This article is republished with the permission of Doug Smith from his blog That Doug Smith (November 10, 2025)
A leader at a large Christian ministry heard my debate with Jay Owen on Preston Sprinkle’s podcast a few months ago and invited me to be on that podcast as well. I was excited because I’m a big fan of the ministry.
But in our email dialog, he made this extra request about what he’d like me to say:
Given that AI is already being used at school, among friends, family, in churches, etc., how can parents help their kids flourish? So the attention would be less on if kids should use AI and more on how to faithfully follow Jesus in the AI-saturated world we live in.
It would be so much easier for me to go along. There is a cost for my views. But the more I study, the more I pray, the more I watch and read, the more sure I am that generative AI is a net negative for all of us, especially for kids and teens. I’m open to being shown how I am missing it, and will continue to remain so. But in the meantime, I must hold fast to my convictions.
After a couple more emails, they decided to rescind the invitation for the interview. Here’s the response that got me uninvited:
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Hi _______,
Thank you for the invitation to your podcast. I’d love to do it.
But I have a concern about the focus you shared.
All of my efforts in speaking and writing on these topics flow from my heart as a Christian, a long time homeschooling dad of four (now adult and married) daughters, a grandpa, but also a lifelong software engineer. I’m a senior engineer for Covenant Eyes, working on a product that uses machine learning technology. So it’s fair to say I’m an insider on these topics.
I also write as a student of Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Ellul, C.S. Lewis, and even modern scholars like Cal Newport. And I write from the personal experience of helping thousands of people overcome screen addictions for more than ten years.
Intentionally habit forming
I have gone deep into learning the mechanisms used by Big Tech to make their products intentionally habit forming, even truly addicting. And Generative AI LLM chatbots build on Big Tech’s playbook to exploit us even more. And, as always, it’s worse for the young.
GenAI adds the constant pull of the emotional UI — designed to form relationships — which is why people are at alarming rates. In fact, the #1 use-case for ChatGPT according to Harvard Business Review is for therapy or companionship. I saw that coming two years ago — because the UI is designed specifically to build trust and form relationships.
(So Big Tech creates the mental health and loneliness crises, and “fixes” them with chatbots to give us therapy and companionship?)
Add the fact that GenAI is often confidently wrong — later models even more often than earlier ones. And it’s not just that they’re hallucinating, but that they have no binding to reality, so they don’t know anything about what they generate. They are not grounded in truth.
So we get quick answers that are “close”, but yield a quick, emotionally supportive, and sometimes amazing response that triggers the same dependency-forming dopamine loops in our brain while causing us to lose our critical thinking skills.
As Prof. Gary Smith (no relation) often says, “if you know the answer, you don’t need an LLM; if you don’t know the answer, you can’t trust an LLM.”
Add to this the blatant sexualization built in to the models, like Grok’s new AI companions who quickly move to abhorrent behaviors, especially towards children, as my friends at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation have confirmed.
Even MIT has shown in a recent study that LLMs hamper key brain processes that are involved in memory and critical thinking. This is definitely worse for the young.
There’s no upside for kids or teens today
Based on this, I don’t think adults should use GenAI. But kids especially don’t need to be using it. There’s no upside for kids or teens today.
So I won’t be helping families find a way to navigate their use of AI with their kids, other than to help them unwind their use of it if they are already using it. To me, that’s like asking me to help them balance their use of porn if they’re already using it, or balance their use of crack if they’re already using it.
In every talk and conversation, I always share my research with grace and truth. I’m “a beggar showing another beggar where I found bread,” not speaking from an ivory tower or sense of any kind of superiority (God knows I’m not!). And I recognize that no parent would let their kids use GenAI if they knew what I know. So I teach them, graciously, then help them teach their kids why they’re going to be different than other people.
Because ultimately, this all comes down to discipleship. Discipleship happens when we do things in pursuit of a trusted authority. If GenAI is our trusted authority, we will certainly be led astray, and kids may be irreparably harmed.
Cast a positive vision
Parents need to cast a positive vision for their kids that is focused on being disciples of Christ. In his excellent Raising Spiritual Champions, George Barna said that parents who wanted to raise spiritual champions seriously limited their kids’ tech use. How much more should they limit a technology designed to build an addictive relationship with them with content that has no grounding to truth or reality?
Christian parents need to hear these truths. And I am burdened to the depth of my soul to help them see it, even though it’s unpopular, maybe even unthinkable right now at the peak of Big Tech’s engineered hype cycle.
I know how deeply [your ministry] cares about developing a Biblical worldview. I share that goal deeply. Again, it’s all about discipleship.
So who is discipling our kids? Big Tech knows Deuteronomy 6 works. They want us to use their products, especially social media, and now GenAI, when we sit in our homes, walk by the way, lie down, and rise up. When we do that, we are changed, secularized, harmed, addicted. We are not formed into a Biblical worldview.
We must cast a better vision. That’s what my book does, and what I try to do every time I speak.
So that’s a big response to your prompt. But I thought it would be best to be clear, so that you can decide whether you still want me to share with your audience.
I hope you do, as I think parents need to hear what I’ve learned. But I understand if now that you’ve read this, you need to make a different decision. I’ll respect any decision you make.
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