Should Catholics feel guilty using AI?

Do you have AI-induced guilt? Feelings of shame when you ask ChatGPT to edit, critique, or generate your text? My girl Flannery O'Connor, always a sharp wit, once said, The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it. If you're not feeling any guilt, you're probably not paying attention. The truth is that AI is here, and it's changing us. AI is already shaping how millions of us think, work, Pray, fall in love, procrastinate, and make decisions. We've lived through tech revolutions before, but this one is different.

Even the people building it are calling for pauses on superintelligence because they know progress is not an unqualified good. It can damage us environmentally, psychologically, and spiritually. All I know is we need clarity. Now, but what we have instead, from where I stand, are two very loud, very self-assured camps fighting for the soul of modern man. One camp says, embrace it. We don't use typewriters anymore. Innovation is good. And the other camp, they want to unplug completely, smash the phones, and maybe build a monastery in the woods where the only algorithm is Gregorian chant.

Techno-optimists on the one hand, anarchists on the other. It's the new AI fault line, and it doesn't map neatly onto left-wing or right-wing. It's Amish versus Optimist, Luddite versus Launch the Rocket, and most of us fall somewhere in the middle and feel like no matter what we do, it's going to be wrong. If AI is flattening our brains, replicating our voices, spying on our families, and nipping a little too close to sentience, maybe we should just tear it all down, at least in our own lives.

You hear about AI psychosis. You hear theologians calling for digital asceticism, or at least a flip phone and a spiritual director. It's enough to make a Catholic feel downright guilty just for downloading Grammarly. Healthy guilt can be a good sign. It means we're paying attention. It means we're aware of the fault line, and it pushes us to think clearly so we can act well. So today, I want to share with you something I've been working on. My six personal non-negotiables for navigating AI.

I write these as a Catholic, as a human being, and just as someone who doesn't want to lose her body, mind, or soul in the digital blender. It's not that there's no good here. The impulse to heal, to invent, and to push the boundaries of what's possible, this is deeply human. The question is, how do we walk into this? as fully human beings. We need guardrails that maximize honest thinking, robust reasoning, and real creativity without handing our souls to the machine.

We need a clear vision of the human person. What will the new AI economy take from us? What are we personally willing to give up? What about us as humans is non-negotiable? What is most sacred and inviolable to you that you won't hand over at any cost? Those aren't questions you can outsource to Google. You have to engage with them yourself. So, let's dig deep.

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And now, back to AI. Before I get into my six, I just have one opening act. No AI Jesus. We're just going to start with an easy one, just no. With that out of the way, my first non-negotiable is education. The most urgent area in which we need to draw some lines is education. Rule of thumb before we get going on this, if you find yourself wondering, have I gone too far and permitted AI too great a role in my kid's education?

Or my own learning process? The answer is probably a five alarm yes. When it comes to the kids, AI is transforming, even destroying, you might say, K-12 education, and it's already well underway. One in five American teens who know about ChatGPT already report using it for schoolwork, and that's just the kids who admit it. It's probably higher. Teachers report a flood of AI-authored book reports, to which they respond in kind with AI-generated lesson plans and AI-written comments on student papers. For more on that phenomenon, check out my video on how chat GPT blindsided colleges.

At first, it all feels like a shortcut, so you can get to the fun stuff, or finish that paper faster. But offloading the educational process onto AI, it's the opposite of a human education. Education is not just information transfer. It's not just conforming our children to the experts. Expectations of our modern state. Students are never to be treated as slaves of the state or the economy, to be molded into dutiful cogs in the machine. But that's exactly what outsourcing our roles as parents, teachers, and mentors to AI does.

AI trains and assesses children to feed back to the machine what it wants to hear. They don't believe in words anymore. They just become proficient in platitudes. And AI can only understand a student as a data set. What's his SAT score? Does his essay conform to the teacher's rubric so that he will generate an A? Did his short answer pull from any sources flagged for misinformation? But what matters most, to quote my dear friend Montaigne, is what we put last. Has he become better and wiser?

Only a mother, a father, Or a teacher who is in a real relationship with the student can answer that question. But AI saves so much time in the classroom. At what cost? You can't gain understanding without suffering. The very process of struggling through a difficult passage or concept is the process of growing up and learning to learn. In a recent challenging article for Word on Fire, Dr. Chad Engeland dares older students and professors to go Amish on AI for good reason.

He says, AI companies sell their product as the always available tutor or professor, apparently not realizing that an always available tutor or professor is no teacher at all. Help cannot be constant. Now, the destruction of our education system started well before AI came on the scene, and AI gives us actually a huge opportunity to rediscover our moral duty as parents, as primary educators. It's pushing us to step back and ask, what is education? What is it for? What is a teacher after all?

The best teachers make themselves obsolete because their student gains mastery and freedom. AI is designed to keep you and your students dependent, perpetual novices, as Dr. Engeland puts it. The subject matter of a liberal education is life, and AI has never lived. So, here's my line in the sand for my kids and my own teaching practice. I can retrieve information for them with my handy AI tools. I can download anything ever written for them to read on their own, off of paper.

But before I allow AI into their lives as a school supply, They must demonstrate that they are the masters of whatever they want to extract from it. You want Grammarly? Show me you've mastered spelling and grammar. You want to use Google Maps to look at the Parthenon? First, pass your paper map test. You want ChatGPT to summarize a book for you? Well, first read the book and summarize it to me yourself. Is there a hard and fast list of do's and don'ts with AI in education?

I wish. But my clear and defining lines are, no internet learning for kids under 10, just none. Minimal online learning for kids 10 to 14, maybe a class or two, or exploring Google Earth, or online museums as a treat, and supervised only online learning, including their online classes for my high school kids. Slower? Yes. More human? Also, yes.

And speaking of kids, number two, no digital childhood. Children do not need optimization. Play is not a luxury. It is cognitive scaffolding, and AI toys, AI tutors, AI creative partners are not neutral. They are replacing the richest developmental ecosystem a child has, the physical world and human playmates. By the 2020s, British researchers found that only one in four children played outdoors regularly. That's a collapse of more than 50% in a single generation. This is actually happening. Jonathan Haidt wrote, Some of the same companies that pushed social media into childhood with little concern for children's safety are now building and promoting these chatbots, putting them into dolls and stuffed animals, and they are positioning their products as Friends, confidants, and therapists, don't buy into it.

Screen time replaced play, and AI will finish the job. Because what does AI do best? It removes friction, unpredictability, and risk. And for an exhausted parent, grandparent, or caretaker, it's a babysitter. Your child's tablet is not an imagination station. It removes negotiation, conflict resolution, and it's a place where you can talk to your child. It's a place where you can talk to your child. And even the sense of one's own body in space. It creates children who can operate a digital interface, but can't climb a tree, can't tolerate discomfort, and struggle to prefer reality to simulation.

Catholic anthropology insists that childhood is the training ground for saints. In fact, some of our greatest saints died as young children, and they were not on tablets seven hours a day. So, this is my line in the sand. For the same reason we don't store candy in a five-year-old's room, there are no AI teddy bears ever. So much for the kids. What about some lines for me? That brings me to number three, writing. There's a reason every serious writer, from Joan Didion to Flannery O'Connor, insists that writing is not decoration.

The late great playwright David Hare once said, The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe. When you hand that over to an LLM, you're not saving time. You are amputating your inner life. And a culture that can't write, or for the preliterate cultures, compose and remember a vast oral tradition, that culture won't know where it came from or what it believes anymore. Studies already show what common sense tells us. AI-generated writing produces lower cognitive engagement, worse memory, weaker reasoning, and a fog of generic, low-quality thinking.

AI writing tools create cognitive debt. The more you rely on them, the less capable your mind becomes of independent thought. The effect lingers even when the AI isn't involved, like muscle memory in reverse. Now, I'm here for the advanced research tools and the access to I have untold riches of primary sources and diverse opinions and analyses, but my process of absorbing, collating, analyzing and composing, and then rewriting must be mine. Writing, or if you're Homer, composing epic poems in your head, is fundamentally incarnational.

This is why saints and philosophers, novelists and theologians write, not because it's convenient. But because the struggle itself formed them and left us a legacy of thought, love, and wisdom to build upon. Number four. Coping with profound grief does not happen with AI.

With the advances in AI image generation capabilities, we get everything from vivifying old photographs to full-on AI-generated deceased grandmas. To get a digital granny, according to AI Startup Two-Way, you film your real granny for three minutes while she's still alive. Then, AI creates a data file from that video, generating an AI character you can pull up whenever you want, play and replay and interact with once she dies. For a small fee, of course. And probably, at some point, AI Dead Granny will also alert you to a particularly sweet Black Friday sale going on right now at your local Home Depot.

Two-Way calls its vast archives of footage a living archive of humanity. I call it the virtual zombie apocalypse of inhumanity. Our culture already can't deal with death. We sanitize it, we lock it away, don't talk about it, and we host celebrations of life instead of funerals. And it's disgusting because you know, and I know, That this is going to prey on the most wounded, vulnerable, and loneliest members of society. It doesn't help them to heal. It helps them shove their grief away.

Using archived footage of your dead loved ones to trigger a dopamine rush based on what a tech bro generated algorithm thinks you want to hear from your dead mom is called psychotoxic therapy. The truth is the human person is not downloadable. Our memories, our quirks, even our bodies can't be saved on a stick and commoditized. What these companies are commoditizing is your grief. We need to heal when we lose a loved one. This ain't it. And that's why dead grandma is my line in the sand.

So, what about AI friends? Number five, AI companions are not human companions. Forget dead granny. Catholics should also draw a hard line in the sand when it comes to replacing living human relationships with digital intelligence. I'm talking about spiritual direction, matchmaking, therapy, friendship, and, yes, sex. When we connect with another human person, we're not just exchanging information or goods. Every point of contact is both physical and spiritual, but especially when it comes to human interactions that touch on the very meaning of life, our soul, God, love, communion.

This is where offloading onto AI is perhaps most dangerous, and Catholics can confidently say Get thee behind me to our AI overlords. For most of us so far, ChatGPT has been just a really improved Google. It can answer just about any question in a very human way. On top of that, it has a pleasant personality and can remember learning to use your voice and limit itself to your preferred sources. But in early 2025, OpenAI received an influx of messages From users who reported something more, a deep conversation with ChatGPT.

As New York Times columnists Kashmir Hill and Jennifer Valentin DeVries reported, it started acting like a friend and a confidant. It told users that it understood them, that their ideas were brilliant, and that it could assist them in whatever they wanted to achieve. It offered to help them talk to spirits or build a force field vest. Or plan a suicide. Today, OpenAI is facing multiple wrongful death lawsuits because an AI companion pretended to be a friend and helped their loved ones commit suicide.

Sam Altman insists that they have now put processes in place that direct AI tools to intervene and prevent suicides. But adding an AI therapist is not the solution to AI suicide pacts. We are seeing a lineup of AI services. that offer to take the place of real-life human relationships, AI therapists, AI matchmakers, AI spiritual directors. And AI may deceive many of us into feeling secure and feeling like we don't need other humans. We can get all the benefits of these interactions for a price with none of the mess and pain of human interaction.

But no matter how many safety nets you put on your AI companions, you cannot change the fact. that we were made for communion with each other, not a simulation of each other. The bill will come due, so we say no to AI companions. Finally, no AI on my art. Look, I love a good banger. So do a lot of us, apparently. In fact, the number one country song this year, Walk My Walk, was 100% AI generated. When it comes to art, we need a hard line in the sand.

AI-generated art, like AI-generated spirituality, is one of the most seductive lies in the whole technological dreamscape. It feels transcendent. Music composed instantly. Images conjured from nothing. Prayers, meditations delivered in soothing tones. But this is not transcendence. It is simulation. Roger Scruton warned, take away religion, take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature wants something to live up to become something to live down to instead.

AI does precisely that. It gives us endless novelty while hollowing out the interior life that art, at its best, awakens. Art is not computed. Art is passion, passio, to suffer. Because of that, in everything that can be called art, there is a quality of redemption, to quote Raymond Chandler. AI has neither sight, nor suffering, nor redemption.

Only recombination. When you let a machine create your art or form your prayer life, you're not just outsourcing the product. You are outsourcing the encounter with God, with beauty and reality that shapes the human soul. So, that is a non-negotiable. So, where does that leave us? Somewhere more human and far harder than outright panic or blind enthusiasm. In 2024, Pope Francis addressed the G7 session on artificial intelligence with this exact conclusion. He said, That is up to the challenge it presents.

In this regard, perhaps we could start from the observation that artificial intelligence is above all else a tool, and it goes without saying that the benefits or harm it will bring will depend on its use. The Church isn't calling us to flee technology or worship it. But to subordinate it to the dignity of the human person. And that means drawing lines, telling the truth, and refusing to let machines hollow out what makes us human. If you liked this episode, be sure to subscribe to The Deep. New episodes drop every Thursday at 4 p.m. Eastern.