“A.I. vs No A.I.”: Why this is a wrong battle

Credit - CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 -  Zen Museum

A quick word before you go on to read: what follows is a theological reflection. It is most importantly not a verdict on any person’s choices. I know Artificial Intelligence has already touched people’s lives in ways that are genuinely painful (lost work, lost trust, lost hours to something that felt like companionship and wasn’t etc.) If that’s you, please don’t read into this as me writing to talk you out of that pain, nothing below is meant to minimize it, or nullify it. I am merely writing this as a reflection-opinion, trying to get the theology train going rather than trying to win an argument. Consider this as an invite to think alongside me, and not as some polarizing write-up. As a great man once said: 'don't hear what I'm not saying', or in this case: don't read what I'm not writing.

Every time “Catholic AI” trends online, I watch the same argument happen. Someone posts about Truthly AI (the catholic branded chatbot promising “2000 years of wisdom with zero spin”) and within hours the responses are split into two camps (how 'binary' of us, pun intended). One side is convinced that this is the future of evangelization. The other side is convinced that it is the end of the world, or at least the end of real catechesis. Somewhere in there, a co-founder is saying things about AI taking your job but never your calling (easier said than lived, but whatever I guess), and then the whole thing detonates into a fight about consumerism, working-class dignity, and whether the catholic AIs are secretly just ChatGPT wearing a rosary.

I have opinions about all of that, but that's perhaps a piece for later. Here’s my actual pet peeve, the thing that makes me want to throw my computer across the room: almost nobody in these fights is talking about “AI.” They’re talking about a subset/species of AI: glorified chatbots or LLMs. Those are not the same thing.

What most people are actually reacting to

When someone says “I am anti-AI”, they are very rarely thinking about the machine learning model that helps a farmer time an irrigation cycle, or the diagnostic tool that flags a tumor a radiologist’s eye might miss, or the tool that helped with some huge medical breakthrough or the software translating ancient documents unraveling the mysteries of the past, or heck even aiding in saving a child's life with some rare condition, who would not have otherwise survived. More often than not they are referring to a chat window that confidently vomited something up (also known as generative AIs), or some AI assistant that ate up a friend’s income, or an app that seems engineered to tell you what you think, and fight for your attention, or the AI slop posters that are all over (yes, art is where I draw the line, but again, that's a conversation for later). These are real grievances. Again, I’m not here to talk anyone out of them. The rate of displacement of jobs is growing so fast that if left unregulated with no laws and guardrails would even be cataclysmic to the economy of many nations. Again, I hear you and I am empathetic to the negative effects of it.

But “AI”, for Pete's sake, is not 'one' thing. It’s not even one kind of thing. Treating “should Catholics use AI” as a single question is a little like treating “should Catholics use electricity” as a single question. Sure, technically it’s all electrons, but a pacemaker and a casino slot machine are not raising the same moral stakes. When the entire discourse narrows down to a blanket terminology of “AI”, we lose the ability to think clearly about anything AI touches that is beyond mere interactive applications readily available on the phones. That’s the category error underneath the Truthly AI fight, and it’s worth insisting before we go any further, because otherwise the rest of this essay just sounds like chatGPT, gemini, claude et al.’s apologetics. It is NOT!

Neutrality and Cultivation

I want to make it clear that I am not going to state a cliche statement and tell you that technology is neutral and it is all about how you use it. That argument is true and helpful as far as it goes, but it is too thin to hold the theological durability this moment actually needs.

My hope, instead, is an invitation to look at this differently. The book of Genesis, in addition to telling humanity to preserve creation, recounts humanity being handed a vocation to cultivate it, i.e., to till and to keep, to draw out what is latently possible within what God has already made, to be stewards of it. We do not create the way God creates. God creates ex nihilo, from nothing. We do not. Every human act of making, be it agriculture, architecture, the printing press, modern medicine, is really an act of discovering and arranging possibilities that were already quiescent in a creation that God entrusted to us. It is not me coming up with a work around to justify new gadgets, but it is about as old a Christian intuition there is (see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I,q.45,a.5; Pope John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens; JRR Tolkien’s idea of ‘sub-creation’, ‘refracted light’ in Mythopoeia.)

The Vatican’s 2025 note on AI, Antiqua et nova, leans on this idea. It bases the whole discussion of artificial intelligence in the biblical calling to till and keep the earth, treating human intelligence itself, and by extension our drive to build things with it, as bound up with being made in the imago Dei, God’s image. Read that way, developing AI as a field is not automatically suspect. Diagnostic medicine, agricultural forecasting, weather/calamities forecasting, accessibility tools for people with disabilities, speeding up cure for illnesses, etc, none of that, literally none, has to be smuggled in as a lesser evil. It can and, in fact, ought to be read as an extension of the same creaturely vocation that gave us penicillin, the printing press, the platform that you are reading this on, electricity, etc.

If that is true, it follows that refusing to develop AI at all is not the neutral, safe, automatically pious option either. If a tech can genuinely serve human flourishing, choosing not to pursue it has consequences too. Thus we see, the real question was never “AI or no AI. It is “what kind, for what ends, cultivated toward what vision of the human good.”

Where cultivation stops being cultivation

This is what I think both the Truthly’s fans and critics (or chatGPT, or claude or whatever for that matter) keep looking past.

The stewardship argument licenses building the tool. It says nothing about what the tool then gets asked to become. Cultivation is humans extending human capacities into the world God gave us. Substitution is entirely something else. Substitution is handing the tool a role that was never a tool to occupy in the first place. A calculator extending arithmetic is cultivation. A chatbot standing in for the priest who actually knows your name, your history, and your face when you walk into the confessional is substitution, no matter how empathetic or affirming or orthodox it is.

I think this is exactly where the Truthly AI debate goes sideways. Both camps are arguing entirely at the level of the chatbots or LLMs or whatever you want to call it: whether it is accurate, if it is biased, is it, as one critic memorably put it, just a secular LLM stacked in a trench coat. Those are definitely fair questions about product transparency. I strongly believe there has to be strong oversight over Truthly AI especially as it claims to be faithful to the “Catholic Church”. You can win the argument of “is it virtuous, is it secretly secular” etc etc very easily but still not have touched the deeper problem which is “the” theological question.

Why the Incarnation, of all things, is the North Star in this discourse

“The” theological question goes beyond all surface arguments. It goes back all the way to the very core of the human being. 

Christian anthropology does not define the human person primarily by intellectual output and capabilities. If it did, an increasingly capable LLM really would be a slow-motion crisis for the doctrine of the imago Dei, image of God. But that is not actually what imago Dei has ever meant in the tradition. The human person is embodied, relational, free, and capable of communion (emphasis mine) (see. Vat. II, Gaudium et Spes, 24).  [Read this paragraph again without zoning out]

Nowhere is that clearer than in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ himself. The Son did not take on some random abstracted, generalized “intelligence” or knowledge. He assumed a complete human nature, a body that got tired, a face that people recognized (some loved, and some hated), a particular Galilean accent, a mother, a father, a hometown, a group of friends He knew by name. He ate. He drank. He wept at a specific grave. He was known, and He knew. The Resurrection is not a liberation of some inner intelligence from the inconvenience of the body; the body itself is what gets glorified. Salvation, in the Christian tradition, has always run through the particular and the embodied, never abstraction. 

That is the theological reason, in short, that a chatbot or an LLM cannot occupy the chair in spiritual direction or confession or catechesis or any thing that requires communion, no matter how many magisterial documents it can cite in a fraction of a second (and not just the practical “AI is bad or AI hallucinates” argument). A catechist, for example, is a particular person, in a particular relationship, with you, helping you navigate the faith, primarily by their life as a witness. So is your doctor, your therapist and your priest. Exercising judgment that comes from actually knowing you, spoken in response to your voice, in a specific context, at a specific hour. The sacraments are a totally different beast. A chatbot can mediate information about the sacraments and the doctrine. It cannot mediate the sacraments, because grace comes through the particular and embodied Church, and not through an interface or a data set, no matter how faithful and how “Catholic” the interface claims to be.

So what's the matter

Putting all these together, it comes down to this: the stewardship argument means Catholics do not get to write off AI wholesale as though building it were inherently rebellion against God and humanity. The incarnation means Catholics do not get to hand AI a personal role, any AI for that matter, those that claim to be Catholic AIs or not. That role belongs to an embodied person and a sacramental Church. Both things can be held true at once, and neither cancels the other out. (The good ol' catholic both-and.)

Which means the Truthly AI fight, on the Catholic internet circles, as fun as it is to watch from the sidelines, has mostly been happening at the wrong altitude. “Is this app secretly secular” is a fair transparency question for a company to answer. It was never going to answer the only question that actually matters theologically: what is a chatbot or an LLM actually for (Truthly, or chatGPT, or Claude, or whatever comes next) and what must it never be trusted to replace?

I would love to see the discourse actually deal with this. Not “pro-AI or anti-AI.” It has to be “cultivation vs substitution”. Everything else is, at the end of the day, a fight over blanket categories which lead to nowhere (yeah, sorry about that.)