What specific spiritual challenges for members of the Church do you see from the further development of artificial intelligence (AI), such as AGI (artificial general intelligence), agentic AI (AI that can do things in the material world, rather than merely online), etc.? In your view, what should members of the Church do, or prepare to do, to meet these challenges?
Full Citation for this Article: Editorial Board, SquareTwo Journal (2025) "Reader's Puzzle for Summer 2025," SquareTwo, Vol. 18 No. 2 (Summer 2025), http://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleReadersPuzzleSummer2025.html, accessed <give access date>.
Would you like to comment on this article? Thoughtful, faithful comments of at least 100 words are welcome.
I. Emilee Pugh Bell
I couldn’t tell you how many times in the last year that I have heard people start their talks off by saying not only the classic “Well, Brother/Bishop so-and-so called me two weeks ago and asked me to speak on X…” but now adding “…so I typed the topic into ChatGPT and asked it to write me a talk.” I have seen and heard of other things prepared for church settings by AI, including primary program scripts, lessons, etc. This deeply concerns me.
President Dallin H. Oak's first talk as our new Church president included an observation that families used to be a unit of production, but now we are units of consumption. He noted that consumption is not strong enough to keep us together. I think this applies to us spiritually as well. If we simply consume spiritual thoughts formulated by AI, we do not receive the blessings pondering, studying, and praying in preparation brings. How many times growing up did I hear that preparing a talk blessed the speaker more than the congregation, or that preparing a lesson strengthened the teacher more than the students, or that the missionary was blessed more deeply because of their service than the people they served?
Perhaps this is a new interpretation of the parable of the ten virgins. The five wise studied their scriptures, prepared their lessons, prayed their prayers, wrote their talks—maybe they are not the most enlightened of us nor the most eloquent, but they did the work and gained the oil of testimony. They themselves were ready, having outsourced none of their spiritual preparation. The five foolish thought they could get by with AI, and gained nothing, gathered no reserves. They had only enough to keep their lamp lit for a time. Then night came, their lamps burned out, and they had no reserves to draw upon. This shocked the five foolish at the time of His coming, perhaps they had given lessons and talks and had scriptures read at them, but as they had put in no effort beyond the parroting of what had been generated, their oil reserves remained shallow. The oil of testimony cannot be accumulated by inserting prompts into AI.
AI is an unsatisfactory surrogate for covenant discipleship.
_______________________________________________________________________II. Ashley B. Alley
As with most modern technological developments, AI is an incredibly powerful tool that can bring about great good or serious harm depending on its utilization. I have seen ChatGPT used to efficiently summarize years and years of CoJC discourses and theological publications in concise and easily digestible ways. But I have also seen it generate further disinformation and misunderstanding about core tenets of CoJC doctrine, depending on what sources it was primarily pulling from. Like President Nelson said, we will not be able to spiritually survive the storms of confusion and strife without the Holy Ghost as our guide. Along with striving to live worthy of the Holy Spirit's influence and actively seeking the gift of discernment to help us see through the fog, we have to understand that we cannot become lazy in our gospel study and research. If we choose to use ChatGPT or other AI tools as a study tool (which can be great additions to our resource library!), we must not assume the presented information is correct or aligned with God's law. We should continue to apply the "law of witnesses" and check out findings against the words of the living prophet(s), what the Holy Ghost reveals to us through personal revelation, and what the scriptures teach us as well. We must not become "slothful servants" and should always be prepared to put in the extra work to ensure we are staying on the correct path.
_______________________________________________________________________III. Holly Hamilton-Bleakley
AI is, at the end of the day, a machine. Machines cannot teach people the gospel of Jesus Christ, because machines do not have souls. I think specifically of Doctrine and Covenants 50:22: ‘Wherefore, he that preacheth and he that receiveth, understand one another, and both are edified and rejoice together.’ There is not a mutual transfer of spiritual understanding when we substitute AI generated content for human interaction in a gospel context. AI does not understand the principle of faith – specifically, faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, the first principle of the gospel. It cannot practice it. It cannot even attempt to practice it. It cannot ‘plant the seed’ of faith; for there is nothing in which to plant the seed. Therefore, it cannot teach faith. And without faith, we can do nothing (Doctrine and Covenants 8:10).
I am glad that the Church has taken steps to address the use of AI, most notably with Elder Gong’s work this past year as he has sought to articulate some guiding principles regarding how to engage with AI in a gospel context. Specifically, I applaud his assertions that ‘AI is not and cannot be God’, that ‘AI cannot provide inspired divine truth or independent moral guidance’, and that the virtues of ‘benevolence, compassion, judgment, optimism, faith – that which speaks to and for our souls – require lived experience and authentic relationships’. (Elder Gerrit W. Gong, Faith, Ethics, and Human Dignity in an Age of Artificial Intelligence, July 29, 2025.)
Elder Gong has been clear that there is no substitute for human engagement with the God. He has stated that ‘our most precious truth, comfort, revelation, [and] guidance come when we personally commune with the Divine. Spiritual truth and light come from understanding who God is in creation and the universe. For children of God, platforms and technologies cannot substitute for authentic Divine connection and relationship.’ (Elder Gong, ibid.) I think these are absolutely essential principles that Elder Gong is teaching. They need to be heard, and they need to be understood. Machines are not God. And we are children of God - a loving Heavenly Father, who sent His Son Jesus Christ to atone for our sins. Our divine connection to them is at the basis of everything good in our lives.
However, while I am cautiously optimistic with this direction that the Church is taking, I do still have concerns. The Church has always been rather on the techno-optimist side, usually framing technical progress as one of the ways in which God carries forth His of spreading of the restored gospel. While that is undoubtedly true, I have also thought that this approach has led to an underestimation of the dangers of technological progress, or some of its negative externalities. For instance, I quickly became uncomfortable with way in which Church leaders, in the early days of social media, encouraged members to use social media and other digital platforms to spread the gospel, stand for truth and righteousness, etc. Again, I am all for spreading the gospel and standing for truth and righteousness, but, as we now all know, the medium of social media has so many toxic qualities and encourages so much unethical and destructive behavior, that we have seen many of our members lose their faith as they have tried to navigate this fraught digital space. In the younger generation, they often barely discover their faith before they join social media. It is naïve and risky to assume that they could become a consistently faithful ‘LDS influencer’; all we need to do is look at the numbers of young people online who announce their ‘faith transition’ or the ‘deconstruction of their faith’. It is only fairly recently that we have started to hear General Conference talks warning us about the dangers of social media; I think those warnings should have come much, much earlier.
That techno-optimism is still there in our Church culture, and it will take great wisdom and foresight to continue to prioritize spiritual connection, learning and development over being ‘tossed to and fro’ by every new technological development. I think we as a people will need to learn a more moderate, less enthusiastic approach to the creations of people like Elon Musk and Sam Altman. We need to learn how to be more protective of the precious gifts of the Spirit which we have through our covenants of the holy priesthood; not through whatever is being developed by the atheistic techbros.
Still, Elder Gong’s leadership on the AI issue is promising. At least, he is getting out ahead of the issue with acknowledging the serious spiritual effects that could result from a misguided approach to AI. Yet, we have perhaps a unique situation here in that Elder Gong himself tends to talk like AI. I will try not to worry too much about this; that is, I will try not to worry that when members stand up in Sacrament meeting and talk about how to use AI responsibly, that they may have used AI to write the talk, rather than quote Elder Gong. For, it may be hard to tell the difference.
_______________________________________________________________________IV. Valerie M. Hudson
I am developing a longer essay around the topic, but will share the first point I make in that essay here as a response to the Reader’s Puzzle:
AI is not like other technology that humans have developed to date.
--We are literally creating an alien intelligence whose reasoning we do not and cannot understand and which will never feel for human beings because it will never feel. Consider also that every other intelligence on Earth is embodied (and we believe even God is embodied); unembodied intelligence is incommensurable with our own.
--AI is unlike any technology we have previously developed, even the most dangerous, such as nuclear weapons: nuclear weapons cannot create more advanced nuclear weapons or redesign themselves; nuclear weapons cannot autonomously “act” to escape their safety mechanisms. Furthermore, the world did not allow corporations and companies to develop nuclear bombs, and even the construction and maintenance of nuclear reactors are placed under intense government oversight.
--AI is also unlike the Industrial Revolution, where we built new things with new capabilities that we steered. With AI, we are building something in order to give all the steering wheels of the world over to it, while simultaneously making our own minds less capable of steering anything ever again.
The Church is right to be very wary of the spiritual ramifications of AI. Not only does AI have the potential to de-skill us intellectually, it also has the potential to de-skill us spiritually. Stay tuned for my longer essay, but if you have been following my op-eds in the Deseret News, you will know that I am an AI “gloomer”—not a “doomer,” but certainly a gloomer.
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