As someone who has worked in tech, I have first-hand experience with how artificial intelligence has disrupted the field of software engineering. I also regularly hear from friends, outside of tech, about how they use AI in creative and surprising ways.
One friend was doing What Color Is Your Parachute? on steroids. If you haven’t heard of it, that book helps you discover your skills and values and to do career planning and job search. My friend had recently been laid off and was rethinking his career. He had done personal reflection not just on the career he wanted, but also on how to “build a well-lived and joyful life” with work in its proper place.
My friend set up an AI workspace, where he uploaded the personal reflections he had written. He created a prompt that told AI what job sites to search. He asked AI to research the organization offering the job and to evaluate the jobs based on his personal values, interests, and goals. Because my friend was open to career change, he prompted AI to look at related jobs outside of his niche. After doing the work that only he could do, he asked AI to do work that it could do more efficiently. If you will, my friend’s job search was performance-enhanced.
When I was a teenage bodybuilder, my buddies at the gym could tell what was natural growth and what was steroid-enhanced. We knew at the highest levels of the sport, every competitor was on steroids. That’s the kind of world we live in today. Whether or not we personally use AI, our world is using it in every field from business to medical, from pastoral to military. We’re all on steroids now.
Steroids can performance-enhance what our bodies do naturally, but they do so with side effects and potential to permanently damage to our bodies. In the same way, AI can supercharge the work we do, but the results we get will come with unintended side effects and potentially irreparable damage to our communities and to our planet.
When I heard from a Gen Z friend about how she likes to talk things out with AI chat, I thought of Dear Abby on steroids. (If you haven’t already figured out from my dated examples, I am Gen X.) If you’re not familiar, Dear Abby is a syndicated advice column. Today, you don’t need to wait for a column to be published. You aren’t limited to “advice” from just “Abby.” AI has the whole internet at its disposal. You can chat with it. Ask it questions. Question its answers. Back and forth. Human-like. But don’t mistake AI for a human. Don’t confuse sophisticated pattern matching for wisdom.
If you narrowly define intelligence as processing power and pattern recognition, then AI is “intelligent.” Paired with natural language processing, AI appears human-like. But do not mistake this for a mind with the ability to create meaning. AI is machine, incapable of wisdom and incapable of morality.
“Machines can process language, but they cannot inhabit the stories language tells. They can detect patterns, but they cannot decide what those connections mean. They can generate coherence, but they cannot assume responsibility for what that narration signifies.” (Uriah Y. Kim, AI and the creation of meaning, Christian Century, August 2026)
I have a mid-career friend, who is working on an MBA. When I heard about his study routine, I thought, CliffsNotes on steroids. He takes the weekly syllabus and tells an AI agent to create a slide deck that summarizes the content for that week. He also tells it to create a quiz that he can use to test himself. He is not cheating. In high school, if you read the CliffsNotes on Romeo and Juliette, but didn’t actually read the book, you were cheating. But my friend watched all the video lectures and did all the reading. He only asked AI to help him study.
There’s been much discussion about whether using AI in schools is “cheating.” If our teaching and our assessments can be better done by machines, maybe it’s our pedagogy that needs to change. If a machine could teach us the content of an MBA, maybe business school should teach more what only humans can teach.
My youngest son just started film school. At his school, the general guideline is, use AI as a tool, but don’t use AI to generate what you came here to create. At welcome week, in the company of parents worried about AI disrupting the field, there was palpable fear of lost jobs in an already challenged industry. Will their children be able to find a job after graduation? Some jobs are being lost to AI, but our students are creatives. They are the storytellers and screenwriters, producers and cinematographers. They are the true creatives.
AI needs to remain a tool in the hands of true creatives in the arts and in every human endeavor. With all the hype around it, AI has been elevated from machine with human-like capabilities to superhuman with god-like characteristics. Those, who tout AI as savior, and those, who decry AI as impending doom, treat AI as a god.
How might we bring AI back down from a god to a machine? We could begin by learning from how steroids are safely used. When used at therapeutic levels, steroids can help the body heal. When used at 100 or 1,000 times the therapeutic dosage, however, it will have unintended consequences and likely do permanent damage.
AI proponents seem to believe that exponential times more data and processing will result in god-like, all-knowing, all-powerful AI. They are not willing to accept that people and our planet cannot sustain this. It is, however, possible to say, no, to massive water-sucking, energy-draining data centers without saying, no, to all AI.
At the moment, AI is equated with LLMs (large language models), that require ever more massive data centers to house and grow ever more massive LLMs. But artificial intelligence is not all one thing. Besides massive LLMs, there are other types of AI, other theories and research directions, to pursue. What if we put a constraint on AI, and required AI to be energy-efficient and sustainable?
Constraints are not a roadblock. In art, design, and engineering, there’s the saying, “constraints foster creativity.” Let’s charge the brilliant human minds behind AI to live within the constraints of our planet and see what new directions they might discover.
Another fundamental ask, let’s keep AI in the realm of machine and tool. Machines can out-search, out-compute, and out-generate a human being in many ways, but it cannot create meaning, possess wisdom, or practice morality. It can only mimic the flawed data with which it has been trained. Let AI be a machine and a tool in the hands of the true creatives.
Finally, let’s put constraints on the economic investments we as a society make in AI. AI is not the savior of the world. It does not deserve all the gifts, resources, and attention that we give it. Let’s invest in the many ways that humans are working for the flourishing of humanity and creation. Let’s put AI in its proper place. AI is tech. AI is not god, or even human.