New Christian guidelines help young people use AI wisely

Recently a friend told me how he uses Google’s NotebookLM to help his 16-year-old son, Joe, with his GCSE Physics. You give it all your course notes and say, for example, “make a podcast.” NotebookLM then generates a lively, entertaining dialogue between two AI-hosts based on the notes. As a bonus, Joe can join the podcast himself just by interrupting, eg: “Hang on! I still don’t understand why ….”, whereupon the hosts obligingly change tack and address Joe’s concern. Alternatively, NotebookLM can equally make a video or flashcards, etc.

What a great way for young people who may struggle with written text, or simply want their notes presented in a different way. Used like this, AI can strengthen our ability to learn rather than weaken it.

AI calls us to a greater depth of discernment

Use AI to release your thinking, not replace it is one of several principles in the free, concise “AI Guidelines for Christian Ministry”, published by the AI Christian Partnership (AICP). This PDF download consists of three parts: a summary of the pros and cons of using AI in ministry, an introduction to the ethics that should underpin AI use for Christians, and eight practical guidelines for using AI well. Although aimed at adult volunteers and leaders in Christian ministry, the AICP’s guidelines can help anyone to use AI well.

Here’s a few more of the principles from those guidelines thinking particularly of the young people in our care.

Using AI

It’s good to use the best tools available to produce our best work: “If the axe is dull and its edge unsharpened, more strength is needed, but skill will bring success,” says the thinker in Ecclesiastes 10.10, But used badly the same tool can cause us harm.

One of the principles is: use AI to critique not create, encouraging us to use our own critical thinking, do the prayerful heavy lifting ourselves, and only after that, use AI to improve our work, give us a second opinion etc. Perhaps if there is one simple, easy to remember takeaway, its “use AI to critique, not create”.

 AI can relentlessly flatter us, produce highly personalized responses, encourage us into our echo chambers, and even build pseudo relationships with us

But perhaps the most basic and essential skill, is ask great questions in the first place – open questions that don’t lead the witness (AI) to state what it believes will most please us.

Eg instead of:

Was Jesus crucified on Good Friday?

Try:

“On which day of the week was Jesus most likely crucified? Summarise the credible alternatives and arguments for each”

These effects are magnified for young people still working out their identity. That’s why we need understanding, guardrails, conversation

Even better, use AI to ask us questions – to help us think a problem through ourselves.

Eg instead of:

“I’m not sure what subject to study at university. What do you think?”

Try:

“I’m not sure what subject to study at university. Don’t tell me what to study but give me three or four questions I can ask myself to help me come to a good choice”.

Other discussions in the Guidelines include the importance of being transparent in our use of AI including guidance on how to be transparent without over-stating our use of AI; and understanding the potential impacts of AI on our environment and the world we live in.

When we use AI, we must learn to use it well.

Not using AI

Isn’t it interesting that, on the Emmaus Road (Luke 24), Jesus deliberately allowed the disciples to remain in a muddle for could have been hours. Somehow their struggle, their discomfort, their wrestling, was sufficiently important to Jesus to allow it to persist. He didn’t instantly give them the answer …. “Look it’s me, I’m alive!”. There was a process of working things through from the beginning that had to be negotiated. The moment of revelation came only later over the meal. “Then their eyes were opened and they recognised him”. Luke 24:31.

Read more:

AI in the classroom and at home challenges Christian parents to think afresh

Made, not manufactured: why AI can never be your child’s best friend

All of us, but in particular young people who do not have decades of experience working on lengthy projects and delivering solutions, need this experience of wrestling. Their assignment or essay is not the thing being formed. The thing being formed is them – their ability to grapple with problems, having to go back and start again … sometimes getting it wrong.

A recent workplace report from Microsoft calls this deliberate wrestling, ‘frictionmaxing’. A growing number of professionals deliberately eschew AI, avoid it, for a proportion of their work. These are people who don’t want to lose their own skills.

Losing our ability to think critically is a price we will pay for using AI badly.

Knowing when we need a person

A few years ago, my daughter was choosing a final-year thesis topic for her degree in Classical Civilisations and Theology. She was torn between diving deep into Greek culture or exploring women’s experience in Genesis. Which one is the right choice? After many conversations, she realised there isn’t a right choice. It’s what you do with the choice you make that makes it right.

Very often in life it’s what we do with the decision we take that makes it a good or a bad choice, not the decision itself.

In over three years of using AI, often intensely, I’ve not seen this kind of advice. AI has a great fondness to always calculate and vehemently promote ‘the right answer’. And then of course, if you say, “actually no, I think this could be the right answer,” it changes tack and argues forcibly for whatever you suggested, in the process telling you how brilliant you are! Can you imagine having a colleague sitting next to you who behaved like this? You would want to punch them! But conversely, once we understand AI behaves like this with everybody, it loses its power to mislead us.

Value judgments, understanding what’s really important, telling us we’re wrong and, most important of all, having responsibility - actual skin in the game - loving the people in our care, are all foundational human behaviours that AI lacks.

The Guidelines

Hopefully we have demonstrated here that AI calls us to a greater depth of discernment. AI is not, as some suggest, just “another resource”, like a new app or a website. It is different. AI can relentlessly flatter us, produce highly personalized responses, encourage us into our echo chambers, and even build pseudo relationships with us. These effects are magnified for young people still working out their identity. That’s why we need understanding, guardrails, conversation.

For the complete set of guidelines, download your copy here – free, no registration required.

Then start a conversation with the young people in your care. Not sure how to start the conversation? Check out the tips toward the end of our previous article, or indeed at the end of James Burden’s excellent article.

Written by Chris Goswami - Founder, AI Christian Partnership, with feedback and contributions from Chris Curtis – CEO, Youthscape.

Note: AI was used to assist in this article in a secondary mode only (see the Guidelines Section 5): to summarise earlier NexGen articles, summarise the author’s previous work, and to critique the final draft.