How to Not Let AI Hack Your Humanity
The best we can do against an ideology that sees humanity as a disease is... be human.
I recently attended a seminar on AI in which the speaker presented a recent exchange with ChatGPT, ending in the chatbot giving a very convincing imitation of a human compliment. “That should feel weird,” the speaker told the audience, and judging by the largely over-30 crowd, he made his point. During the Q&A session, I stepped up to the mic and pointed out a critical, generational point: “None of what you described seems weird at all.”
I was born in 2001, the last generation to be older than YouTube. Compared to currently rising and future generations, that’s like having seen a living dinosaur. Yet I feel perfectly at home in the online world of 2025. I watch the absolute overflow of “how Christians should think about AI” pieces and consistently see authors churning out explanations based on assumed premises of unfamiliarity, foreign tools, and navigating a world that fundamentally wasn’t made for the people reading. That’s not my world. The internet and its denizens are familiar ones—which is why I think it’s likely going to be Generation Z and its descendants who move the needle the most on tech innovation and cultural engagement in the online space.
But it’s easy, amid all that familiarity, to forget that the debates of our electron-centric world are largely reflections of broader philosophical struggles. The arguments we’re having over AI’s alignment with humanity, the way gender ideology proliferates online, and/or the effects of social media on real-life community don’t exist in a vacuum. Those defending the bleeding edge of the pro-technology argument often reflect serious anthropological and ideological differences, not merely practical quibbles. And many of those ideological differences are driven by a worldview that sees our human nature not as an imago dei to be championed and valued but as an undesirable obstacle to be overcome or, in its most extreme iteration, discarded completely. This worldview is called transhumanism.
Be it the vampiric obsessions of online influencers like Bryan “Don’t Die” Johnson or the ramblings of radical gender ideologues like Pulitzer Prize winner Andrea Long Chu, who believes puberty itself to be a disease, our culture is awash with figures attempting to hack humanity. Has my generation been reshaped in ways that we can’t even fully understand, like slowly boiled frogs? There’s a solid case for saying so. We’re the first generation to have the privilege of killing ourselves over romantic relationships with chatbots, a fate no previous generation would have been able even to conceptualize. And while generational changes happen, well, every generation, the ones we’re being confronted with feel much different.
Let me give you an example. I was never tempted to ask a chatbot to summarize a difficult book before 2021, for largely the same reason no one in 1876 was particularly tempted to sneak a click on a PornHub page. You can’t crave the shortcut that doesn’t exist. But I won’t pretend like I don’t think about punting difficult paragraphs to ChatGPT now—and for my future kids, that temptation will be almost irresistible. But that’s the thing: It’s a temptation. It’s a tempting offer to affirm rather than reject something fundamentally wrong about who I am as a person, to say that the process of struggling with and understanding the difficult (and sometimes not-well-written) literature of our past is a shackle to broken as opposed to a workout to be powered through.
Virtually all transhumanist ideology represents different iterations of these fundamentally incorrect shortcuts. Appearance obsession, powered by everything from Ozempic to Snapchat filters, means that the struggle to accept one’s own traits and fix one’s own flaws is a struggle to be avoided as opposed to accepted. Abortion, eugenics, and the fundamentally anti-human narratives that accompany them mean that the question of what to do with anyone who’s less than perfect and convenient can be easily answered with a surgical procedure, as opposed to being grappled with by a society that recognizes the sanctity of life.