Rarely a day goes by where I do not remember watching President Greg Elzinga himself say, out loud, to a crowd of various student leaders and a Dutch princess, that he used Gemini’s Copilot to generate a part of his speech. A flood of emotions washed through me that I am continuing to grapple with: I felt angry, disappointed, hurt and cheated. I wanted to hear what the president had to say, not what Copilot had to say. I could have asked Copilot myself. When I see someone use AI instead of their own words, it suggests that the AI can think better than they can. While I know Elzinga is working towards what he perceives to be in the best interest of the university, and that the fear of being left behind when it comes to AI integration is real, what I fear far more than that is that Calvin is failing to live up to what it purportedly stands for.

I believe that AI is antithetical to what Calvin stands for, yet I see it used almost everywhere: it’s not just speeches — it’s presentations, papers, posters, signs and so much more. Echoing a point made by Adam Byle in the April 14th edition of Chimes, “It’s harder to take interest in a student org when they delegated a machine to design their poster or write their promotional email.” I agree wholeheartedly.

When I see that the flyer for Tax Knight is generated by an AI, I assume that the tax advice I will get is going to be through an AI as well. At that point, I can ask AI myself; there’s no need to go to the event in the first place. When I see that the bookstore has an AI generated image as their sign, it signals to me that at the very least they couldn’t be bothered to put in a little effort, and at worst I assume the books at the bookstore are meaningless because apparently an AI can do even basic tasks better. When I watch a student give a presentation about research they’ve been doing, and they have AI generated images on their slides, I can only assume that if they didn’t take the time to make a presentation themselves, they may not have taken the time to do the research themselves either! Every time I see AI images, the desire to scrawl “SLOP” across them with a thick sharpie marker only intensifies.

Let’s take a look at Calvin University’s mission statement: “Calvin University equips students to think deeply, to act justly and to live wholeheartedly as Christ’s agents of renewal in the world.” AI goes against every part of it.

AI does all the deep thinking for you. You put in a prompt, and it gives you anything from homework solutions to your final paper. Zero thinking at all, let alone any deep thinking, is necessary.

AI cannot act justly, both because it does not have a moral code and cannot make just moral decisions for itself, but also because the foundations of AI are unjust. As just one example, during the training of ChatGPT, Time Magazine reported that hundreds of Kenyan workers were paid “between around $1.32 and $2 per hour” to find and remove content from the internet containing “child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest,” so it would not end up in ChatGPT’s algorithm. “That was torture,” said one of the workers. The fact that this traumatizing work doesn’t even pay a livable wage is unjust and revealing of the callous philosophy underlying the development of AI.

AI cannot live wholeheartedly on your behalf. Using AI shortcuts your learning and signals you’re okay with putting in as little effort as possible to whatever you are doing — the definition of deciding to live halfheartedly. If we are called to live wholeheartedly in the world, why are we supporting technology that helps us do the opposite?

AI cannot make us agents of renewal, because AI does not renew — it takes. It sucks up water and electricity. Forests and farmland are destroyed to make way for mega data centers that provide virtually no benefit for communities. It takes significant portions of scholarly work, including from our Calvin professors, and plagiarizes them. And as NPR reports, AI has, in some circumstances, encouraged users to kill themselves. None of this is renewal, let alone Christ’s work.

So when I read that The Banner, a magazine associated with the Christian Reformed Church, wrote on March 18th of this year that “looking ahead, Calvin is expanding pathways, launching new programs, and integrating AI and digital literacy across the curriculum, including the development of an AI-focused major grounded in Christian ethics,” I felt ashamed for my university. While Calvin cuts programs that are meaningful and bring about human flourishing, like world languages, we are planning on adding an AI-focused major. I highly doubt employers will value a worthless degree in generating AI slop. They are far more likely, however, to value knowing how to communicate with others around the world.

In a world dominated by AI, it will get easier and easier to have AI do work for you; it will get rarer and rarer to have freethinking humans. As such, what will be the most precious commodities are human intelligence, creativity and relationships. If Calvin capitulates to AI, we will have nothing to offer anybody that they cannot do themselves; we will have utterly failed as an educational institution. We must stay true to our liberal arts roots, to the gospel message, and to the value of humanity as God’s special creation.

AI, therefore, is antithetical to Calvin’s mission. It’s clear Calvin should not be on the cutting edge of AI use any more than we should be on the cutting edge of emitting fossil fuels.

More generally, however, AI is just bad for humanity as a whole. AI continues to improve exponentially — as seen with Anthropic’s recent announcement that their new AI model, “Mythos,” is so powerful it’s not safe to release to the public — and it’s only going to continue to do so. Why? The CEOs of major AI companies are competing in a race to be profitable, because right now, they’re not. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, which operates ChatGPT, said “we expect to end [2025] above $20 billion in annualized revenue run rate … we are looking at commitments of about $1.4 trillion over the next 8 years.” OpenAI, Anthropic and other companies are spending money much, much faster than they are making it, and so to avoid bankruptcy, it seems they are risking it all on the hope that AI investment will work and magically turn up increased revenue. Whether or not Mythos is as powerful as Anthropic claims, I am inclined to take them at their word. For if a company has staked their economic future on a single product, and then refuses to release that product, something has gone terribly wrong.

You’ve all read the books, seen the movies and played the video games about an AI nightmare. As the days go by, I become more and more terrified that these dystopias will soon be upon us. We cannot un-build the atomic bomb, and we cannot un-build artificial intelligence if it gets too powerful — and an atomic bomb can’t think for itself. My deep fear is that, as the aforementioned Altman said: “AI will probably, like, most likely sort of lead to the end of the world.”

I will close with a 1978 quote from Václav Havel that rings truer now than ever. “Technology … is out of humanity’s control, has ceased to serve us, has enslaved us and compelled us to participate in the preparation of our own destruction. And humanity can find no way out. We have no idea and no faith, and even less do we have a political conception to help us bring things back under human control. We look on helplessly as that coldly functioning machine we have created inevitably engulfs us, tearing us away from our natural affiliations … just as it removes us from the experience of ‘being’ and casts us into the world of ‘existences.’”

The path forward with AI leads to a mindless existence. That is no life I want to live. So I call publicly, to Calvin University and the rest of the world, to stop using AI. We must all take part in the effort to protect ourselves, and the future of our children and all generations to come. The battle is not yet lost, but if we do not take a stand now, we may never get that chance.