MADE TO LOVE: Being Human in the Age of Generative AI
By Christopher Loo*
A machine can now write your emails, hold a conversation, and on a good day, pass for human. So, what if being human was never about intelligence, or productivity, or the tasks we can perform, but about becoming a certain kind of person?
Genesis 1:26-27 makes it plain: we are made in the image of God, given the dignity of ruling over creation alongside Him. But that image was never a static badge to wear. It's a calling to grow into.
Then, astonishingly, God Himself showed us how to live it. "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). Jesus, God among us, is what a fully human life looks like. He is our archetype, not because He was powerful, but because He loved perfectly, all the way to the cross.
And here's the better news: He isn't just an example to admire from a distance. The apostle Paul writes, "be imitators of God… walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us" (Ephesians 5:1-2). We are being remade, day by day, into people who love as He loved. That's the arc of the Christian life: from image-bearers, to a people who love like Jesus, until the day God dwells with us fully and wipes away every tear (Revelation 21:3-4).
So here is the calling above every other calling: to be human is to love as Jesus loved.
But how good is this AI technology, really? It's worth understanding what's actually happening beneath the fluent sentences. Traditional computing is deterministic — it does exactly what it's told, whether a spreadsheet formula or a line of code. Generative AI works differently: trained on vast amounts of text, it learns patterns and predicts what comes next, producing language that reads as reasoned, without reasoning or understanding as we do. That's also why it can “hallucinate” or misinform, stating something false with total confidence, and not know the difference.
However, here's what no amount of prediction can produce: love. No matter how advanced the model, it cannot love. It processes, produces, performs. It has no God to walk with, no neighbour to serve, no life to lay down for a friend.
That's the difference that should resonate with each of us: our calling was never about output, so it cannot be threatened, matched, or replaced by anything a machine can do. It's about becoming a certain kind of person, one who loves as Jesus loves.
So, here's the invitation. Don't just admire Jesus from a distance, or treat faith as information to know. Participate. Ask the Spirit, daily, to remake you a little more into His likeness. Practise loving the people in front of you, the ones no AI can love on your behalf: your family, your neighbour, that one person at church who's hard to love, the friend you could sit with over kopi, instead of being glued to a screen.
That's what it means to be human. Not intelligence. Not output, but love, given, received, and grown into, day by day, until together as a church, we become like Him.
This article was written and edited with the assistance of Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic, for length and clarity. The ideas, scripture selection, and final edits are the writer's own.
*[Christopher Loo has 45+ years of experience in Information & Communications Technology, from IBM mainframes to generative AI, and has been an active hands-on user of generative AI since ChatGPT’s 2022 debut.]
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