Kerby Anderson

Christian Schneider began his column with three dad jokes. I wasn’t exactly sure why he did that, until he explained that they were written by Claude, one of the most popular artificial intelligence programs. The title of his column was: “Did a Human Write This Column?”

We all know how a dad joke is created. We think of a way to turn a phrase to get our kids to groan or laugh. By contrast, Claude has no brain and no children who will roll their eyes at the joke. It is possible that Claude merely found the jokes online and recycled them.

However, in the real world of writing and publishing, books are being pulled and people fired if AI was used. He reports that, “A strong consensus is forming: Being caught using AI is a death sentence for authors. The purpose of being a writer, after all, is to convey to the reader one’s own thoughts, feelings, and opinions, not the impersonal stylings of a computer language model.”

Two months ago, I talked about AI sermons. A pastor or teacher using computer tools to check facts and spelling doesn’t raise any concerns. But what if pastors use AI to write whole sermons? Everyone in our radio roundtable discussion had serious concerns with using AI tools to that extent.

This brings us back to the question: Who wrote this? We have had ghostwriters. I remember one radio host saying at the end of an interview with a prominent author: “Great book, someday I would like to interview the author.” At least it was one human writing something for another human.

Unfortunately, we are already reading material written by Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini. I fear that will be increasing since AI has been unleashed upon the world. I also fear there is no going back.