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# How and Why We Do (and Don't) Use Generative AI
- URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/how-and-why-we-do-and-dont-use-generative-ai/
- Published: 2026-09-29T11:00:31.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-29T11:00:33.000Z
- Description: We are seeking after understanding, healing, and preservation rather than strength or domination.
- Author: Mere Orthodoxy
- Tags: Jake Meador, Technology, About Mere Orthodoxy

*The Three were not made by Sauron, nor did he ever touch them. But of them it is not permitted to speak. So much only in this hour of doubt I may now say. They are not idle. But they were not made as weapons of war or conquest: that is not their power. Those who made them did not desire strength or domination or hoarded wealth, but understanding, making, and healing, to preserve all things unstained.* 

*\~ J. R. R. Tolkien*

*The output of the assignment is not the ultimate goal. Instead, each assignment at DTS is designed to train you in specific skills and build new capacities you need for ministry. Put another way, you are the output, not the paper.* 

*\~ AI Policy Statement from Dallas Theological Seminary*

Why do we write? 

If you’ll forgive such a pretentious introduction, I think attempting to answer that question will take us some distance toward defining healthy rules for the usage of large language models in the writing life.

The most common reason many people have written in recent years is that they needed to sell something. 

Prior to the internet, business advertisements mostly existed in phonebooks and on billboards and perhaps on the side of a truck. The amount of copy one needs for such things is minimal. Indeed, if anything one was incentivized toward *less* copy because newspaper classified rates were so high.

The internet changed all that by reducing the cost of information production and distribution to basically zero. This has meant that over time it has become normal and expected that businesses would have their own website or social media page as part of their marketing. Often they also maintained an email list to promote their products to customers. 

But websites have to be written, as do emails, which means businesses sometimes needed to employ writers themselves, especially if they also had an interest in competing on search engine result pages for traffic. It also meant that freelance writers could, for a time, find reliable work writing website and email copy for businesses. (I worked as a marketing copywriter for a couple martech agencies for nearly nine years before being able to go full-time at *Mere Orthodoxy.*) As a result, writing took on a utilitarian, functional quality that I am not sure it had in quite the same way prior to the web. What this means is that we now live on the far side of a cultural and technological moment that tended to reduce writing to a commercial tool.

There is a further complication that is layered on top of this technological moment. It is not simply that firms suddenly had a “need” to generate far more copy than they ever would have in the pre-digital era. Individual employees did as well due to the rise of email and its integration into the day to day operations of most businesses. Because of email, a great deal of communication in the professional world was now done via writing rather than in-person conversations in an office, conference calls, and so on.

Overnight, then, everyone became a writer in some sense of the term, but their relationship to writing was purely utilitarian and a matter of professional necessity. This gave them a certain relationship to the written word that saw the generation of copy as being a means to the end of accomplishing some needed professional task.

That world is now being unwound by the rise of large language model (LLM) technology which is able to generate large blocks of text in response to a prompt or query from a human user. The work that companies once paid copywriters to do can now, on the technical level at least, be outsourced to an LLM. If the chief purpose of writing is to convey data or simply fill up online spaces that require a certain amount of copy, then it is hard to identify what is wrong about all this. If writing is purely a means to the end, then if you can obtain the same end with an easier, cheaper means… why not?

Obviously one could say that the writing which really is purely utilitarian in nature *can* be made via generative AI tools. It is hard for me to make the argument, for example, that firms today should employ people to do the kind of writing I was employed to do between 2013 and 2021\. That said, the danger of our moment is that we have been schooled for 20 years now in the idea that all written communication is utilitarian in nature. If you have come to think of the written word in such terms, then it is not merely copy for website product pages or marketing emails that might be legitimately made via artificial intelligence software, but *all* writing. And this is where my concerns sharpen and come to a point.

When we diminish *all* written language in this way, it is not simply our relationship to writing that is changed. Our relationship to communication and language itself is transformed, which also leads to the transformation of our relationship to persons. To turn *all* writing into a purely utilitarian good rather than it often being an artistic or ornamental good has deprived us of much. The people who care about this should not be limited to professional writers and editors.

There is a form of writing that is done as a way of thinking or of conveying care. The people who write in this way are not seeking financial rewards, political power, or simply to check off an item in their Todoist app. They are in search of understanding, of shared knowledge, and of making and healing, as Tolkien said. Indeed, the reason I began with Tolkien here is that I think the Tolkienian values described there by Elrond have been almost entirely forgotten by many today. 

One way of naming the writing that has been lost due to this shift is to simply share a sample of it. Consider the widely cited letter written by Civil War soldier Sullivan Ballou who was killed in 1861 not long after writing this to his wife. I will only share (longish) excerpts below. The [whole thing can be found online](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sullivan%5FBallou?ref=mereorthodoxy.com#Letter) quite easily and you can [hear it read on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78SOjurJkHk&ref=mereorthodoxy.com) from the Ken Burns Civil War documentary.

> Our movement may be one of a few days duration and full of pleasure—and it may be one of severe conflict and death to me. Not my will, but thine O God, be done. If it is necessary that I should fall on the battlefield for my country, I am ready. I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in, the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how strongly American Civilization now leans upon the triumph of the Government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution. And I am willing—perfectly willing—to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this Government, and to pay that debt.  
> But, my dear wife, when I know that with my own joys I lay down nearly all of yours, and replace them in this life with cares and sorrows—when, after having eaten for long years the bitter fruit of orphanage myself, I must offer it as their only sustenance to my dear little children—is it weak or dishonorable, while the banner of my purpose floats calmly and proudly in the breeze, that my unbounded love for you, my darling wife and children, should struggle in fierce, though useless, contest with my love of country.  
> Sarah, my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me to you with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield.  
> The memories of the blissful moments I have spent with you come creeping over me, and I feel most gratified to God and to you that I have enjoyed them so long. And hard it is for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hopes of future years, when God willing, we might still have lived and loved together and seen our sons grow up to honorable manhood around us. I have, I know, but few and small claims upon Divine Providence, but something whispers to me—perhaps it is the wafted prayer of my little Edgar—that I shall return to my loved ones unharmed. If I do not, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, and when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name.

Sullivan Ballou was exceptional in many ways. He was a graduate of Brown University. He served as Speaker in the Rhode Island House of Representatives. The above letter is written by an accomplished man with impressive academic and professional credentials. It was written by an elite rather than a commoner. (Though even here: Ballou was also an orphan; if he was an elite, he was a very particular kind of self-made American democratic elite.) If such letters were ordinary and commonplace even in Ballou’s day it is unlikely the letter would have been saved. That we have it at all is testimony to its exceptional nature.

And yet: Do today’s Ivy League graduates make the sacrifices Ballou made by serving in such a dangerous position in the military? Do today’s Speakers in state-level Houses write in this way? Do our elites today, generally speaking, face adversity, danger, and pain with such poise, grace, and clarity? To ask such questions about our elites today is practically to answer them. The laughter they provoke is all the answer needed.

I am not saying that writing alone would fix the problem I am gesturing at here. It would not. There are a virtual infinity of inputs that led to the formation of a figure like Ballou and that, today, lead to elites like the ones we now have. What I will say, however, is that the people who relate to language as a means of thought, of caregiving, indeed of self-giving, are likelier to be formed in ways that will over time give them sensibilities and language and virtues similar to those of Ballou. 

A former pastor of mine was once attempting to explain to his predominantly college-aged congregation why it is important to read the Bible daily. “You need to put yourself in the path of that which is marvelous,” he said. And that is much of what formation is, I think: Choosing what to put yourself in the path of. If you put yourself in the path of language that is beautiful and clear, you will over time learn to recognize beauty and clarity yourself, perhaps even you will learn to create such beauty and to speak with such clarity.

To shift metaphors, you could likewise say that formation is about choosing what atmospheres you will breathe in. The atmosphere Tolkien made in his legendarium, the atmosphere Ballou spent much of his life breathing, is an atmosphere of making and understanding and healing and preservation. The atmosphere you inevitably breathe when you relate to all language in purely utilitarian terms will be defined more by various species of war and conquest.

We know both of those things quite well, of course. Strength, domination, and hoarded wealth are familiar concepts, I trust. But we struggle to escape the imaginative framework that knows those things exclusively, at the expense of those other goods. Most of us today largely seem to live exclusively in the world of domination and wealth with the only moral test being who dominates, who is dominated, who holds the wealth, and who is deprived of wealth by those hoarding the wealth.

That I am wandering so far afield in hopes of attempting to address LLM and writing is by design. For the question at stake as we consider LLM technology and the writing life is actually the question of what it means to be human. I say this not because I am a professional writer and editor, though I am, but because I recognize something in Tolkien’s language and in Ballou’s that I desire for myself, for my wife and our children, for my church, and, ultimately, for my nation. We would all be better off if the character and formation required to produce such a letter were more common and more accessible.

As LLMs understandably devour the many forms of writing that were quite often done badly by human copywriters working for businesses in the past 20 years, the temptation will be to think that all writing can be swallowed up in that way, rather than simply the writing that only came into existence in the first place because of the rise of the internet. 

This, indeed, is a good example of the typical problem created for us by digital technology: Digital technology promises to offer us a superior version of a good we already value, but it does so in the terms of digital technology, thereby rendering us in some way *part* of that technology. So in this case digital tech offers us written communication that is easy to produce and performs the needed function. Because those are the values of digital marketing copy and professional email in which many of us have been formed for the past two decades, we come to think of those characteristics as being the markers of “good” writing. 

We have, in other words, been trained to think of all writing in purely utilitarian, mechanical terms for 20 years now and so it was in a sense inevitable that eventually machines would come to be regarded as acceptable replacements for writers. In the early digital era, human writers became a kind of machine that produced cheap, effective, search-engine friendly copy. LLMs are simply an improved model, as defined by the terms of the digital writing economy. The distance from humans writing for search engine algorithms to large language models generating copy themselves is vanishingly small. As long as we accept the terms of that writing economy as normative for our relationship to writing (and to language), it will not be possible for us to see our way out. To do so, we will need to frame the creative work of writing in some other way that is not implicitly mechanical in nature or not permanently crippled by the advent of digital technology. 

The statement quoted above from Dallas Theological Seminary moves us in that direction, I think. The author of that statement recognizes that the point of written work is not simply to generate an output that fulfills a utilitarian need we have. Rather, the point of written work (and the reading and thinking that comes before it) is at least in part to form us as human creatures. This is because language is an essential part of how our unique status as rational and social creatures announces itself.

Humane communication between persons is not purely utilitarian or commercial in nature; it is an attempt to take something proper and native to our humanity and use it well and responsibly in light of our needs, desires, ambitions, and so on. To remove language from the domain of our organic humanity and shift it into the domain of machines and commerce is to deprive ourselves of a key form of giving and receiving love as well as creating and delighting in beauty. In some contexts we recognize this: When Sam Altman talked about [using ChatGPT](https://x.com/sama/status/2083221585792762171?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) to help parents keep track of their kids interests, [many people](https://www.fastcompany.com/91584149/sam-altman-shared-a-parenting-hack-thousands-of-moms-and-dads-instantly-disagreed?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) loudly [objected](https://x.com/%5FAlexHirsch/status/2083268104742924484?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). Likewise, when [this ad](https://x.com/orchid%5Fhq/status/2082149144710336976?ref=mereorthodoxy.com) for an “AI assistant” launched last week, the responses online [were similarly hostile](https://x.com/orchid%5Fhq/status/2082149144710336976/quotes?ref=mereorthodoxy.com). 

What I’m proposing is that the rebellions we see in these very niche cases–how to keep track of your child’s activities, or remembering significant dates (like an anniversary)--are ultimately about rebelling against the degrading of communication, the replacement of organic practices of memory and encounter with mechanical processes in which the work of memory and encounter is outsourced and automated. 

The lines here do, admittedly, blur at certain points: Is a homemade dinner for my family less personal and significant if it is Costco pulled pork instead of a pork shoulder I smoked myself? Yet the existence of ambiguous cases does not mean all is ambiguous. There remains a real difference between “understanding, making, and healing” and “strength, domination, and hoarded wealth.” When I lament LLM essays, I am not primarily lamenting something new or something that may have adverse effects on my professional life; I am, rather, lamenting something that has been happening for a long time, something that is likely to keep happening and more quickly, and something that collapses ever more of life into the categories that Tolkien himself mourned over in his own works.

Of course, the invocation of Tolkien suggests something else as well: Two of the most beautiful places in his legendarium are such because of rings of power. Both Rivendell and Lothlorien are stewarded, protected, and made by the efforts of ring bearers. This is part of Tolkien’s genius. He is not hostile to power or to commerce or to utility. He is hostile to those things being stripped from moral contexts bound by virtue, affection, and beauty. What makes Sauron evil is not that he has a ring of power, but that he, like Saruman, has a mind comprised only of metal and gears and is concerned only with domination and his own Ring is inherently constrained by his own hatred and vanity. But it is quite possible in Tolkien’s world to possess a ring of power and use it for making and healing and it is quite possible to wield power more generally for the good of all. Thus these remarks by Faramir, made to Frodo in *The Two Towers*:

> I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend: the city of the Men of Númenor; and I would have her loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom. Not feared, save as men may fear the dignity of a man, old and wise.

One does not imagine Faramir (or Tolkien) objecting to a new smelting technique to make better swords or, indeed, more radical innovations that improve the range of a catapult, though they would object quite strenuously if these techniques also came with the broad desolation of forests. These are the kind of fine and difficult distinctions we must make if we are to live wisely in the world which we are entering. 

I am typing this essay rather than writing it out by hand. When researching for the essay, I have used Claude–I see little difference between simply querying an LLM bot directly with a question and using a search box on Google, given that Google uses generative AI technology as much as Anthropic does. You are reading this essay on a website that was designed and built with the aid of AI coding tools. And, indeed, earlier this week we launched a new research initiative at *Mere Orthodoxy* that is heavily dependent on generative AI technology called “The Faith Received.” 

We certainly are not “AI sober” at *Mere O*, nor do I think such a posture is even possible for someone, short of that person abandoning digital technology altogether—and that’s mostly an OK thing. As my friend Brian Mattson never tires of [reminding his readers](https://brianmattson.substack.com/p/game-designers-are-people-too), we can and should recognize that human innovation is often a great good. 

There would be something impious, for me at least, in even trying to be “AI sober” in fact. Were I to denounce digital technology I would be biting the hand that feeds. The only reason I–a first gen college graduate of a land grant university–am able to have the job I have is because of digital technology. A Nebraska graduate with no prior family or institutional relationship would not have been hired at any legacy evangelical publishing institution I can think of when I was beginning my career. I certainly wouldn’t have gotten my foot in the door at any major coastal media organization, most of which tend to hire only from elite schools. I owe my career to the internet.

The question is by what criteria we judge technologies. It is too much and badly wrongheaded to set virtue and attentiveness and the beauty of the search for understanding on one side and “technology” on the other, as some tech critics sometimes seem to do. But, likewise, it is a mistake as well to say that technologies are neutral tools. 

To return again to Tolkien, it is significant that while rings of power are treated as potentially good, *the* Ring of Power is not because it was made only for the purpose of domination. Twice we see ring bearers in the story offered the ring of Sauron and in both cases they reject it, warning that that particular ring would make a terrifying tyrant of even them. We also find Gandalf warning that *no* ring of power should be used lightly. A fool wielding the power of Elrond or Galadriel’s ring would be incapable of using it to preserve and grow places like Rivendell or Lothlorien. Their use figures to be something closer to the uses of Gollum for Sauron’s ring–as a tool for expanding the bearer’s own vices.

This suggests a few principles, then: 

First, there is what we can call the absolute moral principle. Some technologies can be twisted in ways that make particular applications fundamentally disordered and unredeemable. Not all rings of power are inherently twisted and wicked, but one of them was. 

Likewise, there is no redemptive use for AI-generated pornographic videos or sports gambling applications. There is no redemptive use for something like Fr. Justin, the short-lived AI priest who claimed to have the powers that Roman theology reserves to the clergy. These applications must be rejected entirely because they strike at the vitals of the moral life. Applications that dislocate the sexual embrace from the context of marriage are irredeemable. Applications that give the promise of wealth for no work while actually exploiting the masses are irredeemable. Applications that dehumanize the sacramental life of a Christian believer are irredeemable. 

Additionally, one can very easily argue that Christian statesman should strongly consider advocating for laws that would ban such applications. (The phrase “strike at the vitals” is something I am lifting from the confessional life of my home church, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). In the PCA, we require all ordained leaders in the church to affirm “the system of doctrine” taught in the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Shorter and Larger Catechisms. We do not require that the ordained affirm every word in these documents, but where ordination candidates disagree with the standards they must explain their difference and the church must then decide if the difference “strikes at the vitals” of the theology of the standards or not. A similarly capacious sort of analysis will likely help us when judging uses of various technologies.)

Second, there is the formational principle. Many technologies, due to their immense power, should only be used by certain qualified people. We recognize this already with things like guns and cars. We recognize that a 12-year-old is not prepared to command a combustible hunk of metal that can reach speeds far surpassing that of any organic lifeform and at which a collision will likely be fatal. Significantly, the formation we expect of people before acquiring these technologies is not simply that they reach a certain age. We do not automatically give 16-year-olds a drivers license. Rather, we recognize both that a person *can’t* have the requisite maturity, judgment, and motor skills required to operate a vehicle prior to reaching a certain age *and* that after reaching that age they still must cultivate and acquire specific skills as part of their own formation in order to drive safely. We should likely place social media and smartphones in this bracket. I would argue that many uses of LLM tools also fit here. Some tools can only be used rightly by people who have labored long enough and suffered through certain difficulties that equip them to use the technology well. In this case, steps should be taken to protect these technologies from unfit users *and* efforts should be made to make the formation necessary to use those tools well more accessible to more people.

Finally, we might suggest a third rule, which is the tragic principle. Some years ago a friend of mine told me a story about a conversation he had with Wendell Berry in which they discussed the late historian James C. Scott’s book *Against the Grain*. (Scott is best known for his book *Seeing like a State.*) In *Grain*, Scott argues that states first emerged largely thanks to agriculture and grains in particular because the life of a grain farmer was highly legible to a state. In practice, this meant that farmers and farming often had a harmful effect on human flourishing at that time because farmers were more easily exploited by states–who found it far easier to tax farmers than they did hunter gatherers–and because the emergence of farming went hand-in-hand with the emergence of frequently tyrannical state structures. 

On hearing this argument, Berry quite liked it, according to my friend. For those who have had a more superficial encounter with Berry, that might surprise you, but that was the kind of thinker he was. He wasn’t an ideologue, nor did he go hunting after an absolutized system one could follow with perfect consistency. Rather, he recognized that our life in this world presupposed a certain measure of violence and even of destruction. In “The Gift of Good Land,” he wrote,

> To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.

There is not a way of living pristinely in this world. The nature of our existence is tragic; we will often be forced to confront choices that are all to varying degrees ugly and unpalatable. We will often have to discern the relative goods and evils of the choices before us and make choices between undesirable outcomes. 

This can drive us to despair, but it need not necessarily and, in any case, the despair should not be conclusive or all-consuming. Rather, this fact can just as well force upon us the necessity of mercy in our judgments, humility in the face of our own fallibility, and also an openness to *good* possibilities and outcomes that we might miss if thinking in a more ideological mode.

This final principle should provide a certain grounding for how we continue the conversation about generative AI. Blanket moral denunciations or ill-defined bans will not aid the cultivation of wisdom. They may, ironically, erode good will and judgment because such denunciations and policies close off the possibility of conversation and debate, both of which are the lifeblood of any democratic society, which ours is, even in its current declined state. The difficulty before us, and it genuinely is a difficulty, is how to preserve the search after understanding, making, healing, and preservation when so much of the circumstances of our world is arrayed against those things. And the reality of our moment is that there are no perfect choices free from the potential to cause harm or free from adverse trade-offs.

The above considerations are the many factors that weigh on my mind as I think about the work of this magazine as it relates to questions of generative artificial intelligence. Many things appear obviously wrong to me: Using generative AI to draft essays or help with brainstorming or developing an argument is wrong, I think; it is a category error. But it is likewise wrong to issue blanket moral denunciations of anyone who uses AI for research. What is needed in our moment, I think, is a recognition of the tragic nature of our existence in the world tied to a steadfast refusal to allow the tragic to make us nakedly utilitarian or pragmatic. 

Holding that balance is difficult. It is a problem that has defeated many people smarter and more trained than I am. But, as Tolkien said, there are some tasks it is better to begin than to refuse, even if the end is uncertain and likely dark. That, I think, is the task before us now–how to preserve our humanity in a mechanized age, and also how to preserve our friendships and communities amidst great differences in circumstance and judgment. What comfort we might have as we confront such a task will be found nowhere other than a quiet confidence in the providential mercy of God. And so we labor in hope.