God created man in his image, and we have returned the favor. The idea comes from the notebooks Voltaire kept for his musings. While his observation is correct in how we often redraw our mental image of God, forging a god more like ourselves, the actual task of getting God to comply with our endless re-creations has proved much more difficult. And because of the difficulty, we have embarked on the next best thing: copy God and make something in our image. Stretching back into ancient Greece with its myths and creations of automatons—machines that moved on their own—people at some point decided we need to make something alive, or at least as close to alive as we can get.
Why have we felt this need? It is difficult to say. Perhaps, on the one hand, we are made to be creative in a similar though lesser way than God is creative. This is borne out when God’s people use their gifts to design and create things, like Oholiab and Bezalel did when crafting the Tabernacle and its furniture (Exodus 31:1–6), or when people use language and sound to write music, poetry, and literature to communicate about God’s character and his wonderful creation. On the other hand, maybe this need to create is just another way our sinful hearts try to replace God with ourselves. If God created us, then he is our master, but perhaps if we can master the world and create life ourselves, then we can usurp his position and become the masters of our own destiny.
Either way, create we did: animatronic puppets at Disneyland and life-like computer-generated characters in movies, but now we have come to a point where life-like movement is not enough. Something more is required. So, we made artificial intelligence (AI), something that appears to read, see, speak, think, create art, and—if given the right hardware—move. The growth of AI in terms of actual users and its abilities is astounding. But I fear that we have made a gross miscalculation in what we have done. Do we even understand what we are doing in the way we build and rely more and more on AI? I would argue we don't.
AI becomes what man has always wanted: a god in his own image.
The best way to approach this is to determine what AI functionally is at an epistemological level, that is, how is AI “thinking,” and what is it doing? There are lots of different mechanisms and algorithms at play across the different AI companies. These are referred to as AI models. Some are better; some are worse, but they all share a particular trait in common, which is frequently overlooked: They all merely recombine and restate human knowledge in different ways. The part that makes AI incredible is the speed at which it can analyze, write, or display something that would take a normal person hours to complete.
Why does this matter? Well, if human knowledge is the final reference point of everything for an unbeliever (Van Til, A Christian Theory of Knowledge, 6), and if AI is human knowledge but impossibly broader and dramatically faster, then AI has the potential to become man’s final reference point. That is, AI becomes what man has always wanted: a god in his own image.
From this perspective, AI takes the values, beliefs, knowledge, and preferences of mankind. And then it acts and reacts faster than we ever could. AI can hold millions of servers' more data than we can in our own minds, and it can in theory have access to the latest cutting-edge data as soon as it is published. AI could be as close to omniscient as the unbeliever is capable of understanding.
Psalm 115 on Idolatry
Thus, AI becomes the idol par excellence. While this sounds extreme or alarmist, let us consider how the Bible describes idols. Psalm 115:4–7 describes idols this way:
Their idols are silver and gold,
the work of human hands.
They have mouths, but do not speak;
eyes, but do not see.
They have ears, but do not hear;
noses, but do not smell.
They have hands, but do not feel;
feet, but do not walk;
and they do not make a sound in their throat.
First, idols are made by man. Here they are described as precious metals; in Isaiah 44, they are carved from wood. Second, they have the features of a living being: mouth, eyes, ears, nose, hands, and feet, but none of them function. Third, they make no sound; they do not communicate. This final piece is where one may say, “Aha! But AI does communicate. I can chat with it, and it responds in a unique way.” This is to misunderstand the difference between what AI does and what communication truly is. Communication is an essential feature both of God and of his image bearers, as is well pointed out by Pierce Taylor Hibbs in his book Wielding Words.
Communication is an act of God by which he creates, reveals, and works—even so far as the second person of the Trinity, the Son, is called “The Word.” As image-bearers, we communicate to describe, express, worship, and share. Behind God’s communication is his inscrutable and eternal will; behind our communication is our own unsanctified and finite will. Behind AI’s communication is code. The will of an AI is either the user making it communicate or the hundreds of computer scientists writing the code to give it the appearance of a communicative will. Like the idols, the appearance of ability is there, but it remains only an imitation of the real thing. It has no will to make it want to communicate what it finds interesting, funny, moving, or wonderful, because it doesn’t find things to be anything at all. It only has data points to be correlated.
Behind God’s communication is his inscrutable and eternal will; behind our communication is our own unsanctified and finite will. Behind AI’s communication is code.
So, what is the worry then? The lack of a will only makes AI a machine, which is certainly nothing negative. After all, this article was written on a machine and is likely being read on one. The worry lies in the way it is used. Much like Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park pointed out, “...Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
What then is the danger of AI? Let us consider the recent Apple commercials for their new Apple Intelligence. It features the ability to summarize your text messages and emails, to read and reword your messages for tone, impact, and voice, and to summarize various kinds of documents. The danger lies in abdicating our position as Imago Dei to AI by not communicating and receiving communication ourselves. We can end up reading so much material AI has re-written, summarized, or produced from a prompt that we begin to sound just like it. The uniqueness of our own voices becomes mute as our primary influence becomes the AIs that will inevitably all start to sound the same. The threat of Psalm 115:8 becomes very, very real. “Those who make them become like them; so do all who put their trust in them.” We’ve only swapped out wood for plastic, carving for coding; we’ve gone from handcrafted idolatry to automated idolatry.
The more we rely on AI, the more we entrust ourselves to it, and the more we lose the ability to do things that are inherently part of being image-bearers.
There are helpful ways AI can be used, though these probably reside not in the flashy, fun places advertised by tech startups and marketing companies. The best uses are probably quite boring to most people, but exciting to those who can speed up a tedious process so creativity can begin, but that is for another article.
To be made in God’s image means we are not just able to process and display, but we are called to create and express ourselves. This is a wonderful, glorious thing. But when we use that creativity to fashion something to think, speak, and create for us, we start to abdicate our role as Imago Dei and in a sense become less human. By delegating our God-given task to coding, we deny who we are and who God is. When the massive flood of AI-generated content drowns out both the well-crafted painting shared on Instagram and the random shower-thought posted to X, we might finally understand that the punishment for the idol maker is true. Our voices will be buried under the rising volume of AI-content, our vision will be blinded by the warping and blending of reality, and our hearing will be deafened by the noise of AI voices speaking AI-generated opinions.
We will end up having nothing to say, nothing to see, and nothing worth listening to or looking at anyway, because we will have been overtaken and crushed under the weight of the idol we built for ourselves.