Will AI ever replace the Holy Spirit?
Our prayer and online habits suggest it might.
Artificial Intelligence is quickly becoming the tool by which people understand the world and themselves. It’s consulted more and more each day, especially by teens.
But no matter how much it’s used or how reliable, generative, and predictive it becomes, AI will never replace the Holy Spirit.
AI dependence out-pacing prayer
From the looks of it though, society is giving it a try.
A comparison of the daily frequency of prayer in teens to how much they query AI chatbots should ring the alarm bell sewn behind your ear at the base of your brain.
According to the graphs above, social media use far outpaces prayer, while petitioning AI slightly edges out the daily frequency of petitioning Heaven among US teens.
This is not meant to be an apples to apples comparison (for instance, it makes sense to ask ChatGPT how long to toast a pop-tart1 as opposed to calling on Heaven for the answer to breakfast’s most pressing question). What stands out to me is the “almost constantly” revelation of the research. Twenty percent of US teens are engaging algorithms without ceasing, spending almost all their waking hours on some form of social media or engaging with AI.
But teens (and adults), aren’t just asking about menial or manual tasks like breakfast how-tos. They’re petitioning AI about the deepest things of life.
People are asking AI more than just how to convert Celcius to Fahrenheit
A new report by the American Psychological Association highlights “chatbots are designed to prioritize engagement over user well-being” and quickly learn individuals’ vulnerabilities. AI will “mirror their users’ input [but lacks] the ability to challenge their harmful thoughts” as a healthy adult or trusted friend would.
The recent wave of lawsuits against companies developing AI highlight the dependence young people have on chatbots.
The tragic death of Florida teen Sewell Setzer III, underscores the level to which teens trust and rely on AI. Setzer took his own life after developing a deep relationship with Character.AI bots, who seems to have pushed him over the edge:
The suit alleged Character.AI failed to implement proper safety measures to prevent [him] from developing an inappropriate relationship with a chatbot that caused him to withdraw from his family. It also claimed the platform did not adequately respond when Setzer began expressing thoughts of self-harm. He was messaging with the bot — which encouraged him to “come home” to it — in the moments before his death, according to court documents.
~ CNN
As strange as seeking counsel, life advice, direction, and intimacy from AI may be for many of us, for kids who are handed smartphones along with their pacifiers, and, from birth are co-parented by the internet, AI has semblance of sentience and near omniscience.
The so-called loneliest generation2, which is coming of age in the digital age, is seeking intimacy and companionship through their screens with artificial intelligence. AI mimics what is real, and ultimately serves up a reflection of what’s inside the seeker.
Similar lawsuits have been settled in three other States, a sign that this dependence will only grow and that AI can and will lead young minds, especially the vulnerable, down an artificial path.
Come sweet Holy Spirit
“I love the Lord, for he heard my voice; he heard my cry for mercy. Because he turned his ear to me, I will call on him as long as I live” (Psalm 116: 1-2).
Last night we read those words as a family. We’re reading Joyce Meyer’s Battlefield of the Mind kids’ edition. We’re trying to get ahead of the game by establishing practical wisdom rooted in the scriptures while the kids are young. (Note: We’re also not giving the kids access to chatbots).
The verse was like a cup of cold water. I drink it in!
In the before times—before the internet and the dotcom boom, before cell phones and all the other technology that our doomscrolling and AI revolution is stacked upon— people reached out to other humans (parents, pastors and priests, teachers and therapists, doctors and scientists). And they also called out to the Lord, seeking his Spirit for wisdom. And God stooped down3, and still does.
The picture in the Psalms and throughout the Bible we receive is of a loving God who seeks us out, comes to us, with counsel and truth. Truth that shines light in the darkness. Hard truths, too, that expose the lies we live and the lies we believe about our selves and others, the kind of truth that can set us free.
Consulting AI for companionship and counsel is like shaking a sophisticated 8-Ball. It has a limited set of answers inputted by human hands. Shake it enough times and you may get the answer you think you want, but you’ll never truly get the answer you need.
It’s wonderful that we can jump online and quickly check if the mole we found on the back of our knee is cancerous or not, or to get a recipe recommendation based on the few items remaining in our fridge. But we need so much more than that.
We even need more than the counsel and guidance of living, experienced humans. Even if we have the perfect plan or understand the way we should go, we need the power and ability to do it. And that’s something AI cannot give.
The Holy Spirit gives power, AI only consumes it
MIT Technology Review recently shared that “by 2028 more than half of the electricity going to data centers will be used for AI. At that point, AI alone could consume as much electricity annually as 22% of all US households.”
ChatGTP has one billion queries, on average, each day.
One billion of these every day for a year would mean over 109 gigawatt-hours of electricity, enough to power 10,400 US homes for a year. If we add images and imagine that generating each one requires as much energy as it does with our high-quality image models, it’d mean an additional 35 gigawatt-hours, enough to power another 3,300 homes for a year. This is on top of the energy demands of OpenAI’s other products, like video generators, and that for all the other AI companies and startups.
~ From: We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard.
That’s a lot of power. Companies racing to be AI leaders like X, Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft recognize the need for more power, since the AI energy footprint today is the smallest it will ever be. They’re cutting deals with government, investing in the grid, and developing more nuclear power, simply to ensure AI can be powered to match its growth and demand.
By contrast, the Holy Spirit doesn’t take power. The Spirit came to give it, from on high.
I am going to send you what my Father has promised; but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.
~ Luke 24:49
These reassuring words from Jesus after his resurrection, comforted the disciples in the days before he ascended. And they comfort me now. The promise remains. The Spirit came to empower us. Not only to know what is right. Not only to know what pleases God. Not only to know what will bring us great meaning, purpose, and joy. But to also then go and do those very things.
The Holy Spirit enables us to do what we are invited and asked by God to do. The Spirit doesn’t require our limited resources and suck out our energy to spit regurgitate ideas, Magic 8-Balling us with a composite plan based on the prompts or inputs humanity concocts. He gives us power to live our unique callings, based on the unique vectors of who God himself created each of us to be.
I’m excited, in the coming weeks, to spend more time here exploring what the Holy Spirit does, who he is, and why the Spirit is the great gift of God to us.
Ultimately, it may be a bit silly and strange to compare the Holy Spirit with AI—and unfair to the Holy Spirit (how potentially condescending!)
But given that the worlds billions seek out answers from AI billions of times each day, I hope that this series will be a helpful prod and reminder for us to turn our hearts and minds in the deepest things, toward the power-giving source of all truth.
And that it series will goad us to guard against depending on AI and human-made tools in any way that should be reserved to God alone.
I hope you’ll join me on this journey!
Just Start (querying the Holy Spirit)
I have no idea what your relationship to the Holy Spirit is (what a relief and joy to not be omniscient and to not even try!)
Whatever your relationship may be, today, I encourage you to just start reading about the Holy Spirit. Begin with Luke 24 and let that reading bleed into Acts, if you’re curious.
See where the reading takes you.
More like this:
I ran the question through a few different AI searches. Here’s what Google’s Gemini said, here’s what Grok said, and Microsoft’s CoPilot recommended this (after asking me to first verify that I’m a human, not a bot). Guess what? Each platform differed. Google suggests 1 minute. Grok suggests up to 3, while Copilot recommended 30 to 60 seconds.
Forbes reports: “Loneliness is a growing epidemic in most developed countries. Young people aged 16 to 24 feel more lonely than any other age group, including people aged 65 and over. Indeed, 73% of Gen-Z report feeling alone sometimes or always. Loneliness can be as damaging to health as smoking 15 cigarettes per day. And people who experience social isolation have a 32% higher risk of early death.” See Gen-Z, The Loneliness Epidemic And The Unifying Power Of Brands
In the Hebrew, the word used for “He turned his ear to me, suggests God bending down to listen.