Generative artificial intelligence, or AI, is a technology that creates new content—such as text, images, video, code, and music—by recognizing patterns in existing information. Though AI may seem invisible, it depends on very real systems: data centers, electricity, water for cooling, and the people who build and maintain them. These systems can bring jobs and investment, but they may also burden communities through heavy energy use, water consumption, noise, land use, and disruption of local systems.
AI can do remarkable good. It can help people make sense of complex information, reduce repetitive work, support medical research, and assist with creative projects. Used wisely, it may become a tool for service, learning, and problem-solving.
Still, AI raises serious concerns. Data centers can have environmental costs. Easy and unprotected access to AI can also create risks, especially for children and youth, including misinformation, phishing, unhealthy emotional attachment to AI companions, and confusion about what is true. AI can also shape decisions about jobs, loans, policing, health care, education, and what information people see. Sometimes, even experts cannot fully explain how an AI system arrived at its answer. That should give us pause.
For people of faith, this raises a deeper spiritual question: are we giving AI something like godlike power, allowing it to judge, predict, and direct human lives in ways we do not fully understand? We are not God, and no machine should be treated as all-knowing. Faithful wisdom calls for humility, foresight, and care.
AI is not simply good or bad. Like many human inventions, it can serve our neighbor—or deepen injustice. The Minneapolis Area Synod of the ELCA is undertaking work on AI ethics, privacy and usage safeguards, policy guidelines, education about environmental and community impacts, and a “faith and AI” study guide to help the church respond thoughtfully.