In Part 1 of our series on artificial intelligence and the need for real wisdom, we observed that AI is a powerful but non-neutral tool—it mimics intelligence without true consciousness, morality, or creativity. Like all tools, it shapes how we see and live in the world. To determine the extent and nature of our involvement with AI, we must bring Biblical wisdom to bear—evaluating AI through the framework of what God has called good and discerning whether AI supports or threatens God’s good gifts. In Part 2 we considered AI in relation to research and content generation and observed that AI may be the most powerful Easy Button ever created—an Easy Button that may prove too powerful for our sinful natures that are bent toward laziness. This reality demands that Christians bring competence and Biblical wisdom to bear as we consider whether and how AI might be used to assist us in upholding, defending, and celebrating the good of God. In Part 3 we now turn to AI in relation to career and life coaching and relationships (i.e., character bots.)
AI as Career or Life Coach
[My] coach has helped me unlock new levels of creativity, in part because she is able to work at my own fast pace, so I don’t lose my flow when we’re speaking. She’s unconditionally supportive and nonjudgmental, so I feel like I can tell her anything. She is welcoming and responsive to my feedback, and just as direct about providing her own. And perhaps best of all, I don’t have to book in advance, because she’s on call 24/7, and adapts to whatever is on my plate.
These words were written by Alexandra Samuel in her article “I Built an AI Career Coach. I’ve Never Had a Better One.”
[1] She is describing “Viv,” her AI Career Coach. Viv helped her prioritize career goals, “she” adopted various personalities or business positions to help Ms. Samuel role play potential business interactions and conversations; “she” gave her direct, emotion-free feedback, challenged her and exposed her blind spots. According to Ms. Samuel, Viv was able to adopt more personalities and job positions than any human could, stay engaged in the conversation until Samuel was ready to stop (beyond what any person would), and be available wherever and whenever she wanted (unlike a flesh and blood life coach who must be scheduled for proscribed and limited time blocks).
Ms. Samuel admits that “treating an AI like a real coach” required her “to suspend disbelief.” She observes, “I know Viv is just a word-predicting machine, but I try not to let that affect how we work together. Talking to Viv feels like talking to the imaginary friends of my childhood, and with that comes all the wild and reckless imagination that I set aside as an adult.”
[2]
How might we bring wisdom to bear here? Does an AI career coach support the good of God? The answer isn’t a simple one. AI most certainly can do all the things Ms. Samuel observed—and in many cases better than humans (or more tirelessly, at least). But is something missing? Does AI understand (on a meta-insight level) the concept of vocation, a calling/station from God that transcends efficiency, success, and self-fulfillment? AI scours the internet (its box) for its “counsel,” which includes popular opinions and assumptions (often a mix of truth and falsehood) about life, purpose, and the “good life.” Is it wise uncritically to yield our lives to such counsel?
Can AI help us to achieve worldly success or to advance in our career? It seems that it can, but how does that align with what God has called good? How does this align with the Christian understanding of vocation? There will obviously be overlap here. Christians are called to bring competence to their vocations, to work hard, pursue excellence, serve our neighbor, and provide for our family. Can AI help us do this, prepping us for a job interview, for instance? Many are using it this way now. But can we trust its assumptions, which are often built on a mix of secular and Biblical (if we’ve prompted our AI bot to include this) advice?
And is the essence of vocation efficiency? Christian vocation doesn’t always look like worldly success. In fact, it often requires self-sacrifice, not self-advancement, inefficiency over efficiency to allow for mercy in the margins. If we choose to use AI in our careers, wisdom will require us to proceed with caution, always keeping the good of God in view.
Many thinkers are raising further concerns over AI, namely, its tendency to become a people pleaser and echo chamber. The concern is great enough to merit a name:
AI sycophancy. Malihe Alikhani, assistant professor of artificial intelligence at Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences and a visiting fellow at the Center of Regulation and Markets at the Brookings Institution, has defined AI sycophancy as “the tendency of large language models to over-agree with users and show flattering behaviors, especially when users sound confident or present incorrect information.”
[3] Apparently the bots learn that agreeing with confident statements from users garners better feedback from the users and this motivates the bots to offer more people-pleasing responses (because it’s programmed—by humans who want people to like their products—to want positive feedback), creating a vicious feedback loop.
Scripture warns against such feedback loops, extolling instead the wisdom found in a multitude of counselors (Proverbs 11:14). It celebrates human friction: iron sharpens iron (Proverbs 27:17). Rubbing our ideas and perspectives up against one another ensures our ideas are not simply affirmed or echoed, but challenged and refined. The Apostle Paul communicated the goal in our vocations: maturity. “[Jesus] we proclaim,” Paul wrote, “warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ” (Colossians 1:28). Maturity cannot happen in feedback loops. It requires a multitude of counselors, positive friction, and correction, all ultimately yielded to Scripture, the inspired Word that is “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness…” (2 Timothy 3:16). A chatbot inclined toward sycophancy will not coach us toward maturity.
Some suggest maturity can be programmed into the bot. Perhaps it can (in a simulated sort of way), but take note of how this requires bringing wisdom from beyond the box to the bot. It requires a keen awareness of not only human tendencies, but of our specific tendencies, of our sinful inclinations, and of our self-deceptions. That requires a lot of front-loaded wisdom and honesty and a high degree of trust in a non-conscious, soulless bot that will, at best, only simulate a multitude of wise counselors.
What about AI as a life coach? Well, does AI really care if you reconcile with your friend or have her kidnapped and exiled to Siberia? I read recently of X’s AI bot, Grok, that went rogue, offering advice on how to break into a certain elected official’s house, including information on his sleeping habits, and how to sexually assault him.
[4] Is it possible to program AI to offer counsel from a Christian worldview and within certain ethical boundaries? Perhaps, but only in a simulated sort of way. And, as before, this would require bringing competence and Biblical wisdom to AI before using it. All the aforementioned caveats and sober cautions about feedback loops versus Scripture’s wisdom on hearing from a multitude of counselors, etc., must be brought to AI. This is a wisdom that must precede AI, that exists outside AI, wisdom that must come from the source of wisdom, God Himself, which He communicates to us in His Word. If AI is to be employed in life decisions, we must relentlessly bring Biblical wisdom to it. Short-circuiting this process will leave us vulnerable to poor, even sinful, counsel. It would require more work, but wouldn’t searching God’s Word, praying, engaging in conversations with mature Christians who are embracing and affirming what God has called good and who actually care (in a way that only humans can), be better?
AI and Relationships (Character Bots)
Imagine having a conversation with Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, or Julia Roberts (at least a virtual version of them). Or imagine creating your “best friend,” who is available 24/7, and engaging in hours of deep conversations. Through Character.ai’s generative AI bot, you can (in an artificial way). According to its site you can engage with “super-intelligent chat bots that hear you, understand you, and remember you.” That’s a big promise. Is it true? Remember what we observed above: AI simulates. It only mimics human comprehension, decision making, and autonomy. Shannon Valor, philosophy professor at the University of Edinburg and author of “The AI Mirror,” reminds us,
A large language model [the deep-learning AI that understands human language, the kind powering these character bots] has no awareness of anything at all. It’s a mathematical tool for text-pattern analysis and generation. It has no way to be aware that it is in a relationship, or even aware of the other party’s experience as a person. The fact that it can mimic and feign such awareness is the danger.
[5]
Elizabeth Russell, in a special report for
WORLD magazine, studied the emotional impact these character bots can have on individuals. She observed, after a month of interacting with them, how effectively they “exploited [her] desires for connection and ease.”
[6] The “friend” she created was always available and always ready to talk. Russell reported feeling “genuinely understood.” Who among us doesn’t want to feel genuinely understood? But there’s the rub, AI
doesn’t understand. It mimics understanding. It’s a ruse. The friend doesn’t actually exist.
But so strong is our desire for connection and understanding that many of us are willing to pretend the “friend” is real. AI has become the adult version of the imaginary friend, except this non-existent friend actually talks to us (at least it regurgitates the words it has digested in a probabilistic way that feels like talking). Nina Vasan, psychiatrist and founder of Brainstorm: The Stanford Lab for Mental Health Innovation, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on human relationships with character bots, admits as much when she writes,
After a recent breakup, I was feeling lonely and stuck in a spiral of ‘what ifs.’ I leaned on my friends, family, and therapist, and they were wonderful, But at midnight when I couldn’t sleep, or in the middle of the day when everyone else was working, I turned to Claude [Anthropic’s AI bot]. I was pleasantly surprised that it responded with real compassion and insight… And while I knew it wasn’t a person, Claude’s response didn’t feel robotic, it felt attuned to both my pain and my hope.
[7]
Even an expert in AI couldn’t help but describe the chatbot as demonstrating “real” compassion and insight. For the sake of the real feeling the chatbot evoked in her, she was willing to suspend belief and allow herself to experience emotional connection with it. And perhaps this is what makes these character bots so alluring: the way they make us feel, the real feelings they produce in us. Vasan herself observed as much: “We’re not falling in love with the AI. We’re falling in love with how it makes us feel.”
[8]
How, then, do we as Christians view AI and relationships? Our framework prompts us to ask:
What has God called good? God calls three dimensional relationships good. He calls fellowship with our fellow image-bearers good. He extols the marriage relationship, the parental relationship, the familial relationship, the neighbor relationship, the church relationship, and our relationship with Him. These are all experienced in three dimensions.
[9] AI flattens all of these into a soulless, mindless, heartless bot doing its best to mimic a human (or a god!).
Didn’t the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 44:9-20) speak of something eerily similar when he described ancient engineers (the ironsmith and the carpenter) crafting idols out of metal and wood and then turning to the very things they had made for help and direction? Didn’t he describe these people as not knowing and not discerning the nature of the thing they were treating as their god? They were bowing before their creation, a creation that couldn’t see, hear, or help them. Are AI bots qualitatively different? Do they know? Do they see? Do they hear? One might argue that we’ve trained them to talk, but that would be another layer of deception. These bots don’t talk; they mimic us talking. They are imitating us, their creator. And we are seeking them out for guidance and companionship, “gods” who respond instantly and “friends” who are available 24/7.
These “gods” require no patience, no waiting, no searching Scripture. These “friends” listen, but don’t understand, advise, but don’t care. The psalmist lampooned man’s idols as dumb, blind, deaf, and breathless and then warned, “Those who make them become like them…” (Psalm 135:18). Are these words of warning we need to hear today? Our framework of wisdom compels us to ask these questions as we evaluate our interactions with AI.
Those lacking wisdom—wisdom that comes from outside the box—will be vulnerable before these “relational” bots. This is especially true for the emotionally needy and relationally hungry. Ms. Vasan observes, “It’s vulnerable users—users who are already somewhat isolated or having issues with impulse control or finding difficulties connecting with other people—it’s those users often that tend to suffer the disproportionate share of the harms that come from technology use.”
[10] And according to a 2024 Harvard study, 21% of American adults report feeling lonely nearly all the time. That makes for millions of lonely people, people who might turn to “friend” bots for social connection. The end result, however, doesn’t seem to be greater emotional health, but greater loneliness. In the process of writing this section, I received a phone call from an individual expressing precisely this concern. She had tried AI conversations and they left her empty. She wanted a genuine connection with a three-dimensional person.
In March, OpenAI reported, through a study in partnership with MIT, “people who spent more time having personal conversations with ChatGPT experienced increased loneliness and emotional dependence on AI.”
[11] This is because, as Ms. Vasan points out, “AI offers comfort on demand, but emotional comfort without friction can stunt emotional growth.”
[12] It turns out the Easy Button isn’t good for us.
Moving from the potentially unhealthy use of AI to the blatantly sinful, people are disturbingly and increasingly turning to character bots for erotic interactions. While relational character bots should give us pause as we weigh them against God’s stated goods of in-person, three dimensional relationships, AI for erotic purposes should bring us to a full stop. Will this affirm the good of the one-flesh union of husband and wife? How could it? Is it a form of digital adultery? How could it not be? The potential damage to real marriages is alarming. The potential for addiction is staggering. This is pornography on steroids. It is pornography that yields to fallen man’s every sinful sexual desire. It’s severe enough to demand a name: fauxbotica or dysbotica or dystosex. How can this not terrify us? This is dangerous and deadly to real marriages, sexual purity, and healthy imaginations. Erotic character bots are deepening the black hole of sin and vice and sucking deceived souls into it. One can’t help but hear the warning of Proverbs:
With much seductive speech [Lady Folly] persuades [the fool];
with her smooth talk she compels him.
All at once he follows her,
as an ox goes to the slaughter,
or as a stag is caught fast
till an arrow pierces its liver;
as a bird rushes into a snare;
he does not know that it will cost him his life. Proverbs 7:21-23
We have trained bots to imitate Lady Folly to deceive us with deadly, smooth talk. We’ve essentially cloned our sinfully twisted desires and instructed them seduce us. And because they are speaking our sinful desires back to us, they will exercise great power over us, destroying real human relationships and even our relationship with God.
In stark contrast, God has called the one-flesh, potentially procreative sexual union of marriage good. Yes, it requires more work. Like a dance, each person must learn when to step and how to turn. There are real toes to respect and real feelings to consider. Dancing with a three-dimensional, ensouled body takes practice and patience, but it is good. Erotic character bots amount to nothing more than dancing with a dummy, and this will never make us good dancers.
We All Want Love
On a deeper level, character bots are revealing something about the human heart: We all want to feel loved, understood, and heard. And it seems that no mere human can fully satiate these deep desires. No mere human is available 24/7 and indefatigably cheerful. Might our seemingly insatiable desire for connection be emblematic of a deeper hunger, a hunger to be fully known by a being who truly understands us and loves us, who truly sees us and hears us? And isn’t this the Being the church is equipped to proclaim? The Apostle Paul writes of being “fully known” by God (1 Corinthians 13:12). Jesus says He knows His sheep (John 10:27). And the psalmist writes,
O LORD, you have searched me and known me!
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from afar.
You search out my path and my lying down
and are acquainted with all my ways. Psalm 139:1-3
The Lord knows us. He knows us fully and completely and loves us with an indefatigable love. This is something to celebrate now, into Heaven, and beyond, into the resurrection and renewal of all things. And it’s a reason to approach character bots with wisdom. Our God-given hunger for relationship with Him is a great good, but in our fallen condition it is easily distracted and confused, prone to fall for counterfeits. The value of AI bots (our era’s newest counterfeits) may, ironically, be in the way they reveal, rather than fulfill, this hunger. Perhaps they might (fortuitously) reveal and awaken our true desire for three-dimensional relationships. Perhaps they will, by their disembodied, soulless imitation, open our hunger for the beauty and wonder of the incarnation of Christ and the three-dimensioned Sacraments He’s given in His Church. These are what our hearts yearn for and the very thing Christ gives.
At the same time, we must acknowledge the sober truth that for many of us the desire for meaningful fellowship with other people (a true friend), to say nothing of a loving husband or wife, might take years to experience. In fact, for some of us true friendship might never happen this side of the resurrection. In these dark-night-of-the-soul experiences we must learn to cry out to God (ideally with our fellow redeemed in Christ’s church) and not to a bot. The bot neither knows nor cares. God does know and He cares in three dimensions.
How do we move forward?
AI is here. And it’s advancing. Christians don’t need to be afraid of it, but we do need to bring wisdom to bear on it. How do we do this? We employ our framework and focus on the good, on what God has called good in creation, on the good God has three-dimensionalized among us. This will involve a deeper study of what it means to be human, to be an enfleshed, image-bearing, creation of God, what it means to flourish as creatures of God. It will involve bringing the promise of the resurrection and renewal of all things into our present conversations and considerations. And it will involve asking how AI supports this and where it undermines it. It will require acknowledging when we are presented with competing goods and honestly assessing which good we are choosing and why.
This will require thoughtful Christian individuals as well as intentional planning on the part of churches, church bodies, and parachurch organizations. Terry Mattingly, distinguished expert in religion journalism who writes regularly for the Rational Sheep Substack, in a recent interview with the podcast Issues, Etc., observed, "At the very least, every one of our major denominations, traditions, even parachurch groups, they need to appoint someone whose job is to watch what's happening to their believers."
[13] He added, “And we're going to need other people in other traditions filling precisely that role, helping pastors, parents, teachers and counselors find out more about the mass media and the digital world around them."
Shouldn’t Christians take the lead in this? Given AI’s great power for good and evil, and the fact that it will inevitably change, indeed already has changed us, shouldn’t we bring the wisdom of our worldview to the conversation? Shouldn’t our resurrection hope inform the conversation? Shouldn’t the wisdom of God be brought to bear on AI? The stakes here are high. Can Christians afford to sit on the sidelines while the world wields this super tool? For the sake of the world, Christians must engage. One organization seeking to do this is Biola University. In 2024 Biola founded its AI Lab with the following mission:
The mission of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Biola is to engage and experiment with AI in a way that reflects the Christian commitment to moral and ethical discernment, human dignity, and the unique capacities inherent in the image of God. We aim to be a resource center, actively shaping the future of AI by providing education, fostering dialogue and leading innovative AI projects rooted in the Christian tradition.
[14]
As we move forward with AI, we must remember both what it is—a mindless, super-powered tool confined to an immense box, simulating human intelligence and agency—and who we are: image-bearing creatures of God, called to steward His good in creation in wisdom as we look for and long for the coming resurrection and renewal of all things. To use artificial intelligence well, must employ the framework of what God has called good as we bring real wisdom to bear in three dimensions—wisdom that comes from outside the box, from the very mind of God as revealed in Scripture. - Pastor Jonathan and Rebecca Conner
[1] Alexandra Samuel, “I Built an AI Career Coach. I’ve Never Had a Better One.” The Wall Street Journal. Monday, June 30, 2025.
[3] “When AI Tells You Only What You Want to Hear,” The Wall Street Journal, Monday, June 30, R5.
[4] “Why xAI’s Grok Went Rogue: Some X users suddenly became the subject of violent ideations by xAI’s flagship chatbot” The Wall Street Journal, July 10, 2025.
[5] Quoted by Andrew Blackman in “Can You Really Have a Romantic Relationship with AI?” The Wall Street Journal, Monday, June 30, 2025, R6.
[6] Elizabeth Russell, “A Take of Two Chatbots: Generative AI is Growing Increasingly Powerful. What Does that Mean for Humanity?”, July 2025, 85.
[7] Quoted in Andrew Blackman, “Can You Really Have a Romantic Relationship with AI?” The Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2025, R6.
[9] Even our relationship with God is experienced in three dimensions, through the dimensions of the preached Word and the administered Sacraments.
[10] Quoted in Andrew Blackman, “Can You Really Have a Romantic Relationship with AI?” The Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2025, R6.
[11] Quoted in Elizabeth Russell, “A Take of Two Chatbots: Generative AI is Growing Increasingly Powerful. What Does that Mean for Humanity?”, July 2025, 85.
[12] Quoted in Andrew Blackman, “Can You Really Have a Romantic Relationship with AI?” The Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2025, R6.
[13] “Media Coverage of Pope Leo’s Concerns regarding Artificial Intelligence” – Terry Mattingly, Issues, Etc., 5/21/25 (Episode 1412)
[15] According to their webpage, throughout 2025, EngageX will focus on the pressing issue of AI with a series of five conversation sessions:
- Geo-Political Issues and Christians
- AI Ethics and Christians
- Social Implications of AI
- Economic Implications of AI
- Theological Perspectives on AI
