Our Line in the Sand on AI: TGC’s Missional Opportunity

It’s an offense to the word “writing” to apply it to AI-arranged words and sentences. What AI produces is an impressively polished, usually helpful, sometimes cheeky string of words. But it’s just instantaneous pattern recognition and data organization. It’s soulless slop that can mimic and masquerade as brilliant writing. It’s aggressively efficient, speedily rendered, sycophantic information.

But it’s not writing.

Even when it’s created at the behest of a human’s creative prompt and detailed parameters, and even when it’s just assisting a human who has real writing chops, AI-fashioned content doesn’t deserve to be called writing.

Writing is an art form and a labor of love (love is something AI cannot do).

Writing is a product of deeply human, necessarily inefficient processing, meandering, wrestling, noodling, cogitating, and often suffering (suffering is something AI cannot do).

For Christians, writing is a holy calling and an act of worship (worship is something AI cannot do).

I love reading. I’m a book nerd and a sucker for great writing. But I have zero interest in AI-made “writing.” And no matter how good AI “writing” gets in the future, I will never have interest in it—for the same reason that AI-made music (however catchy or beautiful on the surface) gives me the ick. Those who claim we will “learn to love AI writing” are simply wrong.

For Christians, writing is a holy calling and an act of worship (worship is something AI cannot do).

I suspect only robots are interested in reading robot-rendered word dumps. With my limited time—and I’m guessing you feel the same, if you’re still reading this—I want to give my attention to words formed in another human soul, a being made in the image of God. And as an author, editor, and publisher, I want to promote only the work of human writers.

That’s why I’m proud that The Gospel Coalition has drawn a line in the sand on AI usage in the writing we publish. In short: We don’t want AI’s tentacles on any of the written works we publish. We want our audience to trust that what they get at TGC is human-made, human-edited, human-assessed, made in human community for other humans—as an act of love, fellowship, and worship.

TGC’s AI Policy for Our Writers

Our editorial team recently finalized an “AI Guidelines for TGC Submissions” document, which we’ll share with our writers (you can read it in its entirety below). The document begins by stating that at TGC, “we hold the human element of the writing process in high regard, with a low view of AI.” The document also states,

At TGC we emphasize the human element working under and for God. Our editors want to help make your writing better. We want to see your ideas and your writing, warts and all, and want to make your writing better through the art of editing and the work of revising.

Our official internal editorial policy states, in part, about AI:

All written content on TGC should be the original work of its author. Writers should not use AI for

• ideating,
• researching beyond a basic fact search,
• organizing,
• writing,
• or editing beyond a basic spelling check.

As editors, we developed this policy both to honor our readers—whom we want to trust the integrity of our content—and to honor our writers, so they’ll be clear that we only publish human-crafted work.

We’re not looking for perfect writing. We’re not looking for meticulously organized information full of suspiciously pithy one-liners or vague examples that don’t feel like they originated in a human’s real life.

We’re looking for writing that comes from a human heart, born out of real passion, nagging questions, persistent burdens; writing characterized by human affection more than perfectly calibrated linguistic inflection. We delight in the hallmarks of truly human writing: a bit messy, unexpected in the way real life always is, somewhat scattered and less efficient than machine-rendered words—yet pulsating with life.

We delight in the hallmarks of truly human writing: a bit messy, unexpected in the way real life always is, somewhat scattered and less efficient than machine-rendered words—yet pulsating with life.

In some ways, AI writers would be easier, less risky. We editors wouldn’t have to worry about AI writers ever changing their mind or renouncing their faith or committing grave sin. But we relate to our human writers precisely because they have the potential to do those things. They’re like us. We share in the struggle of faith.

We’re also not looking for writing that’s been AI-edited. It’ll be increasingly tempting to run everything we write—from emails to blog posts to Instagram captions to birthday card messages—through AI, prompting Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT to improve on our first draft. But in my experience, AI’s editing “help” tends to veer into rewriting, sucking the life out of my imperfect voice in the process.

Using an AI editor also removes the need for writing in community. This is why, in our AI Guidelines document, we say, “For editing help, we encourage you to ask a human—maybe a well-read friend, a fellow writer, or an English-teacher church member.”

My colleague and TGC’s managing editor, Megan Hill, put it well in a recent email thread among our editors:

As we write, we absolutely need dialogue partners to find “holes” in our logic. But, with AI, it’s now possible to write a piece in complete isolation. Even if you didn’t use AI to generate or create anything, you’ve still lost something important by cutting out the (sometimes painful) process of receiving human feedback.

Human feedback is costly. It requires time and energy from both parties. It requires vulnerability to show another human your drafts. But we want our writers to care enough about their pieces for it to cost them (and others) something to produce.

We want the writing and editing of TGC articles to remain a distinctly human endeavor, where the goal isn’t impersonal content but human community and connection.

You, our readers, are part of this community too. As you read a TGC article, we want you to know it comes from a named brother or sister in Christ, not a well-trained-but-inhuman LLM. We want you to read words as an act of fellowship with a fellow sojourner on the pilgrim path—someone you might one day meet at a conference, in a cohort, or over Zoom (as I did earlier today with a dear brother whose articles I’ve edited for TGC).

We’re pivoting in our editorial strategy to ensure a more human, personal experience of what we publish:

• Audio versions of articles, also released as TGC podcast episodes, so you can hear the actual human voice reading the article he or she wrote
• A soon-to-launch columnists section of our website, where readers can find new work from familiar voices they come to know and trust
• Increased experimentation in video essays, narrative podcasts, and other multimedia formats where ideas come from authentic human faces and voices, not just words on a screen
• A forthcoming AI policy guide resource for churches that helps pastors and leaders navigate wise use of AI in ministry

In these and other ways, we want to lean into the often inefficient, hard work of serving the church by producing resources by humans for humans.

Betting on the Future Value of Exclusively Human Writing

Some might argue that organizations like TGC will “fall behind” or become irrelevant by taking a hard-line stance against AI usage in writing. We hope the opposite will be true.

As AI-rendered words flood the internet and written content becomes cheaper and cheaper, most “writing” will be low-value and not worth anyone’s time. What will be worth human readers’ time will be the distinctly human words protected from the dead-eyed, neutering effects of AI.

Think about a Joe Rogan–style podcast that featured two AI “hosts” discussing some topic, or a YouTube video featuring AI deepfakes in conversation. Do you think audiences will ever have real interest in giving their valuable attention to watching or listening to AI simulations? If not, why would audiences have any interest in reading articles or books that are just AI simulations?

Christ’s incarnation is instructive here. God didn’t reveal himself in a conceptual, virtual, zeros-and-ones sort of way. He took on flesh. Embodiment matters. The medium of his body is the message. That’s why disembodied AI simulations don’t resonate. We’re wired for relationships with other embodied humans, made in God’s image like us.

I can never look Claude in the face like I can a friend sitting across the table from me, seeing fiery passion or glassy lament in his eyes as he shares something from his heart. I can only receive disembodied information and practical aid from Claude. Claude and I can’t commune in the way I can with a human. AI “companions” are a deadly wrong deception.

Claude and I can’t commune in the way I can with a human. AI ‘companions’ are a deadly wrong deception.

At TGC, we aren’t against all uses of AI. Some TGC staffers use AI in various targeted capacities in their work, and many of us (including me) use LLMs like Claude or ChatGPT regularly in everyday life. It can be helpful in all sorts of arenas, from quickly coding websites and cleaning up spreadsheets to offering restaurant recommendations for specific tastes (though in each of these cases, asking a human friend with expertise in that area might be more rewarding).

My wife and I even used Claude recently to create a schedule for “solid starts” foods to introduce to our seven-month-old. It was helpful as a beefed-up search engine, consolidating and summarizing available information in a way that saved us hours of online sleuthing. Inevitably, individuals and churches are discovering all manner of ways to leverage AI.

Deployed in the right directions, AI can be a blessing.

What we’re opposed to is the use of AI in creative intellectual work—like writing—where the cognitive off-loading AI provides undermines the whole endeavor, both in the short-term and (especially) in the long. The “humanities” will cease to exist if we start to outsource them to machines. The appetite and ability to read and write will atrophy the more we farm them out to AI.

People of the Book Need to Be Able to Read

Our stance isn’t just strategic for TGC. It’s crucial for the broader Christian mission. One real risk of a world where AI writes everything is that human literacy will plummet (a process already in motion). And for “people of the Book” like Christians, this is a crisis. Our ability to know, remember, and interact with God’s revealed Word depends on our ability (and desire) to read.

In his introduction to a new AI book TGC is publishing this September, TGC editor in chief Collin Hansen mentions a memorable scene in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 where a woman refuses to leave her book collection even as her house burns. Hansen connects this dystopian story to our present technological moment:

As I learn about and experiment with AI, I keep thinking about books. I want my children and grandchildren to grow up in a world of books, written by human beings, read by human beings. Not summaries of slop, written by AI, read by AI. . . . When we give up on writing, we’ll have no need for reading. And when we stop reading, we’ll no longer be thinking about love and war and other big topics like how to make our world better for the next generation. Literacy is the house I’ll burn down in.

I agree. The digital publishing industry may indeed be a burning-down house. But we hope TGC’s staunch commitment to human-made work will fortify us against the encroaching flames—not for our own survival but for the sake of the future church who will need trustworthy resources, rooted in the ancient gospel, more than ever.