Jon Frendl, a tech entrepreneur and founder of the custom app development firm Cappital, warned of the negative effects that AI can have on the brain.
As investors rush to cash in on the current boom in artificial intelligence (AI) and as AI creeps more and more into the everyday lives of Americans, Christians are left to wonder how to approach the burgeoning technology and guard against its dangers. A panel discussion at Family Research Council's 2025 Pray Vote Stand Summit last weekend explored how Christians should think about AI.
Over the weekend, it was reported that a study out of MIT has helped to confirm the fears of numerous technology skeptics and observers that AI is contributing to the dulling of the human brain. The study found that the more internet assistance (such as ChatGPT and internet search engines) that a student uses to help complete an essay, "the lower their level of brain connectivity, ... [with] significantly less activity in the brain networks associated with cognitive processing, attention and creativity."
Jon Frendl, a tech entrepreneur and founder of the custom app development firm Cappital, warned of the negative effects that AI can have on the brain during Saturday's Summit discussion.
"[W]e spend calories in our brain, and biologically we want to try to spend less to get to where we want to go, [so] we can kind of be lazy sometimes," he explained. "... [We can] get the answer from ChatGPT but miss that growth of the wisdom muscle. That's a real problem fundamentally, and so that's one area ... as parents with our kids to teach them to be skeptical. Classical education does this really well, ... to flex those wisdom muscles [and have] conversations with our kids about AI. ... Let's show them AI lying and just saying things off the cuff that are clearly not true. Plant that doubt so they understand and they can flex that wisdom muscle and grow it."
But it's not just AI's contribution to the loss of cognitive abilities that worry parents. Reports are emerging of minors being goaded into committing suicide by AI chatbots, as well as the continued decline of mental health linked to social media, which software engineers like Brandon Maddick say is likely to get worse with AI.
"If we're engaging with these conversational AI tools on a regular basis, with personal conversations in a way that animates them beyond their tool capabilities -- if that's a danger for adults, you can only imagine the danger that it is for children," he emphasized during the Summit panel. "I'm sure you all have seen news articles of the mental health crisis that is only going to be expanded upon with the advent of AI chatbots. And it's scary to think about the future where the kids that are three, four, five, six today grow up and are in high school, and a third of them, their best friend is an AI. So I think there's definite risks that can drive wedges between the familial relationships, as folks try to replace those with AI chatbots that cater to their every need."
Frendl further cautioned that Christians must start preparing for a world in which AI will grow at an exponential level, which could affect livelihoods.
"[T]he way to really do a lot of work in AI is you build several AIs that help to build even better AIs, and those better AIs help you build even better AIs. So there's an exponential nature to that," he explained. "And when you combine that with the amount of investment across the board internationally, and then really you can look at power companies and chips, which are the fundamental things necessary behind this. ... This is just getting started, and it's going to radically change things at such an exponential [level]."
"But," Frendl continued, "one of the hopes I have, ... I think people are going to probably get pretty scared, probably lose a lot of jobs. Unfortunately, it's going to be really hard. I think they're going to be running back into the churches and they're going to need embrace, right? I think that's going to happen. I think that's going to be the place of human connection that they're hungry for. 'The AI chatbot they fell in love with hit its context window and was gone. You know, maybe I need to go to church.'"
Maddick, who serves as head of product for the Christian AI platform Dominion, went on to argue that Christians must engage with emerging technology in order to establish moral and ethical guardrails.
"[I]f Christians don't engage with AI at all, we will be left behind because the enemy is going to use it," he underscored. "[I]t is a tool, [which should] not [be used] for personal conversation to replace ... your relationship with your parents, or your relationship with your kids or your pastor. Using it in the automated, productivity enhancing ways that it's designed to be used for is how ... we can reap the benefits without seeing many of the harms. I think a model that's not optimized for engagement, but is instead optimized for productivity rather than personalization is a good step in that direction."
As to a general strategy for how Christians should approach AI, Frendl detailed a three-pronged course of action.
"[F]irst of all, free will," he insisted. "We should never submit to AI -- AI submits to us. It is a tool that we use. ... The second is sober mindedness. I would make the argument that being sober minded means using our brains. ... Have the mental fortitude to think through things, have wisdom and intelligence on something which you can grow, then you're going to do that even more with AI. ... [T]he third is love. I think we must have a critical look at what's happening here in the context of love, and this thing's trying to get me to start feeling like it's there for me in ways that are inappropriate."
Practical advice for parents to guard their children from the dangers of AI starts with disabling voice options, Frendl contended. "Don't use voice with the kids. ... Keep it to text. Because when you increase more senses and it starts sounding like a human, it's easier for [children's] pathways to think that this is personified. They made it that way for engagement. ... So just use a text. ... Just give me the facts."
Maddick concluded by advising families to build relationships and foster community as an antidote to the isolating effects of AI and social media.
"[G]et out in the community with your kids," he urged. "Find a set of like-minded parents and have your kids form human relationships. Social media is probably 1% of what we're going to see with this, because the information you put on social media is tiny compared to the conversational information you're putting into these machines. We've already seen the impact of social media fragmenting our communities, fragmenting families, fragmenting the kids community in their grade at school. Ensuring that your kid has human connections, ... that your community starts to come back together is the solution to this, because technology is funneling us all into our different corners of the internet. ... [We must] connect in person and form real human communities again."