down with his good friend and best-selling author Andy Crouch who’s extensively written on healthy relationships in a technologized world.

Together, they explore:

• The issues ChatGPT can and cannot solve;
• How ChatGPT’s supervisors and moderators affect output;
• The folly of the societal quest to find magical tech solutions;
• How AI feeds into our desire to fool and be fooled;
• The importance of worshiping the incarnate Christ, not tech’s discarnate promises; and
• Aligning our use of AI with our design and destination.

CURTIS CHANG: People typically form two big camps on opposite sides of any new technology. The first says it’s a source of evil and we should never use it. The second sees something as benign as a mirror that we should use whenever we like. ChatGPT is no different. But Andy, I’m not convinced of either extreme. How do you see it?

ANDY CROUCH: People look at ChatGPT backward because they are so preoccupied with the “instrumental impact” of artificial intelligence. Will ChatGPT replace artists, engineers, and writers? Are we pushing the tech snowball past the point of no return? Either you will use the tool or be replaced by the tool.

But as you hinted, these are not the most important questions. These are not even an accurate picture of what ChatGPT can do. We keep asking how technology can leverage, enhance, or threaten our activities. But we should ask, with more investment, how might this technology spiritually form us?

CURTIS CHANG: For starters, ChatGPT removes us from our work. And without true work, we are without formation and virtue. It’s easy to forget the formative power of work is sometimes more important than the end result. AI is often championed as a savior from labor, which, on the other side of the unearned coin, is just work without virtue.

ChatGPT is analogous to electromagnetic radiation: an acutely useful source of energy when specifically channeled, and a source of mutation in high and generalized doses. If we’re not careful with how we leverage AI, we’re risking mutation and deformation in our souls.

ANDY CROUCH: Absolutely. Ironically, we don’t just become weaker when we outsource our efforts, we become more troubled with toil. We don’t feel better after an “easy day” of Zoom meetings, Google searches, chatbots, and pings. We feel worse. And to decompress, we watch Netflix and scroll social media and watch the Roomba roll by. We need to value ourselves and others enough to encourage deep work and deep rest, not toil and leisure.

Plus, the magic of ChatGPT (and every social media platform) relies on people doing real, painful toil. Content moderators work for $2 dollars a day in vulnerable countries to ensure the most gruesome content stays out of your feed. People forget to look behind the curtain: ChatGPT relies on human beings to manage and moderate the magic.

Which begs the question, who is supervising? Are their values aligned with our own?

CURTIS CHANG: That is certainly unsettling.

ANDY CROUCH: Yeah, and besides increasing our toil, the most unsettling trend in tech is the dream of discarnation. With every new wave of technology, there’s always been a transhumanist undercurrent: life would be so much better if we didn’t have bodies, this troublesome planet, these mortal limits. Life would be so much better if it weren’t so human.

And yet, we know God chose to be human. He was born of a woman and grew up poor and died painfully. And this is the key, this incarnate reality, that unlocks eternal possibility in the world. The discarnate promises of technology have nothing on the promises of life in the world to come.

CURTIS CHANG: We forget, in this pursuit of magical solutions, that we are yearning for the resurrection. The more technology takes us away from our human design and incarnate God, the more we’re headed for a dead-end destination.

So how do we ground ourselves in this higher reality?

ANDY CROUCH: Well, let’s take one of the most touted fears about ChatGPT: the student has ChatGPT do their homework for them. They don’t actually believe their teacher loves them enough to care about personal formation. They believe, like technology itself, their teacher is instrumental – an obstacle to pass through as they upgrade their life. But if the student knew the teacher loved them enough to care about their formation? The student would learn to care about their work too.

God designed us for more than a life of inputs, outputs, and upgrades. God designed us for love.

I remind myself of this every day by going outside in the morning to feel that I am very small, and God is very large. There is more to this world than my concerns. There is more beauty in this world than I can bring into my home. It’s a grounding practice that orients my heart, soul, and mind back to my true design.

And the more that we can build on the human design for love, the less concern I have about ChatGPT and all layers of tech. The spirituality of any technology starts by being a humble human.