Authentic Faith in the Artificial Age

The Adverbs & Adjectives of Our Divine Humanity

This essay appeared in Wayfare issue 7.

There aren’t many scriptural assignments I feel particularly jealous of. But animal nomenclature? Man, Adam, what a fun assignment you had. Since this Biblical account of man’s first foray into branding is sparse, we’re left with limited insights into the actual process of naming creatures. But naming animals once they’ve become fast food fare? Now, that’s something I know a bit about.

When I was an up-and-coming copywriter, my client was fast food behemoth Burger King, destroyer of cows and lover of human agency (see: “Have it Your Way!™”). One day, a co-worker and I were shipped to BK’s Miami headquarters to sample some creative new menu items the team was experimenting with. (“How many forms can chicken slurry take?” you might ask, but maybe you shouldn’t.) The plan was to sample these novel noshes—which can most accurately be described as carnivalesque in both presentation and flavor—and give them memorable, marketable names.

Presented with these creative concoctions, I became intrigued as to the overall process of food styling. I needed to know how they get the television Whopper to look so shiny, so slick, such a paragon of hamburgerness. They were quick to assure me that not even the product “looks like itself.”

Food styling boils down to a tricky alchemy—dry ice as faux steam, edible wax as a buttery shellac, and food-grade resin to create camera-ready food that maintains structural integrity under sweltering studio lights. The end goal is this: create a model product that entices hungry hordes into the restaurant while presenting a brand image that’s aspirational, yet ultimately unobtainable. Or if you want to put it in the stupidest and most capitalistic language possible, create a hamburger that scales.

Consumers are predictable creatures. We yearn for a familiar, picture-perfect product. We want our Whopper to look the same across the globe, so if we walk into any Burger King we’re served essentially the same thing (often followed by the same level of disappointment when we see what’s actually wilting under the wrapper).

I’m Not Lovin’ It

When traveling and attending a new congregation or ward, one of the great comforts Latter-day Saint churchgoers cite is that “the Church is the same everywhere.” Though international meetinghouses may vary in their design and structure, walk into many a suburban American chapel and you’ll not know if you’re in Lenexa, Kansas or Kamas, Utah.

You’ll likely encounter white painted cinderblock, trademark sisal walls, and an indecipherable color of cheerio-camouflaging carpet (how can mauve and grey be so hard to distinguish?). You’re often served the same sincere smiles, extra eager to greet a newcomer; the same catalog of worship songs, endearingly played just a tad below tempo; the same slogan-esque phrases repeated over the pulpit; the same two-hour format; and the same spirit of homegrown can-do-it-ness. And you know what? It actually feels pretty good. Reassuring. Familiar.

From a branding standpoint, the LDS Church is adept at staying “on-book.” The brand standards are implemented with impressive adherence. Like a French McDonalds, you might get a few regional differences here and there, but overall it’s remarkably on brand. (There is even an actual brand book, colloquially referred to as “The Handbook” that ensures standard practices are meted out with uniformity regardless of latitude or attitude.)

What faith has nailed the franchise model better than The Church of Jesus-Christ of Latter-day Saints?

From our look and feel to our correlated curriculum, it’s quite an achievement. But to what degree does the reality (or mere illusion) of a franchised faith turn spiritual discipleship into lazy consumerism? What are the dangers/costs of applying principles of mass-manufacturing to achieving human connection with the Divine? If we treat our faith like a fast-food drive-through, a convenient transaction of the sacrosanct, is there vital nutrition that we lose out on in the process?

Pastor John Pavlovitz argues that the “Starbuck-ing of Christianity” trend he sees in many contemporary denominational spaces comes at a real cost.

“People are being drawn to the size, the professionalism, the amenities, the numbers, and the impressive overall package found in these new multi-site faith communities; ones which offer similar perks of the big chain pizza places: something good, reliable, and convenient.”

Pavlovitz suggests congregations suffer when they prioritize comfort and familiarity alone, local flavor fading in favor of a mass-produced modality. “We’re losing something,” he laments. The watering down of unique and local Church culture means “individual communities are losing their character, their originality, and the beauty of real diversity.”

Likewise, when traveling abroad, I might feel a familiar pang of nostalgia or even safety when I see Golden Arches, but I never actually seek out those places to feed me.

From a spiritual mindset, convenience is not key to consecration. Although comfort is healthy and essential in communion and communities, an overabundance of it has actually led me toward spiritual stagnation and apathy. I long for more than a consumer-driven faith. I’m seeking one that feels broad enough to contain the colossal wildness of the cosmos, yet intimate, demanding, and highly personal. I’m hungry for a custom, crafted faith that speaks to me in my own language. I want this for every person in my faith community, and I want each to confidently bring their unique expression of divinity and humanity into practice.

Besides, the very notion of a “franchised, model Mormon” is fiction. We’ve been hurt by a false notion that we need to look alike, speak alike (in cadence, tambre, “Relief Society voice,” etc.), achieve a carbon copy clean-cutness, and even think alike, misinterpreting a “one heart, one mind” body of saints as one that demands a single-spice uniformity that works against true and delicious union. This “model Mormon” is an ideal few can achieve, and I’ve seen many become miserable in its pursuit. Not even the hamburger looks like the hamburger.

It made me wonder if part of our cultural strength—a highly correlated church that’s “the same everywhere”—is sometimes also one of our biggest weaknesses, especially in a time of mass consumerism.

Continuing to cling to a franchised faith framework alone feels risky these days, particularly as we move into a time I like to call The Great Averaging (I told you I love naming things). We’re a few pixels from the precipice of something that feels unprecedented. An era unceremoniously ushered in by the advent of large language models (specifically) and Artificial Intelligence (generally). The attendant concern for my community is that the addition of AI into our spiritual buffet serves to compound our conformity and consumeristic mindset—that it might feed off of or further entrench models of Franchised Faith at the expense of unique human expression and expansive spiritual thought.

This is a potential amplification that is worth anticipating and preparing for as we rethink how and why we want to be divine humans in a world that increasingly seems to devalue both divinity and humanity.

Artifice and Averages

There are countless definitions floating around what AI is and what it isn’t. I find the simplest one is this: artifice and averages.

When hearing the buzz around “artificial intelligence,” I worry we are so swept up in the “intelligence” that we ignore the “artificial.” For all the promises that AI will outpace human intellect, its intelligence is currently suspect, while its artifice is factual.

In fact, one of generative AI’s few “realities” is this: It’s a powerful plagiarism tool profiting off theft. Large language models function as cannibalizing copy machines, peddling stolen goods in substandard packaging to the detriment of those artists and thinkers who supplied them with the raw materials. In a faith that lauds the very act of creation as holy and Godlike, I’m alarmed how human output is being exploited without consent.

As AI continues to improve its ability to mimic and regurgitate, it’s going to have impacts on humans that are far-ranging and also intimate and immediate. From Open AI founder Sam Altman’s prophecy that “AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there will be great companies,” to predictions that it will eradicate 95 percent of jobs, to conjecture that it will cure cancer, there is almost an Oppenheimer-esque excitement and anxiety around this artificial-worshipping technology.

But in what sense is artifice ever the preference? Why do we seek artificial intellect? Do we want artificial love? Do we want artificial honesty? Do we want artificial kindness? What value is actually improved by its artificiality? Most Americans won’t even try artificial ground beef.

Societally, we tend to bemoan artificiality, even banning it from our food dyes, so why turn a blind eye when we slap “intelligence” after it? It’s maybe too soon to tell, but generative AI might be even more dangerous to our creative souls than Red 40 is to our bodies.

The detriments of unconsciously consuming AI are more obvious to me (at least currently) than are its merits: it’s full of fabrications, it has no point of view, it’s ecologically disastrous, it’s making us dumber, and it’s rewiring our already algorithmically-enslaved neural pathways. And one of the biggest red flags to me, an artist who finds an inherent holiness in creativity and originality, it makes things so stupidly average.

Ask AI to generate an image of the Norse god Thor and it surveys all the Thors it can find from our very-contemporary internet, and spits out the most likely image of Thor it can generate: Chris Hemsworth. After thousands of years of folklore and myth and varied interpretations, it offers an image of a six-packed Aussie actor, reducing eons of culture to today’s most common.

What does this “churning out the common” do for faith and religious communities that are taught to look for the exceptional, to seek and expect miracles? What impending spiritual torpor is mere steps down this rocky road that adores the average?

My daughter was recently tested for an advanced learning program at her elementary school. She is a clever girl, so I was surprised when she received scores that did not reflect her creativity and intelligence. Wanting to understand her performance, I looked up a sample test that we then took together. Each time she selected an answer, I paused to ask how she arrived at her conclusion. Typically she gave me a thoughtful, innovative answer that very much justified her selection as the correct choice. Ultimately, her critical error was creative in nature.

What she didn’t understand is the baffling reality that these tests seek the most “likely” answer, the answer most people would choose. It would never reward her for creative exploration or childlike invention. She was playing Balderdash when she was meant to be playing Family Feud. When she retook the test the following month, I instructed her to “pick the most likely,” or “the most average,” answer. When we received her second-round results, this strange strategy had worked. Her score soared into the 96% percentile.

Generative AI operates according to this strategy. Unless specifically prompted not to, it will offer you the most common output.

Like an unclever cleaver, AI shaves off the edges of our humanity. It excels at averaging, expelling the outliers, and summarizes away substance.

What’s the first thing to go in a summary? Say adieu to adjectives and adverbs. Say bye to the metaphors and imagery. You’re left with a tired stack of nouns.

Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s “warm thick slobber / Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water / In the shade of the banks” becomes “tadpoles.” William Carlos Williams’s famous minimalist masterpiece gets reduced to “a poem about a wet wheelbarrow.” The entire book of Isaiah loses, well, its poetic punch.

As we forfeit our ability to access the full spectrum of human expression, we risk losing encounters with the divine.

“The impulse behind [AI] seems to be to eliminate the human hand, the human eye, in the making of the reality that we inhabit to the farthest extent possible. It’s just a human impulse to escape from its humanity,” warns novelist Marilynne Robinson.

Even as some transhumanists crusade to use AI to curb or eliminate aging (or even death itself), Robinson is among a quieter cohort that seeks to embrace all stages of humanity. To find beauty and purpose in aging and dying. One that glories in a resurrection that is only made possible by the advent of death.

As the mystical and miraculous molt and mold, as faith and art shed their human highs and lows in favor of a comfortable average, and as things just simplify, we too lose our taste for complexity and depth. We risk becoming lazy spiritual consumers who forget the divine invitation to become cocreators with the divine, instead outsourcing our cooking to technological idols. Practically, I worry about what this means for our spiritual adult education. Why go to church for that which floats on the glossy surface of things and never submerges into more swimmable water?

While I can’t prove this, I’m hearing more and more sermons over the pulpit that I’m fairly certain are 90% written or aided by generative AI. I’m not interested in going to church for artificial and averaged spirituality, the copy machine of the consecrated.

Weekly ordinance aside, what would make attending church uniquely worthwhile? Socialization, service, and community are available to me in many avenues outside of religion, but church is where I want to be spiritually sustained–to be fed and to share food. Why not stay home and have ChatGPT spit me out a talk on any subject that I choose from the perspective of almost anyone. Why not ask it to write me a sermon on substitutionary atonement in the style of, say, Neal A Maxwell. On Fast Sunday, why not prompt it to write a mix of ten diverse, sometimes sweet, sometimes sincere, occasionally humorous testimonies in the style of a teenager, a widow, and a ward leader?

Is it easier to write a talk with AI? Of course! But it’s also a no-growth endeavor. To write is to think, and AI doesn’t make you a better thinker. AI’s core truth claim is that it assists us. More accurately, when it comes to enlarging our faith and creativity, it’s likely severely limiting our growth and potential.

Ever the humanist, Robinson continues, “We don’t tell [people], this is a discipline, like an athletic discipline that they have undertaken to strengthen themselves, not to just bring themselves over some arbitrary line of sufficiency. Students say writing is difficult, which of course it is, but difficulty is the point.” (Robinson knows a bit about discipline. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her 2004 novel Gilead, which was written using the most anti-AI approach available—she wrote her manuscript freeform in one continuous, chronological stream.)

I don’t write like Robinson, in system or style. As a millennial, I love technology and the creative worlds it exposes me to. Surely automation has its place in a modern world, but using AI to create art and share testimony feels so incongruent with the restored gospel. If all things are created spiritually before they are created temporally, as we learn in Moses, then AI is spiritually bankrupt. There is no spiritual creation here. Art becomes “content.”

Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke was presciently vocal in raising the alarm about the diminution of art in a 2013 interview on Here’s the Thing:

“I kind of knew the [music] game was up a few years ago when one of our team of people came in saying, ‘Nokia wants to offer you millions of pounds because they want content for their phones.’”

“‘Content?’ ‘You know, content.’ ‘What, you mean music?’ ‘Yes. Content.’”

I’m constantly told AI is the One True Way, that it will keep getting smarter, that it will indeed surpass human intellect and write faster and better than any poet or philosopher or prophet.

If we want art and faith that feeds us flat “content,” AI is sufficient. If we want faith that feeds us soul-enriching sermons and art (and philosophy, theology, etc.), AI is not the way, for us or for “the least of these.”

In her August 2025 New York Times essay, “Thinking is Becoming a Luxury,” Mary Harrington argues that a “torrent of A.I.-generated slop content” results in a “media environment that seems like the cognitive equivalent of the junk food aisle.” According to Harrington, just like those who live in food deserts dominated by cheap offerings (hi again, Whoppers!) and limited access to nutrient-dense food, the most disadvantaged will also suffer the worst consequences of generative AI.

The message we are being fed past the point of satiety is that we better just adopt it—“open wide, here comes the ‘slop’.” I suspect this is a technological reality that I should get accustomed to in some ways. I’m not so naive to not recognize there is a possibility for AI to make my life easier and better in ways I don’t yet presume to even comprehend. (When driving home at 11:00 pm after a concert, hot french fries actually sound sublime). And yet, is this a world or a church or a reality that we want?

We’re so often swept away by efficiency when sanctity was always the point. We want to rid ourselves of our humanity when humanity was the point.

Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing, Baby

In 1996, Burger King borrowed Marvin Gaye’s iconic love song “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing Baby” as the backing track to its long-running broadcast commercial. “Ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby,” Gaye croons, while artificially-crafted charbroiled patties dance on top of fabricated flames.

I have to believe Gaye is right, that people will ultimately still choose authenticity and flavor above average and artificial.

When Melissa Inouye writes that she wants “a Church that is real,” I think she is zeroing in on a core truth. She identifies the beauty of a Zion that loves shared truths and simultaneously welcomes diversity of thought and experience as varied and colorful as the National Park that bears its namesake.

Like Inouye, I’m not here for artificial perfection—from our practice, our leaders, or our members. And I’m not here for an “average” experience. I want a divine, human-led church that’s striving to be holy via its wonderfully weird humanity. I want a church that transforms, that speaks soul. I want a church with regional specificity. I really want a church with adjectives.