Should Christians Use AI in Worship? Nathan and Cameron on the Morality Behind Modern Church Practices
Nathan (00:01)
Hello and welcome to Thinking Out Loud. I'm your co-host, Nathan Rittenhouse.
Cameron (00:04)
and I'm your co-host Cameron McAllister.
Nathan (00:06)
Here's a little thought experiment for those of you who are listening. Would you eat an apple from a tree that you knew to be planted by a child molester?
Now, I mean, what a weird question is that. But where we're going with this is, what is the degree to which we are comfortable with the morality of people who produce things that we use? That's one category. And then we're going to shift that into thinking about like church, music, AI sermons, the morality of people who are involved in our forms of worship. And it gets
There are a couple of tricky things here. I, you know, all sorts of ways we can get into this. But for example, some of the best Christian artists out there right now, or I should use artist in quotes, aren't real. So you have AI generated, you know, Christmas music that sounds very good, but doesn't have a human element to it at all. And so I think a lot of people are starting to wrestle with the idea. Let me lay this out for you in two ways and then get you to jump in here of saying, are we okay with worship music?
that isn't produced by a human. The next step back from that is to say, are you okay with worship music that is produced by non-Christians? Is there a difference there? And so the apple tree and the child molester are a bit extreme, and probably our personalities and some of our moral frames of reference would maybe function more out of disgust on that one rather than it is out of discernment. But what is the degree
Cameron (01:45)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Nathan (01:59)
And those are false equivalents. we'll show that, by the way, that that question I asked doesn't match on to what we're talking about here. But what are your initial hunches here, Cameron, on... Because I mean, would say, say you're... you know, somebody's using AI to summarize the business meeting, like the church board notes ⁓ of, you know, leadership forum or something. Okay. I think most people would be like, ⁓ that's fine. ⁓ On the other hand, when it comes into actual worship and actual teaching,
What are some of the ways in which we can even start asking the right questions about what are the boundaries here on ⁓ AI-generated content or content that we think is produced by morally scrupulous people?
Cameron (02:29)
Mm-hmm.
Well, one factor to note, I think initially is that sometimes, I mean, it's going to happen. We're not going to be aware of it. So there's a level of, of just, yeah, where, where we will, you'll hear some use some snatch of music or you'll see a video and you'll be fooled by it. So I think we have, we have to acknowledge that we, we don't always know. But then once we, so once we come to the recognition that
Nathan (03:04)
Mm-hmm.
Cameron (03:12)
AI, that AI is present, then things change a little bit. A general principle that I have adopted lately, and this is such a fast moving field, is that AI is a wonderful tool and a terrible master, or AI is a wonderful tool, can be a wonderful tool, and a terrible substitute. So if I am using it to, for instance, I know somebody who took old music.
poorly recorded and then used AI to produce it in a number of different genres. And what came out the other end sounded like something you'd hear on the radio. Now, I think using that to envision where the song could go or what a song could sound like, what's its past crude production, I think could be a really helpful tool in guiding the work. But if that becomes a lazy substitute,
and then you have something artificial that comes out on the other end, then I think we do have a problem.
Nathan (04:17)
Okay, so here would be my pushback is that I think we have lived in a time in which so much of what we have that is closer to like ⁓ commercial quality already has been so artificially engineered that it's very difficult to draw the distinguishing line between I mean auto tunes already been out there for singers the way in which all of this can be reshot and mastered and manipulated. There's a sense in which a lot of the
consumer level value of artistic material already feels so contrived. ⁓ You know, it's the joke that I made about, so you have, when we talked about what, Tilly Norwood or whoever the AI actress is, I'm like, already our professional actresses don't look like real humans. So why should we be surprised when we, you know, have a digital representation now of, ⁓ so that I guess is AI new in this way, or is this just an acceleration of an already
ambiguous warping of human products and the way in which we consume them.
Cameron (05:20)
It's an acceleration. In music, it's easy to point to this, especially in pop music. People have been, you know, the synthesizer has been used in this sense. Programming has been used in a studio for a long time. We've seen a shift away from songwriting as the central focus to production. And so it's an acceleration for sure. But the acceleration is so rapid. We're having a hard time wrapping our heads around it at this point. ⁓
Nathan (07:35)
But is.
I guess
maybe this but music has always been an artistic form that has Been seen as so soulful and personal and intimate it is one of those artistic expressions that it was a uniquely human thing I mean sure you can have a wolf howling at the moon, but there's a way in which it feels like there's a sacred line Even I think for non-religious people to say that here. Here's a ⁓ song or a sound that isn't yeah, help me
Cameron (07:52)
Yep.
Mm-hmm.
So can I point some?
Let me point something out here that's really interesting. So a number of years ago, there was a thinker named, his name is Mark Fisher. Unfortunately, he took his own life several years ago, but he was very interested in, in kind of trends in technology. And he was, he was somewhat of a philosopher and he talked about, and he was, he was English. He talked about when EDM music emerged on the scene, electronic dance music. And he celebrated this. Now he was a.
I think it's fair. He was a cultural Marxist. This is how he defined himself. He saw what he celebrated about electronic dance music, which is in many ways, it lacks those features you just mentioned, Nathan. It doesn't have a very human sound. In fact, and it's music that prioritizes function over form. It is meant to serve the purpose of facilitating dancing, preferably in a club setting, something like that. And it also is meant to power
Nathan (08:53)
Mm-hmm.
Cameron (09:09)
drug usage, all of that, mean, all of that culture, which he celebrated by the way, the raver culture, all of that, what he celebrated about it, it was very interesting. He celebrated it as something genuinely new. And what he meant by that was, if you took somebody playing, Bob Dylan playing guitar back to the middle ages, it would be strange but decipherable to them. EDM would be utterly alien. And to his mind, this was a good thing because, and he kind of represents a little bit,
Nathan (09:32)
Mm-hmm.
Cameron (09:39)
sort of, he, from, to me, puts together some of the differing mindset. Some people will, will react very strongly and they'll say, this is inhuman. This is frightening. This is gross. I don't like this. And others will say, this is wonderful. It's the future. You should embrace it. Stop being so backwards. And so I think that's just a very vivid way of kind of, of, of putting that in and putting that into words.
Nathan (10:02)
⁓ that is
a vivid way of doing it, but it makes the question more challenging for us. So let's say you have ⁓ EDM music is constructed to elicit a certain response from a crowd. Let's take those metrics and say, Hey, can we engineer music in a worship context or a large church setting that is engineered in order to elicit a certain response from a large crowd? And the answer to that is yes. Yes, you absolutely can. And it's been done for a long time.
Cameron (10:30)
Yes. Yes.
Nathan (10:32)
We'll just be better at that now. ⁓ And so there is like, ⁓
Cameron (10:37)
So at the risk of taking us into somewhat speculative territory, although I don't think it's too speculative, I've done quite a bit of thinking on this with regard to the arts. Nathan, bring us into church territory here in a second, because I think we need to talk about sermons. let's think about the arts for just a moment. So can you engineer a kind of very strong emotional response connected to religious imagery? Absolutely, you can. Can you engineer a genuine spiritual
Nathan (11:01)
Mm-hmm.
Cameron (11:07)
response, a general genuine spiritual experience. I don't, I don't think you can engineer it. Not quite the same way. And one example I would point to is in films. There are certain films that are, I would say legitimately spiritual in nature. What's remarkable about that is that everything in cinema, cinema militates against a genuine spiritual experience. Cinema is, as Paul Schroeder says,
seductive in its guts. It is made to seduce you with images. And it is the most probably, you can make an argument that it's one of the most emotionally manipulative of all the arts because it can win you a picture is worth a thousand words. It can win you with an image, but not just, these are moving pictures. It does so much more. And music, you can swell the music. You can do a closeup of a human face. can, through techniques of editing,
You can engineer a response in your audience. In fact, that's what we expect from most entertainment. We expect it to do all of our feeling and thinking for us. The music will come in, here's how you should feel about this character. They look a certain way, here's how this character should be perceived. A genuinely spiritual film will be slower and contemplative and that is designed to make you an active participant. So some of the films and then the place to point to here is
There was a famous book, famous being a relative term before you make fun of me for it. But in the world of cinema, Transcendental Style and Film is a pretty famous book. It's a very celebrated book by Paul Schrader, who is himself a screenwriter and a director. But he wrote this when he was about 24 years old, very pioneering study. But he looks at films by, one film is Robert Brason and the film is Pickpocket. Films like this, which are.
Very slow. Some people would just say this is incredibly boring, but what it's designed to do is it has minimal use of music. It has very, very slow editing. The point is to get to instill in the viewer a genuine spiritual experience, but that experience has to come. It's on you in a sense. You have to actively participate with it. It's not unlike actively participating in worship. There's a similar dynamic there.
Nathan (13:26)
Okay.
I see a difference. I see a difference. And listening to you helped me sort this out. You do not watch a Paul Schrader film and think, by watching this, I will become like Paul Schrader. And I think maybe this is a theological distinction, is that you and I have talked many times about how in Christianity, particularly in the life of Christ Himself, the medium and the message can't be separated from each other.
Cameron (13:43)
Mm-hmm.
Nathan (13:54)
that there's something intrinsic about the way in which Christ is that validates what it is that he said. And if you look at the biblical injunction on leadership all the way through, it's about outstanding integrity and character. Paul's saying, follow me as I follow Christ. There is an integral, you are to become like your leaders mindset and you are to become like Christ through actual worship. So if worship,
Cameron (14:01)
Mm-hmm.
Nathan (14:21)
is about a listening to response or giving you a feeling or making you satisfied or you enjoy the rhythm. If it's on the border of entertainment, you're going to answer this question differently than if you think actually worship is spiritual formation. And the person who is leading me in this is in themselves modeling a lifestyle and something that I desire to grow into because it conforms and comports. With the model that Christ and the teachings that Christ left us, so it.
It seems different when we bring this into a theological or a church context because, okay, let's say that somebody writes a catchy country music song and they're a bit of a goober in their normal life. ⁓ that's kind of expected. However, if you have somebody who is performing a worship song for you and you see worship as something that elicits a response in you for the duration of that song, you're going to respond to this differently than if you think, no, actually when I'm
Cameron (15:05)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Nathan (15:19)
Worshipping with this person is participatory and they actually are leading me into a ⁓ form of formation
that is or isn't expressed in their life, that's different. ⁓ And so, I think it's just fascinating we have such lower standards for the music part of worship than we do for the preaching and teaching part of worship, because I would say that your musical ⁓ leaders in your church are every bit as, if not maybe more so, influential in the theology of a congregation. I mean, people have a song stuck in their head on Tuesday morning.
Cameron (15:32)
Yep. Yes.
Nathan (15:58)
Usually they don't have three or four paragraphs from a sermon stuck in their head on a Tuesday morning. So it's, we're chewing on a lot of things at the same time here, but there does seem to me to be a difference between that participatory or entertainment version.
Cameron (15:59)
Mm-hmm.
We have
Well, we're describing a number of trends that are inherently dehumanizing that are already in the air and have been the air for a long time and have kind of made our AI moment land particularly well in some ways. And I don't think for better or for worse, we tend to look, so music, we have, we pre-condition ourselves. That's a way better, easier way to say it. We look at music in terms, we look at it as,
Nathan (16:30)
Mm-hmm. We've preconditioned ourselves.
Cameron (16:42)
kind of almost mood curation these days. But even before that, I mean, because, that's in the advent of playlists and all of that, I don't need to belabor that point. But we've looked at music and art and performance in non-participatory ways for a long time. It's just something that we, this is something that we single out for contemplation. And I'll never forget one of the really powerful insights here came from Nicholas Woltersdorf.
And this was the central, I think the central insight that's that kind of helped him write his book, Art in Action. And it's in that title, Art in Action. So for a long time, we had been, you know, if you're thinking about the arts or entertainment or anything like that, one of the activities is just contemplation. You're supposed to just enjoy it, sit back and contemplate it. But especially if you went into the rarefied circles of art galleries.
What you're supposed to do in that space is just look at the piece in a disinterested fashion. I believe the major art critic here was Arthur Donto, who would say that, you you want to contemplate the object. And one day it occurred to Nicholas Woltersdorf was listening to an NPR program on work songs. I've mentioned this on the podcast before, but I'm old and I repeat myself. So here we go. But yeah, work songs for songs of basket weavers or people who are building train tracks. These were sung by people as they did a job. And it occurred.
Nathan (17:56)
Mm.
Cameron (18:07)
There was an odd kind of disparity between Woltersdorf sitting in his home on a Saturday afternoon and just listening to this for fun and contemplation and the actual function of the song itself, which was meant to power the work. And it was meant to be sung in community together. It was a participatory thing. And then he made the connection with hymns. And he said, so worship songs, especially hymns. Hymns don't come into their own when we contemplate them in a disinterested fashion.
Nathan (18:27)
Mm-hmm.
Cameron (18:36)
or listen to them as though they're just some private work of art. They come into their own when we sing together and we praise Jesus. That's how they really come alive. When you think about worship in those terms, there's a holistic gathering together of all the human elements. Also, what you were mentioning earlier, Nathan, the fact that the people who are leading worship, ideally, these people who do this are, this is a sacred vocation.
As such, it's important they're held to a higher standard. Who they are matters more than their skill as performers.
Nathan (19:16)
Well, do remember the story I told about speaking at the church in, uh, I think it was in New York and I walked in early and the band was phenomenal. And I was like, wow, they're kicking. then like something stopped in the middle of song, everybody turned and started yelling at each other. And somebody from the church came up and said, Hey, sorry about all this, you know, racket. These, these people aren't even Christians. We just hired them to come in and do our worship music for us on Sunday mornings. Um, I think most people have a little bit of a response to that. It was like something fills off there, but.
I was sharing that story and then I was talking about AI and then Lindsay who many of you met on the podcast recently for the first time who lives in Nashville was saying that the behind the scenes Christian music industry and world is full of deeply cynical people who aren't even Christian to a certain degree because they're like, Hey, these people are just making music to make money and they've got to produce it. And it's, mean, it's just a business. And so it's an industry. Yeah. And, and so there's, can be jaded.
Cameron (20:11)
It's an industry. Yeah.
Nathan (20:16)
There is a way, I think, that you could be cynical enough, Cameron, that you're like, okay, everything's off the table. Psh, Hems, who knows what Fanny Crosby was up to? I can't use that. So there isn't a level of human purity here that we can say, this person has to be perfect in order for me to use the material or the tools that they're producing. But I've been wondering, and this is just fresh in my mind when I say I've been wondering, I've been thinking about this for about 30 seconds.
Is there a little bit of a, a food, a food sacrifice to idols thing going on here? Like if you are worship, like, so let's say there's a song and that your, your church is singing and it was written by somebody who doesn't really believe that it's true, but the people who are singing it and the, and the worship, really is a way in which people are vocally collectively honoring God with their voices. Is that still worship that is acceptable to God? And I would say.
Cameron (20:54)
Hmm. Sure.
Nathan (21:15)
Yeah. The flip side of that, the flip side of that would be if you knew some of the details, ⁓ and this happens, ⁓ Biblical authors, teachers, preachers, kind of takes the spunk out of reading their books for me. And I don't feel like it's necessary to, know, so, so if you remember that, okay.
Cameron (21:17)
I think so.
Okay. You brought in something important
that I brought in at the beginning, awareness. If you know that changes the dynamic, if you don't know and you are innocently singing and genuinely praising Jesus, I think you're just fine. But when you're aware, that can change things. Yes.
Nathan (21:50)
So the apple is good because an apple is good. So back
to my original thing, independent of who planted the tree, the apple tree is a good thing, and apples are good.
Cameron (22:02)
We tied ourselves in knots culturally over this for a while. It seems to be dying down a bit over disgraced artists. Now there are degrees here. A disgraced artist is one thing, a disgraced minister is something else. So we'll tease that out in a second. And both Nathan and I know a little something about working closely with disgraced ministers. Yes, sadly. But, some of you do, plenty of you do as well. But a disgraced artist.
Nathan (22:21)
thing or two or three or four.
Cameron (22:31)
I'll name one. mean, I know there are many disgraced artists whose work I appreciate. One worth bringing up is Woody Allen. I've actually been at an event, this was many years ago, in which I quoted Woody Allen and somebody was offended because of who he is. And you can, I mean, I'm not going to rehearse everything. You look up Woody Allen and see he's led a very, he's got a checkered past. He's not a Christian at all.
But he's a great, he is a very, he's a fine artist. So was Ernest Hemingway. So was, I mean, we can go down the list of so was Picasso. Picasso did some truly wretched things. So that's one, that's part of just the crooked timber of humanity. But, and so do they not make, so for a while, the reason I think we were so culturally naive about this is there seemed to be this response, well,
Louis CK isn't funny anymore. Or Woody Allen, his films are terrible because he's a terrible person. No, that doesn't follow. Nothing that Bill Cosby did was funny. No, that doesn't follow. Now, do we see it in a different light, especially when it's a recent example? Of course we do. But those are two, you can have somebody who's an incredibly gifted person who is also morally very bankrupt. Those two are not.
Nathan (23:37)
Mm-hmm.
Cameron (24:00)
not in opposition to one another. It becomes, I think, more complex when we're dealing with somebody who proclaims themselves to be not only a Christian and that's an ambassador of Christ, but is also on the front lines of ministry. But again, Nathan, think we've heard people say, you know, we worked with Ravi Zacharias. I've had numerous people say to me,
It's terrible, but I'm also really grateful because there were certain things that he said and in spite of all of the darkness in this man's life, the Lord had worked through some of the words that he gave to me. That does happen. That does happen. Yeah.
Nathan (24:41)
Sure.
And even a fundamentally dishonest person can point to something that is true, and the validity of what they say is true in the object to which they're pointing, not in the fact that they said it. that part doesn't... Yeah, I'm on board with you there on that. It is, however, on the other hand, a very different thing, just to be biblically faithful here, to say that the idea is...
Cameron (24:50)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Nathan (25:10)
Formation in a way that our leaders are supposed to model for us and it does invalidate Some of the true things that they say if the changes that they claim The gospel and the Holy Spirit making a person's lives are not evidence in their own lives. So There's a bit of a both and there
Cameron (25:28)
The hard word here is that a lot of people will take away from that, well, this person didn't actually believe. They say one thing, but their life says something else entirely. They don't really believe it. It makes sense for people to have that as a takeaway when they look at gross examples of hypocrisy, not just limited to major Christian ministers, but this is also when people see a pronounced discrepancy between a person's stated convictions,
and the way they treat other people just in their day-to-day lives, in the way they just comport themselves, it matters. This is why Nathan and I often stress Christianity is not just a set of intellectual commitments. It can't be because you can make the intellectual commitments. There are plenty of people who could absolutely nail a theological exam. There are plenty of people in our seminary. Yeah, of course. Yeah, can't. Yep. Yep.
Nathan (26:19)
Well, Grok can now. So this is what saying, you don't even have to be human to do this now.
Cameron (26:27)
Yes. let's go for, think we need to, what about AI creeping into sermons or in, you know, in the, in the preparation process. I think we should talk about this as well. It's happening, of course. Anything, part of the acceleration of our moment means that anything we, what about this? If you say, about this? You can take for granted, it's already happening in mass right now. So I think we should talk a little, yeah.
Nathan (26:52)
Okay, here's what I think is good. All right, here's,
this is again, another thing I've been thinking about for 15 seconds. I think you're going to see a sorting happen here. You're going to have people who say, Hey, you know what? The AI music is better and the AI sermons are better. And so be it. It makes me feel good. I like it on where we go. And there will be a section of the broader culture that in all categories pursues that. And there will be a section of
locations and personality types and generations who think this is fantastic and go for it. And there will also be a resurgence in the other direction. There will be a bifurcation happen here of people who say, you know what, actually, yeah, I was talking to a young lady last week who I said, could you talk to your pastor about this? And she's like, oh no, my pastor doesn't talk to individual people. He preaches and leads the institution.
And some people go, that's great. That's a good business model that grows the church quickly. And then there are going to be people like that young lady who are probably going to be like, you know what? I would rather go to a small church where I actually knew the leadership and I was in their homes and we had meals together and we did projects together. And when that person got, it's, it's fascinating just even in the phrase that we say, well, we really want a preacher who practices what they preach. Actually, I don't, I want somebody who preaches what they practice.
And so I think those will be the two distinguishing, like which paradigm are you using when you think about who you want to train with for spiritual formation will, yeah, I think I don't, it's not something we're going to sort out, but it's just, I think there'll be dividing line that develops there of in the same way that some people like homemade bread and some people like Wonder Bread.
Cameron (28:40)
Yeah. Well, we're, I think that's right. You're definitely that, that basic separation. I think we are also predisposed in the North American church to really favor effective means. And so I know a lot of people who just think, Hey, AI, this is a fantastic, well, think about this, a fantastic tool. Let's use it and let's, let's multiply the kingdom. And there's a, there's a goodness to that impulse.
But there's also a drawback. The drawback is we're not really thinking through how these different mediums fundamentally change us sometimes, reshape everything. Yeah.
Nathan (29:17)
whoa.
Well,
let's just throw some things out here. This is to say, ⁓ all new technologies promise us the ability to do things more efficiently so we'll have more time to do something else somewhere else. So that you might have people who say, hey, you know what, if our pastor is spending 20 hours a week on writing a sermon and with AI tools, he can do that in 10, that frees him up 10 more hours a week to do hospital visitations or something. It's just that has email.
Cameron (29:45)
Yep.
Nathan (29:49)
giving you more time to spend with your family.
I mean, when we just look back through maybe, maybe if you're a very, very disciplined person, the time that.
Yeah, I'm-
Cameron (30:04)
Let's, let me, can I draw something out here too? You're also, if you're doing that, one of the concerns I have with AI being used as more than a tool is that you're short-circuiting genuine thought and insight. Is it faster? Of course it's faster, but that's not how human beings think. It's not how we're, that's not how we were formed morally. That's not how we draw genuine conclusions.
Nathan (30:23)
⁓
Cameron (30:29)
And one of the problems in our culture is that people are becoming less and less adept at thinking at all and drawing out genuine, stumbling their way forward to a genuine conclusion. You got to get cuts and bruises to do that. Can you have AI summarize Aquinas for you instantly? Of course. But there's something very valuable when you speak with somebody who has worked carefully through the Summa and
fought with the subtleties of Aquinas' thought, they have earned genuine insights and there will be a depth. think one of the big qualities that people are, depth is going to be highly sought after and focused. These are things that go out the window when you use this more as a substitute than a tool.
Nathan (31:06)
Well, but it's not just a de-
Okay, so let's say that I use AI to write a sermon on some teaching of Jesus. It has to assume, so it's not just on the depth of the understanding of it, it's also the application and interpretation of it for a specific subculture and location. And so, you're not going to get AI to understand your zip code. And part of this is the leveling of a modern globalized world in which we assume
that the ideal is everybody is the same, everything is the same everywhere, it's everything all together, all people are the same. No, they're not. It's even hard, I think, for somebody from a different state to plant a church in a different state if you don't understand, like we know this, if you don't understand the nuances of the culture and live in a place, it's very hard to effectively preach and teach in that. And AI just can't do that. So AI can write a sermon.
that is like mediocrely interesting for the average human, but it isn't going to be deep for the specific location and community and goals and visions and in response to specific things that are happening in the community around you on any given week. So there's kind of a, there's a sense in which it irons out all of the nuance. And I would say crumples a lot of the beauty in the process of just assuming that there's this one standard kind of
this is the potato soup recipe for humanity. And you're like, well, hang on a second. My grandma likes to add a little bit extra, you know. So it's that flavor that I think feels to me like it's getting squeezed out ⁓ universally.
Cameron (32:47)
Yeah.
There are many other observations to be made. We're just scratching the surface and I think trying to guide us. We're just trying to help guide in contemplation and thought about the subject. Yeah.
Nathan (33:12)
Well, actually, can I say, you know how I said there's a bifurcation
and a distinction happening? I've been using this quote a lot recently, the old Wendell Berry line, that there will be two kinds of people in the future, those who choose to live as machines and those who wish to live as creatures. And I think for those who choose to live as machines, AI is going to be sweet. We'll just plug it in as another tool within our forms of formation worship. And for those of us who want to live as creatures, there's going to be some
Hesitancy. is so easy. I asked it. I preach sequentially like I've been working through the book of Matthew on a like a 14 year pace and there are just a ton of scriptures that don't have a good song that goes with them. This is something that we talk about frequently. So the other day I just dropped it in a AI and said write a sermon based on this passage. 6 seconds later there it was. Would you like the chords with that? Yes, please. And obviously I'm never going to use it, but it's just interesting to say.
There it is, it's that easy. So this is...
Cameron (34:13)
Well,
I felt this in terms of pressure the other day. I was finishing a chapter in a book I've been working on and I was lamenting to a buddy of mine, I just wish I wrote faster. This is taking me so much longer than I want it to. I need to find ways to go faster. I'm feeling the pressure of speed all around me and this friend very kindly, thanks, Cren, shout out to Cren, said, hey, don't get sucked into...
the vortex of all of this speed culture. Work your way through it. So the value of this is it's 100 % AI free, guys, when the book comes out. And this was me, honestly, these chapters, you are reading the end, the finished, not product, but the result of me having wrestled with lots of different lines of thinking and also caring a lot about the turn of phrase and each individual sentence.
Nathan (34:51)
Yeah.
Cameron (35:09)
So, but there's great value in that because it's hugely formative for me. It's shaping me as a thinker and I'm also just allowing myself to be a creature and I work slower and I have good days and bad days. Grok doesn't, but I do. I didn't get enough coffee that morning.
Nathan (35:24)
So the that's
the other element of this camera. And so we've been talking about this largely from the consumption side. You switched over to the production side there and you know, the speed thing, I felt myself the other day I was driving down the road and listening to like the actual radio in a car and the person seemed like they were speaking so slowly. I'm like, I have no way to speed this person up. That was a thought that like that's a problem with radio. The, you know, a good old fashioned FM radio.
Cameron (35:34)
Yeah, I didn't, yeah.
Nathan (35:51)
So all of these things are at our disposal and I think this is where, like, if you're on a screen, you're always, what, three clicks away from porn? ⁓ Now we are always three clicks away from doing our digital work faster. And you will have to make a conscientious decision, I am not going to do that for the sake of this other thing. And so I think there is a, ⁓ there's discernment that we have to have in our consumption.
Cameron (36:02)
Mm.
Nathan (36:19)
And then there's also a whole nother level of discernment that we have to have in our production. And so this is not like, wow, the sky is falling. It's the end of the world. Anything? No. Christians have had to navigate new technologies all of the time. I think in this episode, we're just pushing toward a way of saying, just because it's faster doesn't mean that it's good. And just because it's slick and professional does not mean that it's appropriately forming us.
Cameron (36:33)
Skynet. Just kidding. Yeah.
Nathan (36:48)
in the actual categories to which our faith calls us. And so, we know that, you know that, we're just saying it out loud and taking a little pause here to remind ourselves of that. And we'll have to keep doing this time and time again.
Cameron (37:05)
Definitely. You've been listening to Thinking Out Loud, a podcast where we think out loud about current events and Christian hope.
How would you feel if AI was behind the worship that you're listening to and the sermons that you're hearing and a whole lot more in your church life as a Christian? Well, there's going to be a kind of strange dividing line between those who are okay with it or think it's great and those who get a little creeped out about it. We talk about it in this episode. You can probably guess which side we come down on. This will be helpful to you as we continue to think about our fast paced
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