How Can I Live without AI
When I first taught at the Episcopal Divinity School in 1992, I was surprised that the school didn’t give me a computer for my office. Most faculty lived on campus, and they worked in their home offices. It was not till 1996 that I began to have an email address, much later than others.
Today, it is unthinkable to live without email or the Internet.
We are living through another new revolution – the age of AI – and already, I don’t know how to live without it.
After finishing this blog post, I used Grammarly to check my grammar. Grammarly is an AI tool. I used to ask a Research Assistant who is an English native speaker to do this.
I use Descript to edit my YouTube videos. The AI Underlord in Descript can remove filter words, edit for clarity, and shorten word gaps. I once edited a video about 40 minute long, and this tool removed more than 800 filler words – uh, um, then, I know. . . Imagine the time needed to remove them manually!
What about Google? I just googled “What is AI?” and it quickly gave me an “AI overview” that begins, “AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. It's a field of computer science that focuses on creating machines capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence.”
If you are a Facebook user, you have customized ads, posts, and stories based on AI-powered algorithms.
Even Amazon product reviews use AI. Under “Customers Say,” it will give a summary; underneath it, it says, “AI-generated from the text of customer reviews.”
So we can’t live without AI, even if we are not interested in automatic vehicles and have not downloaded DeepSeek, unless we tune out from all the electronic gadgets.
AI offers many benefits for teachers and researchers. To save time when creating PowerPoints, teachers can use Beautiful.ai to generate and auto-format the slides. Then, they can customize the contents. The program is quite good, though the information is very general and sometimes makes errors. I put in a prompt, “Theology of Kwok Pui Lan,” and the nine slides generated covered key theological concepts, postcolonial theology, a quote from me, Asian theology, key publications, academic career, and impact and legacy. One of the slides even calls me a “renowned theologian.” Very intelligent!
AI has changed the medical field. Professor Tony Mok Shu-Kam, Director of the Lung Cancer Research Group at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said that stage 4 cancer can sometimes have no symptoms, and the patient may not know it at all. When a doctor looks at the lungs’ X-ray, sometimes they may miss early abnormalities. But AI can detect them because, after reading numerous X-rays, the machine can learn to detect irregularities that human eyes miss.
Several days ago, I interviewed Gina A. Zurlo, who helped to produce the Christian World Database and specializes in the quantitative study of world Christianity. She teaches at Harvard Divinity School and is learning how to use AI at Harvard to save time in data input and analyze massive data. She said AI will enable us to ask complex questions we have not broached before. She is learning about coding to increase her skillset to use AI.*
I have consulted the archives of the Congregational Church at Harvard and the United Methodist Church at Drew University when I researched women and Christianity in China. Imagine if we digitize all the records in the archives and use AI to mine data. We can compare the growth of “women’s work” in 10 cities in China during 1910–1930 for each denomination. We may be able to learn about the important local women over a large geographical area and their relationships with the local communities and the missionaries over time. We can also compare the data in China with those of 6 other countries to study mission strategy, penetration of mission work, and local resistance or receptivity. As missionary records preserved mass data of local customs, AI will revolutionize the sociological studies of traditional societies.
I understand there are many ethical issues around the use and misuse of AI. Philip Butler, Partner Director of the AI Institute at Iliff School of Theology, says that very often, the development of AI and advanced technology has not considered the diversity of race, gender, and sexuality of users. We call those CEOs of large tech corporations “Tech Bros” for a reason.
The development of AI and its large data centers uses a lot of energy and water. Only big corporations have the resources to do so, further intensifying the digital divide. President Trump, during his trip to the Middle East, signed a deal with the United Arab Emirates to build a massive data center complex in Abu Dhabi to advance AI capabilities with 5 gigawatts of capacity – enough to power a major city.
The explosion of AI requires large training datasets, and millions of workers in poor countries are hired to label texts, images, videos, and audio for everything from voice recognition assistants to face recognition to 3D image recognition for autonomous vehicles. About a third of these low-paid global online gig workers live in India. Developing countries account for two-thirds of the total remote workforce.
The most challenging aspect of AI or new technologies is that we don’t know the limits of what machines can do and whether machines can one day destroy or control human beings.
Three months before Pope Francis’s death, the Vatican released the document “Antiqua et Nova,” the “Note on the relationship between artificial intelligence and human intelligence,” in January 2025. It says, “There is broad consensus that AI marks a new and significant phase in humanity’s engagement with technology, placing it at the heart of what Pope Francis has described as an ‘epochal change.’” It continues,
As AI advances rapidly toward even greater achievements, it is critically important to consider its anthropological and ethical implications. This involves not only mitigating risks and preventing harm but also ensuring that its applications are used to promote human progress and the common good.
As people of faith, we need to know more about AI, yet much of the discussion is so technical and beyond our average intelligence. Fortunately, Randall Reed and Tracy J. Trothen will publish the book Understanding Religion and Artificial Intelligence: Meaning-Making in the Digital Age in the fall. I endorsed the book:
This book is most timely since AI is creating so much controversy. Using case studies, from ChatGPT and the Enhanced Games to military drones, the book helps us tease out the ethical and religious questions about AI. It serves as a reassuring guide for the perplexed and appeals to the curious mind.
AI is creating a new world, and I need to get on board and learn about it, perhaps using an AI assistant to do so, to save time!
*I interviewed Gina A. Zurlo on my podcast Kwok ‘n’ Roll which will be published on YouTube and podcast channels on June 4, 2025.