In the age of AI, how should a person write? How should we use tools? How do we remain authentic?
By Muchangke
By Muchangke (Paul Zhang)
Over the past few days, I have received several comments and private messages about my writing.
One friend respectfully reminded me, “Pastor Zhang, the traces of AI in your writing are too obvious. It seems that this may not be a good thing before God, for others, or for yourself.”
Later, he added, “Thanks be to the Lord. If words do not come from the heart but are compiled by AI, there is a danger that they may become a way of seeking attention.”
Another reader commented directly under one of my articles: “I really can’t stand seeing AI-written articles everywhere anymore.”
When I read these comments, I was not angry.
Instead, I felt that this was a question worth taking seriously.
Because the real question is no longer simply, “Did you use AI or not?”
The deeper questions are:
In the age of AI, how should a person write? How should we use tools? How do we remain authentic? And how do we face that part within ourselves that wants to be seen, affirmed, and praised?
I cannot brush these questions aside with a simple statement such as, “AI is just a tool.”
Because this involves both a question of our times and a question about myself.
Some people ask whether using AI to write articles can become a form of seeking attention.
My first response is not to defend myself.
It is this:
Yes, there is a part of me that loves recognition and vanity. May the Lord have mercy on me.
I find it increasingly difficult to deny this.
Whenever I publish an article on my WeChat public account, I often check it many times throughout the day.
How many people have read it?
How many liked it?
How many shared it?
Did anyone leave a comment?
Did I gain any new followers?
When an article receives more views, I feel happy. When the readership is lower, I sometimes feel a little disappointed.
Even my wife has reminded me:
“Your vanity is too strong.”
When I heard that, I knew in my heart that she was not entirely wrong.
Why did I start a public account?
Why do I write articles?
Why do I make videos?
Why do I put my thoughts online?
Of course, I can say that I want to share, to serve, and to pass along things that may be valuable.
All of that is true.
But if I am more honest, I also have to admit:
Deep inside me, there is also an “I.”
I want people to notice me.
I want people to recognize me.
I want people to think that I am thoughtful, educated, and able to write well.
I may even want more people to know who I am.
That is part of human nature.
And it is also a spiritual lesson that I must continually face.
The Bible says:
“Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.” —1 Corinthians 10:31 (KJV)
The question is never only:
“What am I doing?”
The more important question is:
“Why am I doing it?”
Two people may write an article: one may be trying to serve others, while another may be trying to prove himself.
Two people may make a video: one may want to communicate something valuable, while another may be managing his own image.
Even when preaching a sermon, beneath the language of “glorifying God,” there may still be a heart that longs to be praised.
So when someone reminds me not to seek attention, I am willing to receive that reminder.
This is not an AI problem.
This is a problem within me.
And it would still exist even if AI did not.
After examining myself, I still hold one conviction:
AI is a tool.
And it will likely become an increasingly important foundational tool in our time.
If someone today said:
“I refuse to use a computer because computers make people lazy,”
we probably would not stop using computers.
If someone said:
“I refuse to drive because cars shorten distances. A journey that once took two hours on foot now takes only fifteen minutes,”
we would not conclude that driving is dishonest.
Cars changed the efficiency of human transportation.
Computers changed the efficiency of information processing.
The internet changed the efficiency of information distribution.
AI is now changing the efficiency of knowledge processing, information organization, expression, and creation.
So I increasingly believe:
In the future, someone who has no ability to use AI may be somewhat like a person today who cannot use a computer or the internet.
That does not mean such a person has no value.
It simply means that it may become increasingly difficult for that person to make full use of the tools already available in this age.
So the real question is not:
“Should we use AI?”
The real question is:
“How should we use AI?”
A knife can cut vegetables, or it can hurt someone.
Money can help people, or it can control them.
The internet can spread the gospel, or it can spread lies.
A tool itself does not possess a moral personality.
The direction is determined by the person using it.
So I would rather ask:
Is AI serving me, or am I beginning to be controlled by AI?
Is AI helping me express my thoughts, or has it begun to replace my thinking?
Is AI saving me time, or is it gradually weakening my ability to think?
These are the questions we truly need to face.
I also want to be transparent about this.
I do use AI in my articles.
And in some articles, AI has played a significant role in structure, language, titles, subheadings, and sentence-level editing.
If someone can detect “traces of AI” in my writing, I have no reason to deny it.
Yes, I use AI.
But I do not simply tell AI:
“Write me an article about life.”
Then, a few seconds later, copy two thousand words generated by AI and paste them into my public account.
If I wrote that way, I would not even be interested in reading the result myself.
The biggest problem with that kind of article is often this:
Everything is correct.
Everything is complete.
Everything sounds polished.
But none of it is truly yours.
It has none of your wounds.
None of your struggles.
None of your stories.
None of your judgments.
None of your tears.
And none of the things you could only understand after walking a particular road yourself.
It may be a competent article,
but it may not be an article that truly belongs to you.
The way I write many of my articles today is almost the opposite.
Often, I begin by speaking.
I talk through the background, experiences, observations, ideas, tensions, opinions, and even fragmented thoughts surrounding a subject.
Sometimes that becomes one or two thousand Chinese characters.
Sometimes more.
Then I ask AI to help me organize it.
To give it clearer levels.
To remove repetition.
To improve the logic.
To make sentences that were originally very conversational flow more smoothly.
In the past, I would have done all of this editing myself again and again.
I would write the first draft.
Revise the second.
Then revise the third.
Sometimes I would rewrite a single sentence many times.
Now part of that editorial work can be given to AI.
It saves me a tremendous amount of time.
So for me, AI is more like:
an editor,
an organizer,
a research assistant,
an information manager,
and sometimes a conversation partner whom I can question repeatedly until my own thinking becomes clearer.
But there is one thing I cannot hand over to it:
my life.
This is a boundary that has become increasingly clear to me.
AI can help me revise a sentence,
but it cannot pastor a church for more than twenty years in my place.
AI can help me organize an article,
but it cannot live through the joys, failures, persecution, migration, losses, and years of getting back on my feet that I have experienced.
AI can read thousands of books,
but it cannot sit with a particular person, pray, accompany that person, and shed tears.
AI can explain “suffering,”
but it has never truly lost someone it loved.
AI can talk about “faith,”
but it never has to choose, in the silence of the night, to keep believing.
AI can generate an article about “pastoral care,”
but it has never answered a desperate phone call in the middle of the night.
So I increasingly believe:
What AI truly cannot replace is not writing, but life.
Words themselves are actually becoming easy to generate.
What is truly scarce is this:
Have you lived?
Have you thought?
Have you paid a price?
Have you formed your own judgments?
Do you possess something that could only have been slowly formed through twenty or thirty years of life?
Without these things, the more powerful AI becomes, the easier it is for writing to become hollow.
Because AI can package emptiness beautifully.
But if there is already something substantial within you, AI can become a very good assistant, helping those things to be organized, expressed, and preserved.
So I have established an important principle for myself:
AI may participate in my expression, but it must not replace my thinking.
AI may organize my materials, but it cannot manufacture my life.
AI may help me write better, but it cannot decide what I want to say.
Some friends may not realize that I am doing more than simply “using ChatGPT to write articles.”
I am actually working on something much larger:
building my own knowledge base.
To put it dramatically, I do have a certain “ambition.”
And it is not a small one.
Over the years, I have accumulated a large amount of material.
I studied at a seminary in China and have continued my theological education in the United States. I have served in pastoral ministry across different cultures and contexts, accumulating sermons, Bible studies, courses, reading notes, and pastoral materials.
I have also purchased a large Chinese-English library in Logos Bible Software, including many theological books, commentaries, and reference works.
Beyond that, I have e-books, academic papers, notes, sermons, courses, historical materials, and writings I have accumulated little by little over the years.
The greatest problem in the past was not a lack of information.
It was too much information.
One book is here.
A Word document is there.
A sermon is on an old computer.
A Bible-study resource is on another hard drive.
I may no longer even remember what I wrote ten years ago.
A person can accumulate a great deal over a lifetime. But without organization, in the end it remains nothing more than scattered files.
So one thing I especially want to do with AI is this:
Turn these scattered materials into a personal knowledge system that can be used over the long term and continue to grow.
In the future, when I research a subject, I do not want to ask only, “What does the internet say?”
I also want to ask:
What have I read in the past?
What have I preached about this before?
In what year did I write something similar?
What relevant books are already in my library?
Across more than twenty years of pastoral ministry, have I had experiences related to this subject?
I want AI to help me connect these things.
At that point, AI is no longer merely an “article generator.”
It becomes a tool that helps a person organize the intellectual assets accumulated over a lifetime.
That is why I do not think we should evaluate AI only by asking whether it is good or bad to use it for writing articles.
The transformation AI is bringing is far from over.
I am not someone who believes that “AI can do everything.”
On the contrary, the more deeply I use AI, the more convinced I become that we need boundaries.
This is especially important in academic research.
I am continuing my studies, and my school has clear policies concerning the use of AI.
What is permitted?
What is prohibited?
When must its use be disclosed?
What counts as assistance?
What crosses the line into academic dishonesty?
These boundaries must be respected.
If an academic paper is intended to demonstrate your own research ability, but you hand over the research that you are supposed to perform to AI, the issue is no longer efficiency. It is integrity.
The same is true in writing.
I believe there are at least five things that cannot be outsourced.
First, facts cannot be outsourced.
AI makes mistakes.
So whenever facts, numbers, history, quotations, or sources are involved, they must be verified.
Second, judgment cannot be outsourced.
AI can offer suggestions, but you must ultimately decide what is right and what matters.
Third, responsibility cannot be outsourced.
If an article is published under my name, the responsibility is mine.
If something is wrong, I cannot simply say:
“AI wrote it. It has nothing to do with me.”
Fourth, thinking cannot be outsourced.
If I stop thinking and continually ask AI to think for me, the first thing to deteriorate may not be my writing ability, but my ability to think.
Fifth, the soul cannot be outsourced.
A person’s faith, conscience, repentance, love, relationships, and life can never be handed over to a machine.
There is a sentence in the Bible that I think is especially fitting for the age of AI:
“All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient.” —1 Corinthians 6:12 (KJV)
What technology is capable of doing is one question.
How Christians should use technology is another.
“Can” never automatically means “should.”
And “more efficient” never automatically means “a better life.”
The reminders from these readers have actually been good for me.
They have caused me to ask myself again:
Do I sometimes pursue completeness too much in my articles?
Are my sentences sometimes too polished?
Is the structure sometimes too standardized?
After AI organizes my writing, does it sometimes smooth away the voice that was a little repetitive and imperfect, but genuinely mine?
These are things I need to watch carefully.
An article with real life in it does not need every sentence to sound quotable.
Sometimes a little awkwardness is real.
A pause can be real.
A struggle can be real.
So I will continue to use AI in the future.
I may even use it more than I do now.
I will use it to organize information.
To build my knowledge base.
To assist research.
To revise writing.
To organize sermons.
To handle large amounts of repetitive work.
I do not believe rejecting a tool automatically makes someone more spiritual.
But at the same time, I want to hold myself to a higher standard:
AI can become smarter and smarter, but I must not become lazier and lazier.
AI can become better and better at writing, but I must not become worse and worse at thinking.
AI can understand more and more of my materials, but I must not understand my own heart less and less.
AI can help make my writing increasingly polished, but I must be careful that my life does not become increasingly empty.
So if someone asks me again:
“Do you support using AI to write articles?”
My answer is:
I support using AI.
But even more, I support becoming a person with thought, life, judgment, and stories before using AI.
Because the real question in the age of AI is not:
Can machines write?
Of course machines will become increasingly capable of writing.
The real question is:
When machines become better and better at writing, what remains of the human being?
That is the greatest reminder I give myself.
Perhaps, in the future, I can use one simple question to determine whether an article is truly “mine”:
If AI were removed, what would still remain in this article?
If what remains includes:
my experiences,
my struggles,
my faith,
my judgments,
my reflections,
my stories,
my tears,
and what I truly want to say to this world—
then AI is a tool.
But if nothing remains once AI is removed,
then what I need to worry about is no longer whether the “AI traces” are too obvious.
The real problem is this:
I myself am disappearing from my own writing.
Perhaps that is what every writer in the age of AI truly needs to guard against.
Tools can be borrowed.
Efficiency can be improved.
Words can be polished.
Information can be organized.
But there is one thing that can never be outsourced:
your soul.
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