The quest for emotional support. . .

How curious it is that reports are now telling us how AI (artificial intelligence) is being used as well as how it is trusted by those who use it.  There was a time when AI was being heralded as an advance in the minutiae of technology, science, law, etc., which employed terminology and patterns of thought not normally used in every day conversation.  It was a means of freeing the people from servitude and pawning off unpleasant or boring things to AI.  Then it became a means of souring the breadth of information available and distilling it into short and easy to understand answers about questions -- what is happening across the world and why things happen as they do.  Very quickly, however, AI has shifted to another area.  It is now seen by many as a means of emotional support -- a therapeutic role.

A study from the Collective Intelligence Project on Human-AI relationships surveyed a small but significant number of people from some 70 or more nations and concluded that "AI moved from task tool to emotional infrastructure.”  What people are outsourcing is not the mundane, boring, or tedious tasks of work or life but friendships and emotional support.  In fact, the survey found that folks tend to trust AI in this role (as with others) even more than they trust other people or the institutions of society and culture.  In their quest to find support for or help in personal issues and emotional needs, they increasingly and very quickly turned to AI.

There was a time in which churches provided the means to and access into community where personal relationships were formed and flourished and emotional needs could be met.  Could it be that the churches have lost this role precisely because they have adapted to and been replaced by the same cold and impersonal digital reality of the rest of the world?  Watching worship is clearly not the same as in person participation in worship services.  Watching preaching and teaching on a screen are not the same as sitting in the pews with others and listening to a preacher or teacher.  Hearing music through speakers is not the same as lending your voice to the congregation's song.  Praying along with a voice on a screen or in your earbuds is not the same as praying with one voice as a congregation (just try praying a common prayer out loud in a zoom meeting).  Receiving a spiritual communion while watching the altar and the pastor distribute the gifts of God to the people of God is not the same as kneeling, eating, and drinking those gifts in the Holy Eucharist.  Yet too many churches and pastors rely on these in place of the common assembly of God's baptized people around His Word and Table.  In this, the churches have shown themselves to be the same as and not distinct from the ways things work in the world.

People once valued hearing even the hard things they did not wish to hear but needed to hear.  In those days preaching did not tiptoe lightly over people's views but confronted them with His Word and truth.  The side reality of our digital world is that we are less likely to hear things we do not agree with or the unpleasant truth that can compel repentance and we tend to look for places to be affirmed in what we already believe and to be encouraged in what we already think.  AI is very good at sensing both what we believe and think and then addressing us passively without rocking the boat of our sacred thoughts or feelings.  Furthermore, AI finds it hard to speak in the unequivocal truth of God's Word but very easy to appeal to feelings and to address the emotional wants or needs we place above our want or need for objective truth.  AI takes enough of what we give to figure out what we want to hear.  It is no wonder that AI has become an essential tool in the desire for emotional support in many.  The question ought to be at what cost?

Our critique of AI needs to focus clearly on the cost of hearing our own thoughts or beliefs amplified in the echo chamber of AI and internet communities and resources that supply us more with what we want to hear than what we need to hear.  Indeed, there are some who have found that over the long term, AI does not deliver.  Look at the beginnings of a revolution among the young who have been coddled with the soft and easy life of living within the comfort of their own thoughts or opinions but who now are seeking out those churches which will call them to repentance, connect them with the transcendent, and compel them to change their sacred feelings and exchange their easy sins for a nobler life worthy of the higher power of God.  It may not quite be orthodoxy yet but it is headed in that direction.  A resurgence of orthodoxy means distinguishing the real Church from the fake ones whose soft seats and easy gospel has little to do with sin, death, a Savior who is God in flesh, and a life stronger than death.  I am not saying we should be blind to the emotional quests of those around us but we cannot deliver to them anything less than the real Gospel of Christ crucified and risen and of the new life in us arising from baptismal water.  The real emotional support for which we long is answered not by finding a safe place insulated against all the things we do not like or want but in the power of forgiveness, the robe of Christ's righteousness, and the work of the Spirit to bring this to bear in us through lives worthy of our calling as the people of God.  The emotional support AI can bring is a feel good moment that will end up leaving us mortally wounded.