15th August 2025

Whenever I’m on my desktop and go into Word to write something, I now get pestered to use Copilot, Microsoft’s ‘conversational AI assistant’. After studiously ignoring this unsought ‘help’, I decided to watch a few Copilot tutorials on YouTube to see what all the fuss was about. I’m still not convinced I need it, but, as a test, I asked it to produce a 270-word religious thought for the day. To my surprise, it did just that, using words and phrases like ‘faith’ and ‘trust’ and ‘the sun still shining behind the clouds’, assuring me that to doubt wasn’t failure, mentioning Abraham by name, but, interestingly, not God or Jesus. There was nothing to take great exception to, barring perhaps the number of saccharine-sweet truisms, but that’s a matter of personal taste; I’ve seen similar in little books of Christian prayers and devotions.

What was missing for me was a sense of genuine encounter with another individual’s thought, the fruit of their lived experience, their take on life expressed through their unique verbal mannerisms, hobby-horses and biases. As I understand it, AI draws on vast databases of such mental creativity, analysing and selecting from this raw material, before producing something uncannily like real human thought. It’s undoubtedly very clever, and will certainly get better at its job as time goes by, but for now, for me, it was human thought after passing through a blender, lacking personality. Copilot’s composite mélange hadn’t introduced me to anyone real, let alone to the One who is the enfleshed Word bringing light to the world, truly revealing God’s thought, God’s take on life  (John 1:1, 14).

Ken Stewart