Leading product at Logos in the Christian tech space, I’m involved in frequent discussion about AI. I’ll highlight two recent examples, specific to Christian higher education, hoping they can help to stimulate your own thinking and discussions on this important topic.
“AI in Your Theological Research and Spiritual Study”
Last month I had the chance to address a group of chief academic officers from about a dozen Christian higher-ed institutions at the Association for Biblical Higher Education’s annual Flagship CAO Gathering, where Logos was the event sponsor. Here’s the topic I was assigned:
SESSION 4 — HOW TO INTEGRATE AI INTO YOUR THEOLOGICAL RESEARCH AND SPIRITUAL STUDY, PHIL GONS, CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER | LOGOS (WA)
Discover how to integrate AI into your theological research and spiritual study with wisdom and care. In this session, you’ll learn how to ethically and effectively use AI-powered tools within Logos to enhance accuracy, context, and clarity in biblical interpretation. We’ll explore best practices, discuss real-world applications, and provide guidance on ensuring AI remains a faithful servant—supporting, not replacing, deep engagement with Scripture and theology.
I didn’t come up with the title or description, but I liked it and prepared some material in the form of a this Google Slides deck: “AI in Your Theological Research and Spiritual Study: A Christian Approach to Building and Using AI.”
We had a good Q&A discussion afterwards, and the group represented an unsurprising spectrum of positions ranging from reluctant to use to cautious to all in.
Reflections on AI Policies in Christian Higher Education
I shared this presentation on LinkedIn, which led to several fruitful, private follow-up discussions. A close friend and professor recently drafted a new little book for seminary students on how to research and write papers, which included an appendix of his work-in-progress AI policy for his students, where he referenced some of my slide material.
In a dialog with him on some feedback he’d received from others, I shared the following about policies on students’ use of AI:
I can appreciate the immense challenge of trying to distill the complexities of this evolving space into policies students can follow. Not easy, if not impossible. Obviously, as the professor you’re entitled to draw the line wherever you want above what is demonstrably wrong. Your school has the right to do the same.
A handful of miscellaneous reflections:
1. Ethical use of AI is complex, nuanced, and evolving, and good policies don’t lend themselves to this kind of ambiguity. You need to either (a) have simple policies that you acknowledge are overreaching for the sake of simplicity or (b) provide robust biblical principles, urging your students to walk before God with a clear conscience—or (c) perhaps do a hybrid of both.
2. A helpful general rule is to use AI mostly to provide inputs to you rather than outputs for you (i.e., that you’d submit as a paper, deliver as a talk, etc.).
3. The core issue in plagiarism is honesty: taking someone else’s ideas or words and presenting them as if they were your own. You can plagiarize human-generated content and AI-generated content. The way you avoid plagiarism is to give appropriate credit through proper citations and paraphrasing or quoting. This approach can work in both scenarios—though there may be other reasons to discourage incorporating AI-generated content directly or indirectly into your work, such as . . .
4. Verifiability, which is an essential part of research. Where did these ideas come from? Teachers should be instructing their students to go ad fontes. In the context of the primary-source vs. secondary-source framework, we may want to treat AI-generated content as a new category of tertiary source. And you may want to advise your students not to cite any tertiary sources in their work. (That may change over time, as AI gains the ability to synthesize existing ideas and come up with new ideas that can’t easily be traced to human-authored content, which is coming quickly—and already here to some degree.) Encourage students to use AI that points them to sources they can personally verify for themselves and cite (e.g., Logos, Perplexity, and others)—or ask AI to show where it found the ideas it’s presenting.
5. It’s worth differentiating between substance and form, ideas and expressions. Many of our ideas we get from others. When they’re not established as common knowledge or sufficiently synthesized with other ideas into some new derivative idea, we need to give credit. How we express those ideas should also be from our own creativity, unless we sufficiently transform someone else’s expression and paraphrase or use quotation marks, in both cases with proper attribution. But what about ideas that we don’t need to attribute to others? What is fair game for how we refine the expression of our ideas? We all use technology to help us fix spelling, capitalization, punctuation, grammar, style, etc.—without giving credit. Phrase completion, a natural extension, is now standard in nearly every text editor and is a basic form of AI-generated content. Do we need to footnote when we use it? Is the key to using AI as an editor to review and make changes one at a time rather than in bulk? That seems like a good approach, since it ensures that we don’t miss the opportunity to see, approve, challenge, refine, and learn.
6. I’ve found AI as a conversation partner to be a really helpful way to organize, sharpen, and refine my thinking. Ideally, we’d do that work with a human thought partner. I don’t love how AI gives the illusion of being human. There’s risk here, in my opinion, especially for the immature and vulnerable. But I’m not sure it crosses a line—at least for the mature who can remind themselves that machines are not made in God’s image. But having a conversation is very open-ended and could quickly verge from helpful into questionable—especially as you drift away from inputs to you and toward outputs for you. But #4 above could solve this.
7. AI is becoming ubiquitous. It’ll soon be a part of every OS, application, and computing device (and virtually all electronic devices are turning into computing devices). It’ll be impossible for policies to cover all the scenarios, which is why you can’t get away from teaching the underlying principles, enabling students to come up with their own “policies.” A course on AI in particular and technology in general that’s equal parts philosophy and principles on the one hand and practical application on the other is likely to be the way forward. That doesn’t mean there’s not a place for policy, but it’s worth acknowledging its limitations and having appropriate supplementation at a deeper level, which is what all good Christian education is ultimately about—giving students a foundation for a life of Bible-saturated thinking and living.
8. AI-use disclosure will likely be an important part of the creative process. Perhaps incorporate a simple form for students to fill out that includes (a) which tools they used (ChatGPT, Grok, Logos AI, etc.), (b) how they used them (to find information, as a thought partner to help organize their thinking and orient them to a subject, to help them find parts of their work that need to be sharpened in terms of grammar or style—but handled one at a time as in #5, etc.)—and (c) how they didn’t (no quotes from AI, no directly paraphrased AI, no core ideas sourced from AI in isolation from underlying human sources, no skeletal structure of their work sourced from AI as an output for them rather than an input to them, etc.).
I’m not sure anything I shared above is novel or a unique contribution to this discussion. But I believe it’s important for those of us who understand Christian higher education, the Bible and theology, and modern information technology to be a part of the conversation, helping to shape the way Christians engage with AI.
I spent more than a decade in Christian higher ed as a student and Greek instructor, but that’s not my primary area of expertise. I’ve spent nearly twice as long—most of my professional career—in the Christian tech space, living at the intersection of the Bible and technology, optimistically but carefully and theologically applying advances in information technology to the study of Scripture.
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Dave T says
Thanks for this, Phil! Some helpful thoughts on this expanding space, for sure.