The Gospel Coalition Takes Hard Stance Against AI

If there was ever a time when The Gospel Coalition revealed its inflated sense of self-importance, it’s luddite position on AI in the writing process is that. Brett McKracken, the wannabe movie critic who recently glazed The Odyssey as well as the Netflix deconstruction of Little House on the Prairie, announced the new editorial standards for The Gospel Coalition.

It’s an offense to the word “writing” to apply it to AI-arranged words and sentences. What AI produces is an impressively polished, usually helpful, sometimes cheeky string of words. But it’s just instantaneous pattern recognition and data organization. It’s soulless slop that can mimic and masquerade as brilliant writing. It’s aggressively efficient, speedily rendered, sycophantic information.

The Gospel Coalition begins with an overinflated sense of the writing level of AI. I have used a lot of AI, and none of the LLMs write in such a way that is passable as human on their own. And what I find ironic is that they publish Joe Carter whose writing often is mentally indistinguishable from AI.

But it’s not writing.

Even when it’s created at the behest of a human’s creative prompt and detailed parameters, and even when it’s just assisting a human who has real writing chops, AI-fashioned content doesn’t deserve to be called writing.

Writing is an art form and a labor of love (love is something AI cannot do).

The Gospel Coalition makes an ontological claim about writing that is not inherently correct. Writing is a lot of things. Evangelical Dark Web is a labor of love as much as it is a business. But just like art, it can be just for love; it can be political; it can be purely commercial in nature. The ulterior motivations behind artwork do not diminish the artistic merits, nor would they for writing.

Writing is a product of deeply human, necessarily inefficient processing, meandering, wrestling, noodling, cogitating, and often suffering (suffering is something AI cannot do).

For Christians, writing is a holy calling and an act of worship (worship is something AI cannot do).

This is a pretentious view of what The Gospel Coalition does. Are Brett McKracken’s bad movie reviews worship? What about when Kyle Rittenhouse is libeled as a mass shooter?

That’s why I’m proud that The Gospel Coalition has drawn a line in the sand on AI usage in the writing we publish. In short: We don’t want AI’s tentacles on any of the written works we publish. We want our audience to trust that what they get at TGC is human-made, human-edited, human-assessed, made in human community for other humans—as an act of love, fellowship, and worship.

The audience of The Gospel Coalition would be better served by AI writing, actually.

All written content on TGC should be the original work of its author. Writers should not use AI for

• ideating,
• researching beyond a basic fact search,
• organizing,
• writing,
• or editing beyond a basic spelling check.

The Gospel Coalition draws its line at AI research which is in this modern era is luddite naivety that AI has not already taken over search engines. If anything, advanced AI research is an excellent development that writers should use.

As editors, we developed this policy both to honor our readers—whom we want to trust the integrity of our content—and to honor our writers, so they’ll be clear that we only publish human-crafted work.

We’re not looking for perfect writing. We’re not looking for meticulously organized information full of suspiciously pithy one-liners or vague examples that don’t feel like they originated in a human’s real life.

We’re looking for writing that comes from a human heart, born out of real passion, nagging questions, persistent burdens; writing characterized by human affection more than perfectly calibrated linguistic inflection. We delight in the hallmarks of truly human writing: a bit messy, unexpected in the way real life always is, somewhat scattered and less efficient than machine-rendered words—yet pulsating with life.

In some ways, AI writers would be easier, less risky. We editors wouldn’t have to worry about AI writers ever changing their mind or renouncing their faith or committing grave sin. But we relate to our human writers precisely because they have the potential to do those things. They’re like us. We share in the struggle of faith.

The Gospel Coalition cares more about its work being human than good. It even notes that robot authors do not suffer personal disgrace. Their lack of committment to quality might be their undoing. But for now, they have the luxury of financial backing to make these lofty ideals their standards.

Christian competitors, ones that do not enjoy The Gospel Coalition’s donor base, might not feel as compelled to play by their rules. The Christian publishing industry is changing. Christian Post is the outlet I most often call out these days. They do not appear to embrace AI writing. Instead, they are resorting to increasing the amount of listicles they publish to deceptively enhance their page counts and ad impressions.

Some might argue that organizations like TGC will “fall behind” or become irrelevant by taking a hard-line stance against AI usage in writing. We hope the opposite will be true.

As AI-rendered words flood the internet and written content becomes cheaper and cheaper, most “writing” will be low-value and not worth anyone’s time. What will be worth human readers’ time will be the distinctly human words protected from the dead-eyed, neutering effects of AI.

Think about a Joe Rogan–style podcast that featured two AI “hosts” discussing some topic, or a YouTube video featuring AI deepfakes in conversation. Do you think audiences will ever have real interest in giving their valuable attention to watching or listening to AI simulations? If not, why would audiences have any interest in reading articles or books that are just AI simulations?

Christ’s incarnation is instructive here. God didn’t reveal himself in a conceptual, virtual, zeros-and-ones sort of way. He took on flesh. Embodiment matters. The medium of his body is the message. That’s why disembodied AI simulations don’t resonate. We’re wired for relationships with other embodied humans, made in God’s image like us.

The entire industry of writing is hurting, and written content is the least profitable and monetizable. Whereas The Gospel Coalition believes that being human is a value proposition over being quality and uses a massive Jesus juke to make the point.

The fact is that this article is slop that I would expect from a bad LLM like Gemini or one of the cheap Chinese models. It’s less agentic than OpenClaw and less human than writing that could be produced by a robot assistant under the supervision of a skillful writer.

Conclusion

The Gospel Coalition concludes with a lament about the declining literacy. However, AI has already contributed to that and future generations will be forced to adapt. Already, education systems are beginning to return to in class essay writing and other methods to undercut cheating. AI reveals midwit frauds who possess no talent.

The Gospel Coalition is signalling its virtue with its commitment to human writing, and it has the resources to maintain that. However, in their arrogance, they invoke a conceited Christological argument as well as starving artist rhetoric to justify their market share, which might be their ultimate concern.

Skillful writers will embrace AI to achieve the heights of their craft. Bad writers will rely on AI, and their work will be obvious as such. Skillful businesses will embrace AI to achieve what their competitors put out at a fraction of the overhead.