Please welcome today’s guest writer, Grace Hsu. Grace graduated from Calvin in 2025 with a major in speech-language pathology and a minor in English. She is currently taking a gap year between graduation and the completion of her graduate studies and pursuing a local discipleship program in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Eventually, she hopes to pursue a career somewhere at the intersection of language and ministry. In her free time, Grace enjoys writing poetry, chasing theological rabbit trails, and petting the cat from across the street.

I typically am very slow to catch onto trends. My first smartphone was a budget Motorola with a poor-quality camera. I still rediscover music from the 2010s that I had heard once or twice but didn’t realize how much I liked. Perhaps the biggest tragedy is that I didn’t watch Hamilton until 2021, six years after that masterpiece hit Broadway theaters.

So, true to form, I had generally watched the advent of ChatGPT from afar. This included listening to horror stories about students getting caught for using AI-generated writing in their classes and offering a “huh, that’s interesting” when yet another one of my peers told me they used Chat GPT to study. There was certainly a sort of hubris involved—I don’t let a machine think for me. I can brainstorm, write, and study perfectly well for myself, thank you. 

Then, for some time, my interactions with ChatGPT involved testing its limits. I was told that AI couldn’t generate a picture of a glass of wine filled to the brim (because those pictures don’t really exist on the Internet), so I tried that out. I asked it to write poems with the same topics as ones I had already written. While initially discouraged by its effortless generation of iambs, I ultimately was tickled by how it couldn’t write a poem without breaking the fourth wall and saying it was a poem (alas, recent models seem to have gotten over this).

Then, several months ago, everything switched.

It began with asking ChatGPT to help me dissect sentences for my language disorders classes. Then I was asking it to generate conversation starters for both clinical activities and real-life relationships. Once I was well into last semester, though—probably the most intense, emotionally fraught semester of my life—I was asking it to help me analyze my attachment styles and find names for some of the emotions I was experiencing in a specific relationship.

It was a trickle-turned-tsunami. And at the peak of it, I was having a conversation with a robot about something that, I believe, should be worked out in the wisdom and care of human community.

Conversation is the fabric of our relationships. And ChatGPT is built to be conversational—every exchange ends with something along the lines of, can I tell or help you more? One of my clinical instructors told my classmates and I that they’ve programmed their ChatGPT to be called and call them by certain designations. At the extreme end of this, an article for The New York Times a few months ago described a (married!!) woman who made this very AI chatbot into her virtual boyfriend and who found herself addicted to the dopamine boosts from words the algorithm generated to suit her wishes.

Growing up, my parents’ struggle with monitoring our technology often resulted in restrictions on screen time. Now, I worry that I will have to have conversations with my future kids about the importance of not simply off-screen, but human community—relationships where a real person is choosing to love you back.

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John Piper, in his foreword to Tony Reinke’s 12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You, says that smartphones (and other types of technology, by extension) can be a sort of “friendly pack mule” on this Christian pilgrimage. “[D]on’t waste your life grooming your mule. Make him bear the weight of a thousand works of love. Make him tread the heights with you in the mountains of worship.”

I’ll admit that I am not quite convinced that AI chatbots are merely a benign tool in the person of faith’s toolbox. Every time I use it, I wonder if I am not rewiring my brain to be lazier, less critical of new information, less able to appraise primary sources.

But all the ways I do use ChatGPT as a stepping stone towards the person I want to be certainly still exist. The other week, I asked it to compare the development of snail shells versus turtle shells, helping to satiate my curiosity. With its ability to quickly synthesize information, I’ve used it to problem-solve when cooking, like personalizing recipes to the ingredients I have on hand. Needing an app to organize my prayers, I asked it to recommend and rank different apps by a certain list of criteria. The results for me, spiritually, have been huge.

I don’t know what the consequences of this technology will be on us in the next five years, let alone the next generation. But in some ways, AI is just like every other privilege I’ve been given—and I hope to wield it well.

Grace Hsu