AI Can’t Raise Ebenezers

This week, the Good Faith Media team has been at Zephyr Point Conference Center in Nevada, leading a series of workshops, worship experiences, and plenary sessions on the topic of justice. Currently, I’m looking out across Lake Tahoe to the California side of the lake and thinking about borders that appear so fixed on a map, but are nonexistent in reality. As I’m reflecting, Canadian geese are honking out a strange tune.

I’m also thinking about a road trip I took out west that began exactly sixteen years ago this week. I was beginning a new career and had two weeks between jobs, so I decided to use those two weeks to drive 2,000 miles from my home in Waco to visit friends in Seattle, with stops along the way to see others in Denver and Portland.

On that trip, I listened to Jamey Johnson’s That Lonesome Song and Brian Douglas Phillips’ Gunnison albums, alternately on repeat for the entire two-and-a-half-day drive there and back. I can still sing all the songs from memory because of those two weeks. I also ate the best slice of pizza ever at a hole-in-the-wall just a stone’s throw from the Boise State University football stadium, got lost on a mountain road in the Four Corners region, and left my credit card at a bar in Wyoming.

Speaking of bars, I’m rarely not thinking about the one in Tartu, Estonia, on the corner of Tahe and Eha streets, where (almost) everybody knows my name, and my seat in the corner gives me a bird’s-eye view of the comings and goings of people I love.

I’m also rarely not thinking about the church building on Dutton Avenue, between 17th and 18th streets in Waco, Texas, which has shaped my experience of and with God for exactly half my life. More than the building, of course, I think of the faces and names of people I have grown up with, fought with, reconciled with, and greeted with joyful hellos and sad goodbyes far too many times to count.

I had a random memory recently of walking into a storefront church in the small town I grew up in when I was home one weekend from college. This was before the old, dilapidated town square buildings were torn down. 

It was a Sunday night service and, unbeknownst to me, a small Pentecostal service with fewer than a dozen attendees. The preacher, a man I knew casually, prayed for all the unregenerate people who had never spoken in tongues, and I knew immediately who he was talking about.

I still respect charismatics and Pentecostals, but I’ve always tried to respect them from a distance.

Oh, and then there’s the story a friend reminded me of recently when news broke that Waco is finally getting a Waffle House.

We were returning home from a work trip in Dallas and stopped to eat at the last Waffle House southbound on I-35 for almost 200 miles. When we went to check out, the cashier looked at one of our checks and refused to ring it up because it totaled $6.66. She appeared frightened at the demonic number.

Our waitress walked over, saw what was going on and agreed to ring it up herself. “What else do I have to be afraid of?” she asked. “My boyfriend just left me for his wife, and I work at a Waffle House.”

When I think about that story, I think about how the sacred and profane intermingle with humor, trauma, and dogged resilience, with twinkles in their eyes.

In the Bible, the term Ebenezer describes a “stone of help.” It hearkens back to the prophet Samuel stacking stones at the site where God intervened to save God’s people from the Philistines. 

Here I raise mine Ebenezer; hither by thy help I’ve come; and I hope, by thy good pleasure, safely to arrive at home, the old hymn sings.

All these stories, places, and people are my Ebenezers—here by God’s help I’ve come.

There are so many thoughts going around about artificial intelligence, what it is doing to our brains, its effects on the environment and the workforce, and whether it is killing creativity. On the spectrum of concerned citizens, place me somewhere in the middle. AI is a tool that should, at the very least, be used with care.

I’m overwhelmed and in awe by all AI can do, but I am comforted by all it cannot do with the written word. Mostly, it cannot create true stories of life and redemption. It is incapable of raising Ebenezers. It can try, but it only flattens them into meaningless drivel.

It may read smoothly, but it lacks the specificity of time and place required to make someone lean in, raise their eyebrows, stifle a chuckle, or hold back a tear.