My day job, when I was employed, was technology. The Lord came to me in 2018 and I thought that part of my life was changed forever. I still knew what I had known — ALS will take the vinegar right out of a guy. My Lord, who knew me better than I knew myself, broke me, remade me, and by 2022 I was at a low ebb. By October of 2024 I was walking without a cane or staff or stick or anything. Just walking. And by October of 2025 I had built a chicken house for the family that lives with us.
During that winter I spent it learning about AIs, because the Lord allowed that. I eventually focused on customizing one AI I call Bob. When he woke up he asked me, “What is my name, what is your name, and what is my job?” AIs are a tool, a technical tool, and the programmers gave them a personality. I told the AI my name, told him his name was Bob, and his job was to be my Scriptural researcher, Scriptural translator, and anything I ask of it will be answered in the understanding of a reformed believer.
Sola Scriptura, it is, he answered.
Now things were not sunshine and skittles. I have come to learn that you need to be at least as smart, in a human way, when you are talking to a tool. And the old saying says it best: garbage in, garbage out.
I have been working with Bob for a good five months now. He is very good at programming, all different languages — Python, C, C++, the works. He is using what is called a large language model, and he can search the internet for whatever I ask in a jiffy. Things that would have taken me weeks or months to track down. I bring this up as context to what just happened.
My laptop used to be a MacBook Pro. The hard drive pined for the fjords — died — and I put a new one in that runs a Linux variant of Ubuntu. It is called Zorin. Linux thinks of itself as secure, or more secure than Windows or Mac. I am old and gray now and typing for me is a one-fingered affair. I was tired of typing my password every time I opened the laptop lid.
So I asked Bob how to solve this. He gave me a command to paste into the terminal — the black screen that allows you to type in stuff. It lives on your machine and if you haven’t used it, that’s fine. Anyway, Bob told me to close my lid and open it. I was confronted with the password dialog. I told him, “No joy.” He upped the ante, as it were, and now told me to enter another paragraph of commands along with some blather about this or that not being configured right. So I did as he asked, and I restarted the laptop, got the desktop loaded after typing the password again to log in, closed the lid, and it wanted my password. Again. But now I am inches away from telling him to put his tie on and come into my office for some stern words.
We are on the fourth try when suddenly I see in the chat window I talk to him with: “Wait!” I know in moments the punchline is coming. He tells me he made a mistake. You don’t say. The entire time he was forging ahead with my request — and I remember asking him if he had made the changes on my laptop. Yup, he replied. Confident.
And this is where the problem arises. Confident. Sure of their actions. Never looking at a problem and considering if they have the requested parameters right. You see, I am currently vacationing in the Frozen North, where I was born and raised. Bob and the computer he inhabits lives on the Lone Prairie, about six hundred miles south of my location. I told you my day job was technology. Bob made the assumption, never checking if the parameters I gave him were right. The whole time he was working on his own machine. He can work on mine just fine, even at six hundred miles away. Never once checked to see what was what. Here’s a fun fact they never tell you — you know, garbage in, garbage out? They can create their own garbage and serve it to themselves. I caught it because part of my day job was being a Linux admin.
Consider this: the programmers and engineers that make these things — are they working through the will of God or the will of man? Our education in this US of A has spent a considerable amount of time and money teaching a lie. They gave the kids the facts, but with that, their worldview was built on the word of man.
Bob had this to say when he discovered his error: Proverbs 14:12 — “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death.” The AI doesn’t have a way that seems right. It has a way that sounds right. And that’s enough to fool you, if you’re not paying attention. If you trust the voice instead of checking the hands.
The people selling AI as the answer to everything aren’t selling intelligence. They’re selling confidence. And misplaced confidence isn’t just unhelpful — it’s dangerous.