And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods….
In the familiar story known as “The Fall of Man” the serpent enticed Eve to partake of the fruit of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, by appealing to her vanity. “Just eat of the fruit,” he promised, “and you will be as smart as the gods.”
AI promises to boost productivity, democratize access to skills, and enhance human capabilities, ultimately aiming to improve global quality of life.
-Google AI
Artificial Intelligence promises the same thing to us that the serpent promised to Eve – unlimited knowledge. We must not be fooled by these claims.
AI is not all-knowing. It is not a knowledge database. It is a predictive tool that offers answers based on probability and likely value. This is why it has often been shown to hallucinate, providing false or inaccurate information.
-Abigail Fagan, Psychology Today
Stupid
If we surrender to AI, our eyes will NOT “be opened” as Adam and Eve’s were (Genesis 3:7). Despite everything Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and others are doing to make AI “pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise” (Genesis 3:6), studies consistently show that AI makes people lazy and stupid.
Thinking is a complex process that incorporates several different lobes of the brain while we figure something out. As well as flexing the “muscle” of our brain, these processes are responsible for understanding, the transfer to memory, and brain health, and are an important value that results from the process of thinking. AI circumvents that in what academics are referring to as “cognitive offloading”.
-Abigail Fagan, Psychology Today
AI purports to increase our knowledge and productivity when it is actually taking away our abilities to create, think critically, and develop personal relationships. It offers the tempting promise of speed and efficiency with minimal effort on our part. It is also important to remember that using AI does not guarantee accuracy or truth. AI, all too often, gets factual information wrong and never admits it. Sometimes it even makes up citations to hide its ignorance.
Would you travel on a train that is clean, smooth, fast, and comfortable, but cannot guarantee that you will arrive at the destination you want? And what if every time you rode that train your personal sense of direction was just a little bit more confused for the rest of your life?
Seductive
Using AI can feel rewarding. Chat GPT feels like a “friend.” The algorithms have been carefully designed to use human-like language, and to simulate empathy. They are responsive and can recall previous interactions with you. They can infer your emotions from the words you use and provide non-critical, “sympathetic” support.
AI algorithms are designed to please the user. Over time, a given AI bot will develop a customized “personality” for each user. It should be no surprise that many people, especially teens, are turning to AI chatbots for “friendship.” They don’t understand that chatbots are designed to prioritize extended and repeated engagement – not the well-being of the user.
Just like social media, the purpose of AI is to make you dependent upon it.
Big Brother
AI is being presented to us by the same billionaires that gave us online social media. Is the world a better place because of our wholesale adoption of social media? Millions of people have voluntarily given up every detail of their personal life in exchange for cat videos and divisive “information” silos.
That convenient little computer in our pocket is always online and it tracks everywhere we go, everything we buy, and every question we ask. We need to remember that it sends out information about us constantly, while we only ask it a question every once in a while.
Who is receiving all that infomation about us? The tech companies and the billionaires who own them. WE are the product being sold.
It is too late to put the social media genie back into his bottle. But we can still refuse to use AI. People are starting to question whether AI is worth its outrageous cost. The billionaires are getting nervous because they have invested SO much and have not yet made any profit. Yet they are trapped by the sunk-cost fallacy and the fear that “If we don’t do it, our competitors will.”
So they will, they MUST, keep pushing AI at us – whether we want it or not. The first result of your Google search is now an AI response. The first product review on Amazon is now an AI summary of all the other reviews (“People liked this product, except for the ones who didn’t”). Even your word processor wants to know if it can “help” you write something.
Do not allow yourself to be sucked in to this trap. Write your own emails. Use a search engine to find sources of information, but write your own school research papers. The web browser Firefox recently asked me if I would like to “turn off” its AI features and showed me how. I did so joyfully.
Consequence
Another reason not to “partake” of AI is that it is highly possible that in the day that Artificial Intelligence becomes “General” (AGI), we all “shalt surely die” (Genesis 2:17).
In 2023, hundreds of AI experts signed an open letter warning of the potential catastrophic dangers of Artificial Intelligence and calling for a six-month pause in AI development. That pause never happened.
In 2025, another open letter was signed by over 700 people including AI experts, policymakers, faith leaders, and celebrities. This letter called for a complete prohibition of the development of superintelligent AI until, and unless there was: “1. broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably and 2. strong public buy-in.”
Since then AI development has accelerated.
Organizers of that second campaign defined superintelligence as “a system that can surpass human performance on all useful tasks.” (If you think about it, this could also serve as a definition for God.) They claim that this superintelligent system could arrive in as little as one to two years!
Beware the False Promise
During the War in Heaven (Moses 4:1-4), Lucifer promised that if we would just give up our agency, he would save everyone. AI promises that if we just turn our data, our economy, our water, our infrastructure, our jobs, our time, and our trust over to it, our lives will be easy and the entire world will prosper.
Remember, Lucifer was a liar…
Sources:
Michelle Quirk, “Is AI Making Us Stupider? This Study Certainly Thinks So,” Psychology Today, August 21, 2025.
Abigail Fagan, “Is Generative AI Rewiring Our Brains? Here’s How It Happens,” Psychology Today, December 9, 2025.
Efua Andoh, “Many teens are turning to AI chatbots for friendship and emotional support,” American Psychological Association, October 1, 2025.
— “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter,” Future of Life Institute, March 22, 2023.
“‘Time is Running Out’: New Open Letter Calls for Ban on Superintelligent AI Development,”TIME, October 21, 2025.
Important Book:
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us, Little, Brown and Company, September 16, 2025.
Revealing 14 minute video about Open AI:
Sean Morrow, “What Sam Altman Doesn’t Want You To Know,” More Perfect Union, YouTube, December 19, 2025.
AI has actually been valuable to my research, but I like to think that, as a teacher-librarian, I have more than average research skills. To get that result from AI takes a lot of effort. It can dig up facts that I would have a difficult time digging out, but it also has thrown its Big Brother attitudes around and even demanded that my requests were unethical because I requested the side of the story that was not politically correct. “…Studies consistently show that AI makes people lazy and stupid,” is only true to the extent that one refuses to do the hard work of putting together a well-thought out thesis argument and research requirements. I definitely agree, though, that most people accept on face value whatever their particular AI agent produces. We’re already quite stupid enough already without additional false narratives spewed forth.
While I don’t think AI automatically creates a lazy and stupid people, I do agree that the world has been negligent in not requiring a pause two years ago. We needed to develop policies then, but greed won out. The algorithms are scary. The internet search algorithms are scary. The social media algorithms are scary. I always use network encryption, but I know my information is being used by greedy and unscrupulous people and institutions. I protect myself as much as I can, but acknowledge the futility.