A major publisher recently pulled a new novel for a novel reason: a strong suspicion that the book was at least partially written by a generative artificial intelligence app. This is likely to become an increasingly common pattern in the world of trade publishing, and new research suggests AI-generated writing is widely infiltrating American newspapers.
I’m seeing the same pattern firsthand as an editor for Mere Orthodoxy, a contributor to many other publications (like CT), and the director of a master’s degree program in creative writing. I’ve had conversations with multiple frustrated editors from a wide array of publications—large and small, Christian and secular—about the dramatic rise in article submissions they believe to be written with AI. Even publications that don’t pay writers are running into this issue!
Editors now must spend time playing AI detective. This technology is often hailed as a time saver, but it’s taking up editors’ time.
Other writers have already made compelling arguments against using AI in writing and editing, so I won’t rehash those here. Instead, I want to address related questions I’ve not seen sufficiently considered: What does this explosion in AI writing mean for the church specifically? And how should we train Christian writers in the age of AI?
Before I come to those questions, though, two observations. First, the popularity of AI-generated or AI-assisted writing is in part evidence of a good desire: to write.
Whether they hope to produce novels, poetry, or essays, many people who write using AI want what writers have always wanted: to take perfectly ordinary words and turn them into something extraordinary. There’s something transcendent and soul-moving to beautiful writing, no matter the genre or shape of the piece, because writing—as other creative endeavors—reflects our basic nature as image bearers of God. Just as our God is a creator, we have a desire to create things of beauty, including with our words.
This desire is good, but as with so many good and godly human desires after the Fall, the means by which we seek to fulfill it can become disordered. Using AI to generate text is just such a disordered means. Often, it is used in a lie, an attempt to pass off words you did not write as your own. Even if you aren’t plagiarizing—stealing from—another human writer, you are lying to your readers. Many people who use AI to write understand this, I think, which is why they tend to hide it, much like Adam and Eve hid from God after their transgression in Eden.
Even when writers are open about the AI functions they use, however, the practice remains deceptive—not about the text but about the author. It presents the writer as the kind of person who could produce the insights or arguments on the page while skipping over the time, work, education, or other formative experiences needed to actually make such a person.
This brings me to my second, related observation: Those who turn to AI for writing are seeking help to become better writers, but they’ve chosen a terrible teacher.
I am convinced that many writers who resort to AI would figure out a way to fulfill their vision themselves, without AI assistance, if they had the time and resources to do so. They use AI because they lack the ideas or tools or basic know-how to write on their own. AI offers them a way to create something, but it typically produces subpar work and, more to the point, conveys no real or durable skill. A chatbot can write unlimited essays for you, but it cannot develop moral or aesthetic intuitions for you, because that requires the labor of your own mind and training of your own habits.
So many people have a good desire to write and easy access to a disordered means of fulfilling that desire. This will affect our politics, of course, and indeed our whole civilization. But what about the church?
As Christians, we are called to love God with all our soul, heart, mind, and strength (Luke 10:27). Using AI to write robs us of opportunities to fulfill this commandment. With enough use over enough time, it will reduce our capacity to read the Bible, to reflect on it, and to teach and preach it to others.
The loss here is particularly great for pastors, who must present God’s Word to their flock. The now-ubiquitous availability of AI writing tools presents them with a constant temptation, the promise of a quick fix for late nights of work and the natural slowness and inefficiency of the human mind. It takes time to think, sit with a text, and think even more before penning a sermon—but that time is itself the work of pastoring. It is formative. It is what makes you the kind of person who can offer wise and biblical guidance to a flock.
For the church, then, AI writing is a direct assault on the moral character and growth of believers. It presents a formational threat to Christians, an invitation to take the easy path in our creative work, and in the process deforming our creativity altogether. In this regard, AI in the church may be the culmination of what theologian Carl Trueman describes as the “desecration of man” in his new book by this title.
So how do we train Christian writers in this context? Even if our answers to this question aren’t groundbreaking—none of the resources I’ll mention in a moment are new—we must be ready with answers.
Faced with a good and godly desire being fulfilled in a disordered way, the church is right to offer something better. “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake?” Jesus said. “If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” (Matt. 7:9–11) God’s people can help foster the good gift of creativity by training writers well.
Much training is already available for Christians who want to grow as writers. To name just a few examples, local libraries often offer free workshops, classes, and accountability groups for amateur writers. For pastors and those who write resources for the church, The Gospel Coalition offers writing cohorts led by well-published writers and editors. For those seeking a formal degree, Christian master’s programs (like the one I direct) pair students with writing mentors who help them develop a book-length project in their genre of choice, in service to the church.
Predictions abound about the skills and careers that AI will render obsolete, and perhaps those predictions will prove true. But good thinking—the foundation of good writing—will always be necessary, if not for the economy than for our life in the church, with each other and before God. However the technology develops, this anthropological truth will remain: To write well is human.
Nadya Williams is a homeschool mom, a writer, an editor, and the interim director of the MFA in creative writing at Ashland University. She is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Churchand Christians Reading Classics and is books editor at Mere Orthodoxy.
