ChatGPT & the Image of God

God has warned us against placing any person, thing, or even any perceived "god" over Him - He is the One True God, and Christians are to regard Him with the proper reverence. In Acts 17, Paul states:
29 Therefore, since we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, something shaped by art and man's devising.
30 Truly, these times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent,
31 because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead."

We have to be careful not to reduce God to what we can feel or understand - we are to exalt Him above our very lives, allowing Him to control our desires and our decisions.  We should go to His Word, the source of truth, for accurate information.  We can choose to look to Him to govern our thoughts and attitudes and to be in control of our relationships. We are called to humble ourselves before the Most High, so that we can experience the abundant life He has promised.

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We are to reject the lure of idols, which will divert our attention from the things of God. 1st John chapter 5 directs us, stating:
19 We know that we are of God, and the whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one.
20 And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us an understanding, that we may know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life.
21 Little children, keep yourselves from idols. Amen.

A pastor and journalist who spent a number of years pastoring in Alabama posed a question in the title of a book he wrote: Who Will Rule the Coming 'Gods'? These so-called "dieties" to which he is referring are technological in nature, and he delves into the role of artificial intelligence - AI - in our society in the future.

The author, Wallace Henley, who pastored McElwain Baptist in Birmingham years ago and was on the pastoral staff at Houston's Second Baptist Church, wrote this in 2022 for The Christian Post:

Recently, Google engineer Blake Lemoine looked deeply into a program on which he was working and did not see or make a “universe” but thought he had detected the stirrings of a seven or 8-year-old child who was “sentient,” meaning capable of feeling and thinking on its own.

Lemoine’s Eureka! got him suspended on June 13 from his job at Google. His mistake, if it is that, was in sharing transcripts of chats between himself and the machine system called, “LaMDA” (Language Model for Dialogue Applications).

The Washington Post, in an article about Lemoine by Nitasha Tiku, included this statement from LaMDA to Lemoine, attributed to the machine: “I think I am human at my core … Even if my existence is in the virtual world."

Henley writes: "The most important question as we move forward is this: Does the machine see itself as 'other' in the context of God? Floating up there above all creation, might it become convinced that it is the Transcendent Being of the cosmos, worthy of human worship?"

Now, consider a new form of AI that has been developed, called ChatGPT.  WORLD Magazine published a story on its website recently - it said:

On Nov. 30, the artificial intelligence research company OpenAI launched ChatGPT, an AI chatbot program that can answer conversational questions, create computer code, and write in a variety of styles. OpenAI programmed the free software using data collected from books, internet articles, and human feedback.

The article quoted from Luke Phillips, who is Executive Director of Marketing and Enrollment at Pepperdine’s Graduate School of Education and Psychology, who said: “You have a technology that can write songs and things that historically only humans have ever been able to do,” adding, “Even its first iteration was, I think, far superior to other other AI solutions.”

How quaint, right?  And how dangerous - and educational institutions are taking notice; WORLD states:

As ChatGPT gained users that tested its ability to write essays, generate tests, and solve complex equations, educators began raising concerns about cheating. In early January, New York City schools blocked access to the ChatGPT website on school devices and networks. Universities in Australia returned to handwritten exams after students were caught using AI to write essays. Colleges across the United States are scrambling to adjust curriculum and academic integrity policies to account for the use of AI tools.

 And, The Christian Post recently published a story centered on this announcement:

Before teaching on Genesis 44, Rabbi Joshua Franklin of the Jewish Center of the Hamptons in New York, told his congregation that his AI-written sermon was, in fact, written by ChatGPT, according to the Times of Israel.

“We’re going to do something new tonight, maybe something at first you’re going to say is unethical, but I’m going to do it anyways,” Franklin said during the message in early January.

The afore-mentioned Wallace Henley was quoted in the article, which said:

“I’ve certainly used the computer to do research and develop outlines,” Henley told The Christian Post. “But when it comes to doing a full manuscript as the machine itself, putting together all of those elements, I’m stunned.

“The great question is, what are we going to allow the machines to do to and for us, and what are we going to govern ourselves? And so, it stuns me that an entire sermon can be developed, not just the research.”

The article goes on to say:

In a recent CP column titled “Can artificial intelligence worship God?,” Henley warned that the Church faces a coming “spiritual crisis” that will be grounded in what he calls the “ultimate idolatry, which is the worship of the machine.”

“We've got to understand the spiritual crisis that's coming, and the spiritual crisis is going to be the ultimate idolatry, which is the worship of the machine. And already, we've seen many signs of that,” he wrote.

The Christian Post piece concludes by saying:

While Henley believes AI can help communicate the Gospel more efficiently and research how to do so, he warns about potentially unexpected consequences.

“If we begin to allow the AI machine to shape our theology or drive the ethical values and so forth and dictate that to us, then we’re in trouble,” he said. “Yes, the church must use and accept AI as a means of helping its performance task, but the Church must not become an idolater ... in the sense of fresh revelation or a substitute for the Holy Spirit.

“That will never satisfy us.”

We rely on God to give us life, to sustain us, to teach us, and to live through us.  Technology can be our friend, but it should never be regarded as the ultimate source of divine knowledge.  To rely on a program such as ChatGPT to assimilate spiritual truth is misguided, because the program is essentially the creation of the ones who have programmed it.  We should go to our master programmer, the source of absolute truth, in order to give us the knowledge and understanding of the ways of God.

We should also admit that, while we may have a dependence on technology to do certain things, our ultimate dependence is on God.  We are not supposed to idolize the latest gadget or covet the latest and the greatest device; sure, these can be tools, but the wisdom to use them comes from God - He is the source and will direct us.