Diane Hockridge
28 August 2024
Stephen Driscoll. Made in Our Image: God, artificial intelligence and you (Matthias Media, 2024)
Artificial Intelligence suddenly seems to be everywhere, and everyone has an opinion about where AI is heading and how we should engage with it. This recent flurry of interest is partly due to the entry of ChatGPT into the public arena in late 2022, which brought “generative AI” to general attention. If you are in any way connected with teaching or education, you will have heard of ChatGPT and the ever-growing range of “large language model” generative AI tools, that respond to our questions in an enticingly human-like manner.
To what extent should we engage with these new AI tools? To what extent should we be cautious? Is generative artificial intelligence conscious, and does it pose an existential risk to humanity? These are some of the questions Stephen Driscoll deals with in this very readable book, which offers a biblical perspective on artificial intelligence.
Driscoll believes something big is happening. He says we are currently experiencing an exponential leap, which sometimes occurs in technological advances. The future is going to be different, and we need to sit up and take notice. Christians need to engage with these questions, he says, because we have something concrete to offer to the conversation about the place of AI in our lives.
Read more: ‘A gift we need to steward well’: AI meets Christianity
This book takes us through a biblical framework, touching on the key points of creation, sin, the cross, and new creation to help us frame our response to AI. It is not however, a dry or academic biblical theology, rather Driscoll insightfully diagnoses and responds to some of the key issues we currently face. For example, the chapter on creation and AI helpfully homes in on our society’s obsession with questions of identity. As humans created in God’s image, our humanity identity involves far more than our intelligence. God made us humans from “dust” (created matter) and gave us his breath of life. Artificial intelligence, Driscoll says, remain firmly in the “dust” category. Generative AI tools can mimic human communication, they can analyse massive amounts of data in the blink of an eye, they are becoming smarter and more impressive every day, but they do not have “spirit”, they are not human.
The chapters on human sinfulness and the cross take us into some scary but realistic scenarios. Generative AI language tools (like Chat GPT, Claude, or Microsoft CoPilot) are fed large amounts of information from the internet and instructed to imitate human language. Perhaps not surprisingly, these tools initially tended to replicate the kind of nastiness and abuse that fills the comments sections of websites or social media platforms. That is, they mirrored human sinfulness. Such responses need to be trained out of the AI tools through “reinforcement learning”. The human (or potentially the AI) that does this reinforcement learning therefore has enormous power in deciding what is a “good” response, and which responses need to be trained out of the AI. As Driscoll says, our understanding that humans are innately sinful leads us to conclude such power will be misused, even where there may be good intent.
Despite the potential for misuse of AI, the overall tone this book is hopeful, and it is frequently entertaining. By helping us to think about AI in relation to the big biblical ideas of creation, sin, redemption, and new creation, Driscoll encourages us to be realistic about the impact of these new technologies, while also looking for positive ways to use them for good.
Read more: Time will judge AI’s ethical implications
Driscoll has certainly taken on a challenge in writing this book. It’s difficult to talk about “artificial intelligence” in general because AI is in fact many different things. This results in some inconsistency in Driscoll’s language – at one point AI is described as “us (humans), but free of our very limited biological brains and erratic memories”, at another it is described as “more in the category of smart calculator than human person”.
It’s also challenging to write about AI because the pace of change is ridiculously fast. Driscoll acknowledges this book is written for this time, and some of its content will date rapidly, but its consideration of AI in the light of the biblical framework will add to its longevity. This book offers easily understood and biblically based principles to guide Christians in responding to AI. If you are wondering whether or how to use AI, in your workplace, in your ministry, in your personal context, this book is a good place to start.
Diane Hockridge is a faculty member of Ridley College.
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