We’ve seen this before.
A new technology arrives. Billions of people adopt it. A handful of billionaires build the architecture. And somewhere between the launch event and the congressional hearing, we find out the tool was never really designed with us in mind.
Social media. Same story.
Zuckerberg didn’t build Facebook to strengthen community. He built it to capture attention. The algorithm ignored your mental health, your teenager’s self-image, and whether your church could actually reach people organically. It optimized for time on screen.
We found out later. Much later.
Now look at AI.
Sam Altman. Elon Musk. Sundar Pichai. Jensen Huang.
These are the people writing the rules for the most powerful technology most of us will ever use in our lifetimes. They’re setting the defaults. Deciding what the tools reward, what they suppress, what they make invisible.
Who elected them?
Venture capital did. Government contracts did. Hardware monopolies did.
This is the power structure shaping AI’s intent before most of us even know how to write a decent prompt.
And intent shapes everything downstream.
Social media proved it. Engagement over truth. Outrage over nuance. The incentives were baked in from day one. By design. Because the business model required it.
So ask yourself: what is baked into the AI tools your congregation is already using?
Whose values are encoded in the default outputs?
Whose definition of “helpful” is the model actually optimizing for?
A concentration problem. When a small group of profit-driven leaders controls the training data, the safety guidelines, the deployment speed, and the revenue model, the technology bends toward their interests. Meaning and dignity are not line items in that equation.
We are late.
The Church arrived late to social media. We built Facebook pages after the algorithm had already been tuned against organic reach. We celebrated the platform right before it started charging us to talk to our own people.
Arriving late to AI costs more. Because AI is becoming the operating layer of culture. Of education. Of how people understand reality itself. A channel we cannot opt out of.
Ministry leaders need to stop being passive consumers of whatever ships next.
Ask harder questions. About who built the tool. About what they optimized for. About whether the design serves human flourishing or human extraction.
Teach your congregation AI literacy. Help people interrogate the tools, learn the assumptions baked into the outputs, and make informed choices about what they adopt.
Show up in the policy conversation. The Church has historically had a voice when power directly affected personhood.
This moment qualifies.
Who gets to decide how AI shapes humanity?
Will we let a small circle of profit-motivated technologists answer that for everyone else?
Or will we show up this time?
