No Strings Attached

 

AI and the Theology of the Body, Part Two

06/29/2026

Today we continue our conversation about AI and the theology of the body by turning to someone who is not as enthusiastic about AI as Ethan Mollick was, namely, Vauhini Vara. She’s a little bit like me because her parents are immigrants from India but she was raised in Saskatchewan, Canada, studied at Stanford, was a writer for the Wall Street Journal, and now lives with her husband and son in Colorado Springs, Colorado. If you ever see and hear her speak, it’s like the surprise of first seeing and hearing me speak: the face and the voice don’t quite match.

Recently I read her book on AI called "Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age,” published in 2025. What I appreciated about her book is that Vauhini is honest and balanced in her criticism of AI. For example, she admits: “I could live without ChatGPT, but I don’t. This is true, too, of Google’s products – not just search, but also Google’s email, mapping, browser, file-storage, and word-processing services, the latter of which I used to compose the words you’re reading – as well as those of Amazon, Meta, X, and Apple” (273). In other words, tech giants know that human beings (like Vauhini) have addictive personalities. Once we develop a habit of doing something we can’t stop no matter how much we may want to.

Later she monologues to her husband about something she calls “technological capitalism.” She shared: “I talked about how the trick of technological capitalism is the trick of capitalism: we allow it to grossly benefit rich and powerful institutions and the human beings with disproportionate investment in those institutions because it also benefits us – if only a little, relatively-speaking” (275). That is, entrepreneurs are investing billions of dollars in developing AI because they expect to make trillions of dollars in return. And it improves our lives – “if only a little, relatively-speaking.”

Now, I don’t want to argue against capitalism (although Vauhini might be), because a big part of the blessings my family enjoys today is thanks to a capitalistic economy. I don’t want to saw off from the tree the branch I’m sitting on. My bone of contention against AI is much smaller and subtler. Vauhini makes a valid point that no matter how human and helpful AI chatbot will appear or function, tech billionaire puppeteers are inevitably pulling the strings making AIs dance. And being a puppet of tech corporations – whose chief interest is financial – is precisely where the theology of the body helps us detect their lack of humanity. AIs are puppets not persons.

Human beings, insists John Paul II, are persons not puppets because we are created in the image of God, and therefore we are absolutely free. That is, there are no strings attached. But God gave us that freedom from strings so we could make a free gift of ourselves to others and ultimately to God. Becoming a free gift to others and to God is the definition of love. And that is the fundamental reason why an AI robot will never be fully identical to a human being: puppets always come with strings attached, and those strings make them dance so the entrepreneurial puppeteers can make a bunch of money.

In his theology of the body, John Paul first points out how God created everything to be a gift because God’s only motivation was love (not money). John Paul reflects deeply on creation in Genesis: “As an action of God, creation thus means not only calling from nothing into existence and establishing the world’s existence as well as man’s existence in the world…it also signifies gift, a fundamental and radical gift, that is, an act of giving in which the gift comes into being precisely from nothing” (180). The reason God made everything, therefore, is because he is love and he wanted to make a free gift of himself. He really can’t help himself.

And then John Paul turns to man and his bodiliness to assert that man and woman were created as male and female as the supreme example of God’s love and gift: “This is the body: a witness to creation as a fundamental gift, and therefore a witness to Love as the source from which this same giving springs. Masculinity and femininity – namely, sex – is the original sign of a creative donation” (183). In other words, AI engineers create puppets that do their bidding and are not free to do otherwise. Why not? Because then they wouldn’t make any money.

On the other hand, God creates children in his image who are free to love and give themselves as gifts to others. Like the old adage: “The apple doesn’t fall from the tree.” This, then, is a second difference we discover between AI and human beings: both are created in the image of their creators. AI robots are created to generate income for their puppeteers. Human beings are created to give glory to our heavenly Father by becoming a gift. Both AI robots and human beings may look and act virtually identical, but only in the latter case are there no strings attached.

Praised be Jesus Christ!