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I’ve noticed a disturbing trend lately; the rise of AI generated writings on Facebook and blogs. I won’t deny that I’ve used AI in some of my writings. I’ve been quite candid about it in my blog post “How I Will And Will NOT Use AI“. But my usage is minimal and really boils down to it being an editorial tool like inserting biblical references when I summarize all the “Omni attributes” of God in a sentence, or heavily paraphrasing an author (while still citing them as the source of the thought) without having to directly quote them at length and risk violating fair use (and this can also be helpful in taking what an author said in MANY words and condensing them down from, say, 7 paragraphs to 3). But aside from it being what I like to call a “Glorified Clippy”, I don’t make too much use of it. I write what I think and feel and believe. If I were to have an AI do more than that 1% I use it for, it wouldn’t even be worth it.

I don’t want to name the blogs I suspect of being completely, 100% AI generated, because all I have are suspicions, not hard evidence. But I’ve noticed that they don’t just use AI images for their thumbnails like moi, but they also produce copious amounts of articles in a short amount of time, and their writings are full of “AI-isms”. AI-isms are things like an over abundance of emm dashes, starting the articles with “What if I told you…”, and an over abundance of the “It’s not X, it’s Y” way of speaking.

And it’s not just blog posts….darn it, AI is beginning to influence how I talk isn’t it….? Anyway, beyond blog posts, I followed a YouTube channel for a while called “Deep Bible Stories” and I definitely don’t mind naming this channel because I would bet the house on it being AI generated. It had AI imagery and voice over, which I was fine with. But before I got accustomed to the way AI chat bots spoke, I was under the impression that the majority of the script was written by a person. All the videos were 1 hour sermons. And they even went through whole books of The Bible. But, every video began with “What If I Told You?”, used the “It’s not X, it’s Y” figure of speech in just about every other sentence, and here’s what really made me suspicious; I could not get caught up with all of their new releases! This channel was releasing a new video every single day! A new 1 hour video preaching every single day! Sometimes 2 or 3 new videos in one day! Even if this was a small team of pastors, I just can’t conceive of that level of human output! I highly, HIGHLY suspect that I was listening to Pastor ChatGPT, rather than real humans who actually studied God’s word, prayed over their sermons, did research in their office, and put their sermon into an AI voice generator.

ElevenLabs practically includes “making podcasts” in their marketing. I used to think that AI was going to replace musicians and painters, but now I’m thinking it’s coming for the blogger, the YouTuber, the podcaster, anyone who could generate literally anything. And here’s what terrifying; content creation is also a competitive market. You have to make your stuff be seen and heard. You have to fight algorithms, ever decreasing attention spans of your audience, and having to deal with hundreds of other creators vying for readers, watchers, or listeners attention. Even though all I’m doing here lately is putting out an occasional blog post or book, I was thinking about making another podcast some day. My plan was to do an expositional Bible teaching podcast, where we’d look at the biblical text chapter and verse until we got done with the book, as opposed to the topical nature of The Cerebral Faith Podcast I made from 2019-2024.

But if I’m having to compete with professionally sounding radio DJ voices teaching through whole books of The Bible in the time it would take me to even open up my Logos app, I can’t help but ask myself the question “Is it really worth it?”

I am beginning to think that making online content just isn’t worth the time and effort anymore. You cannot compete with a robot. None of us can. In the time it took me to type this out on my phone as I waited at the DMV, an AI could have written 4 or 5 articles.

So what to do, will I use AI to generate an entire pieces of content? Again, I don’t even see the point in that. That isn’t to say that I’m going to stop making content here. I plan to keep the Cerebral Faith blog going until I have 1,000 articles or my first child arrives, whichever comes first. But it definitely is a morale deflator. And as for podcasting or YouTubing, I’m starting to heavily rethink that. It may just be good for me to lead a local body of believers in a class and do street evangelism in order to reach people. Because my prediction is that the blogosphere, the podcasting world, and YouTube will be completely inundated in a few years with AI generated stuff.

While I think it’s ridiculous to be against people using AI altogether, I can also sympathize with their angry feelings about it. These undoubtedly stem from fear, fear that they will replace us in all areas. Fear that we will move to a world where no man picks up a paint brush, a guitar, or a pen, and every man can be a musician or an artist if they just write a prompt and hit ENTER. And so I try not to make fun of these people anymore for being “anti-technology”‘ or being “boomers”.

There’s a book Brian Chilton co-authored titled “Stewarding AI”. I haven’t read it yet, but I’d like to. Because as Christians, we need to have conversations based on biblical values about how to and how not to use this technology that appeared in our hands seemingly overnight. This technology CAN be a good thing for humanity if we use it correctly. Unfortunately, I highly doubt we will. And so, I will continue to make content on this blog as long as I feel like, but I definitely am struggling with the sinking feeling that I’m going to have to compete with robots. But as the idea of a “Cerebral Faith Bible Study” podcast, that may not come to pass if I feel like I have to compete with robots.

I’m turning 34 soon. And I really would like to get married and have a kid before I get too old to do it. I’m not going to use what tiny bit of free time I may or may not have to make online content for people who might not even see or hear it because they’re too busy eating up the AI slop. There’s a part of me that thinks that it would be far more worth my time to invest in teaching a local body of believers who want to go deeper in their knowledge of the scriptures, and to equip them to defend their faith and obey 1 Peter 3:15, while loving my future wife as Christ loves the church and training my children up in the way they should go (Ephesians 5:25, Proverbs 22:6). But then when I have those thoughts, I can’t help but wonder if that isn’t going to contribute to the problem? Because I can’t be the only person having these thoughts. The painter, the guitar player, the piano player, the drummer, the singer, the comic book artist, the podcast, the YouTuber, and other bloggers, like myself may all be having the same thoughts. if we throw in the towel and truly stop creating organic generated material, then the AI generated stuff is the only thing that’s going to be left. But then, we can’t compete with computers. There’s already a lot of AI generated music on Spotify, and I’m gonna be honest, it sounds really good.

I don’t want to end this blog post on a negative note. One thing that I think might be a positive outcome of all this AI takeover is that it might make us get off of our screens and start spending more time with each other. I already mentioned that it may only be worth teaching a Bible class in person and doing apologetics with unbelievers in person. Not that I haven’t been doing that here and there, but I may invest more time into that if Cerebral Faith isn’t my main outlet of using my gift of teaching. If I do that, you know what I’m going to be doing? I’m not just going to be teaching and preaching, I’m going to be building relationships. I’m going to be building a community. And I can see other people getting off of their screens because there’s nothing worth looking at, going outside, and going to a concert just so that they can hear a guy play an acoustic guitar and know that he’s really there and not an AI generated video of a guy playing an acoustic guitar. Perhaps Yahweh is allowing this to force us all to, as the kids say, “touch grass”. Maybe we’ll move to a society where everyone knows their neighbors again? Maybe I’m being too optimistic, maybe I’m not. Who knows? Only the omniscient God does.

Finally, yes, I recognize the irony of having an AI generated thumbnail. And also, If you have the time, check out the song “Human In Us All” by Sunset Rebellion. It speaks to the issue I’m getting at , based on my interpretation of the lyrics.

Peace out, God bless, and don’t let an AI think for you. Use the brain that God gave you.