Have we been trained to seek the Right Answer as quickly as possible rather than struggle through figuring things out for ourselves? Do we help our children short cut to the solution when we notice they're having a hard time? It's not helping them.
In fact, it's making us all susceptible to the illusion of efficiency AI brings. When we chat with AI, it feels like we're short-cutting research and getting right to answers. AI is always affirming, and will make something up rather than tell you it doesn't know.
A friend once compared AI to a lazy 14-year-old boy: you have to verify all its work, it's never better than you could have done if you wanted to do it, and you sometimes have to badger it into doing what you told it to do and make it repeat its work. I do use AI several times a week with business-related tasks and have used it for research in home building, and I find the analogy accurate and useful.
Do you trust AI?
On Sunday, our pastor included an example about having ChatGPT choose your homeschool curriculum for you. I laughed. Then later I realized with dismay that people probably are actually doing that. I shared my dismay with my husband who laughed at me and said, "Oh yeah, I guarantee you people are doing that."
Then inside Scholé Sistership (a community of homeschool moms that is what you wish Facebook was – meaningful conversation, intelligent disagreements, and no drama), an older mom shared an article on how Christians are one of the most likely groups not to use AI, but to trust AI answers.
Ladies, this ought not be so.
My husband likes to remind me that AI is not thinking. It is just an algorithm, predicting the right words to put together. It is, by nature, speculation. AI has no concept of truth, only likelihood and probability. It's not even trying to tell you what is true. It operates as if there is no such thing.
Also, unless you directly tell it to search the internet, it's not even doing that to give you a nice sounding answer. If you're on a free version and tell it to search, it will use cursory, minimal resources to do so. The results you're getting are not better than (and it will be informed by) a random Reddit thread. ChatGPT, Claude, Grok–all of them–are sycophants.
AI is a sycophant, not a counselor
We never gain wisdom by surrounding ourselves with sycophantic counselors. Proverbs tells us quite the opposite.
Throughout the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the histories, we see the faithless kings fill their courts with prophets that sound like they're speaking with a word of the Lord, but are really just telling the kings and the people what they want to hear. When the true prophet enters the room, everyone gets mad. It's the true prophet who gets in trouble.
The prime biblical example of listening to sycophantic counselors is Rehoboam. He actually has experienced, wise counselors in his court, the ones who helped his father, David, rule justly. But he turns to his peers who flatter his desire to be greater than his father. Because he doubles-down on his own pride and rejects wisdom, God tears the kingdom out of his hands.
Tales of history repeat the same theme. Wise kings have a multitude of counselors, distribute rather than personally accrue power, read, and humble themselves before God. Kings that want to aggrandize themselves fill their courts with sycophants--and such kings are more common than wise ones.
We are kings ourselves now. We might not have political power or grand courts, but we have more wealth on a daily basis than the majority of the rulers throughout time, especially when we count knowledge as wealth.
As rulers of our own little domains, administers of our household, queens in the heart of our homes, where do we go for wisdom? How do we find and filter knowledge to make good decisions? We do need to make such decisions, and yet most of us were given an education that trained us to comply and get along rather than weigh and consider.
You are a ruler; your advisors matter
I was homeschooled, and I had to get along with my siblings and comply with my parents, but my parents' act of homeschooling at the time was itself a lack of compliance, a refusal to accept status quo and "just get along and go with the flow." Homeschoolers from the 80s and 90s are either ok with being weird or they chose to go full-worldly in some flavor.
But mere homeschooling, especially these days, is no guarantee of passing along a spirit of defiance of the world's standards and expectations nor a guarantee of independence.
If you do homeschool, you are annexing a whole extra little kingdom into your household. You have a million more decisions to make and many more mores to establish on your own. If you homeschool, you cannot operate with an employee, servant, just-go-along mindset and stick it out for very long.
Both homeschooling and homemaking require leadership, rule, dominion. Having AI come up with your curriculum plan, your cleaning schedule, or even your menu plan is choosing ease and speed over wisdom IF you believe that what AI gives you is the best path forward, is a better plan than you could have come up with.
AI is a lazy slave
Now, I have played with AI to come up with various kinds of life management plans. I've also spent a couple decades making up my own plans. I haven't followed any of AI's plans, but I also have a poor track record of following my own.
ChatGPT is so confident. It will give you a plan that it tells you is tailored to your needs and your situation. It tells you all the sweet-talking words that coax you into believing it. If you ask a question or correct something, it takes all the responsibility and compliments you for catching it out. It is a sycophant.
If you are going to use it to help you brainstorm, consider options, or research, you have to treat it like a lazy slave, not a trusted advisor. It might be a helpful workhorse, but not a font of wisdom and sound counsel.
It has the very real potential to be a Wormtongue in your house.
If you are chatting with AI about anything and talking to it through the keyboard as if it were a thinking, reasoning, intelligent, caring person, then please listen: Go on an AI detox right now.
AI plans and conversation are shortchanging yourself. It's choosing shortcuts and sycophants. You're undermining your own ability to think and reason and apply while also reinforcing the assumption that you can't do it without someone "smarter" than you.
Get wisdom biblically
Instead, Proverbs says: Get wisdom, and whatever you get, get insight. AI has no wisdom or insight, only the illusion of it. It's only a fancy algorithm and prediction machine. The Bible tells us how to get wisdom.
Get wisdom from reading Scripture. The more you have Scripture on your tongue, the more wise you will be. Read it, listen to it, study it enough that it's in your head to refer to and check things against.
Get wisdom from a multitude of human counselors who are beyond you in some way. Don't trust one source. Don't choose a guru and do whatever the one person says. Ask around. Get people's experiences. Listen to other people's advice. Mash it up into your own experience and prayerfully integrate it into your own decision making process. Don't go looking for the expert with the definitive solution – and definitely don't think that AI will fill that position.
Get wisdom through prayer. Wisdom is a gift from God. He sends it through means, but we should always be pleading for it directly from the source. He loves to provide for the requests for the things He has told us to ask for.
Get wisdom through experience. James 1 says:
If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.
This verse, of course, is an admonition to pray for wisdom as I said above. But remember the verses just prior to this:
Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials fof various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.
One way that God answers the prayer for wisdom is by sending us experience, struggles, trials, difficulties, hardship. It's His plan to give us wisdom, which He wants us to want.
When we seek the easy path to the right answer, it is often a desire to bypass the means of gaining wisdom ourselves. Even if it was the right answer, though, having received it via the shortcut means we missed out on the important part: wisdom.
Getting to the right answer fast is not our priority. Listening to sycophants (real or artificial) is foolish.
Using the means God has provided, become the Lady Wisdom for your own household. It will be worth it. We don't need the fast track. We need the sanctification.
For more on AI and thinking moms:
- Scholé Sisters #175: Real Human Wisdom in an Age of AI (with Cindy Rollins!!)
- Scholé Sisters #173: Think for Yourself