Jesus & AI Use

Image by Alexandra Koch from Pixabay

Artificial Intelligence (AI) did not exist in Jesus’ time, so of course he said nothing about it directly. Christians today, like most people, are wrestling with what to do with it. In recent years, AI systems can write articles or create pictures based on a few words about what is wanted (a prompt). Today, many documents, sites and pictures on the Internet are generated this way. Should Christians use it too? Is there something in what Jesus says in the Gospels that we can use as guidance about AI use?

To answer this question, first we need to consider how modern AI works. An AI system for written text is trained on a great many existing written texts, and an AI system for images is trained on a great many existing images. AT training creates an aggregation of data that can be used to generate new texts, and new images, that are derived from the many that the system has seen. This is done using math. No AI-generated text or image is truly new. Every bit of it is derived from existing images or existing texts produced by people, but the bits are recombined in new ways, guided by the prompt that the user provides. The key insight is that a person using an AI system can produce text and images without doing any work: they are leveraging the work of others.

There was nothing like this for texts and images in Jesus’ time, but there was something like this for money, devised by private bankers, called trapezitai in greek or argentarii in latin. In a similar way as an AI system today is made from many existing texts or images, a first-century trapezites or argentarius would assemble a deposit and loan system from the deposits of many people and a set of loans to people engaged in trade. The receivers of loans would pay high rates of interest on their loans, the depositors would receive modest rates of interest on their deposits, and the trapezites would keep the difference as their profit. Just like a person can use an AI system to create text or images without doing any work themselves, a person could earn interest on their money without doing any work, by simply depositing their money with a trapezites for interest. While we don’t think of banking as technology in the way that AI is technology, like AI, banking is very much a system, a system involving math, except that the math is implemented through human effort and careful written records, rather than machines.

Jesus mentions trapezitai once, in the parable of the talents, which he uses to describe the Kingdom of Heaven. In this parable, a rich man, a slave-owner, goes on a journey and leaves his money with three of his slaves: five talents in money to one, two to another, and one to a third. A talent in the ancient world is a quantity of precious metal or currency equivalent in earning power to about $600,000 today. When the man returns, he asks each slave for an accounting of the money that had been entrusted to that slave. The first two have both put the money to work in trade, and have doubled the funds. The man is very pleased. The third has buried the money in a hole, and upon the man’s return, gives it back, with these words:

Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours. [Matthew 25:24-25]

Understandably, the man is quite displeased with this slave, and reprimands him, saying:

You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers (trapezitai), and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest. [Matthew 25:26-27]

The parable illustrates how, in the Kingdom of Heaven, each person (represented by the slaves in the story) is expected to make good use of what they have been given. The third slave, who did nothing with what he was given, failed in his duty. Yet the master points out that the slave did not have to do as much as the others did with what he was given, he merely had to do something with it, something that would have produce some benefit.

This provides for us a principle that helps when thinking about what to do with AI. Using AI to produce written or visual materials, like depositing funds with bankers for interest, is an easy way to obtain something that has some benefit, without doing any work for it. As the man in the parable implies in his response to the third slave, it is not as good as doing the work properly, but it is better than not doing anything. Where we cannot do the work well ourselves, the use of AI-generated work may be better than nothing. For example, writers who lack skills in illustration (and lack the means to hire artists) may illustrate their writing with AI-generated images (labelled appropriately of course). Similarly, people whose ideas are sound but whose grammar, clarity, and presentation may be lacking, can benefit from the editing help of an AI language model. Or an AI model may provide easy access to helpful aggregated and summarized knowledge beyond what might be accessible to the average person.

Jesus’ parable makes it clear that it matters what we do with what we are given. Will we work hard with it, doing our best? Will we (perhaps with the help of AI) at least do something useful with it by leveraging the work of others? Or will we do nothing at all? Doing nothing is clearly not acceptable. AI-generated work may be better than nothing, but best of all is doing our own work well. Indeed, Jesus may not say anything about AI directly, but on the basis of what he says about people, we can be guided in what to do about AI.

First published Oct 25, 2026 at newevangelizers.com