Built for Good: Seeking Virtue in How We Use AI

Built for Good: Seeking Virtue in How We Use AI

In our first post, we explored why the love of God and neighbor must remain our first commitment as we navigate the age of AI. Love orients our hearts toward God and neighbor. But we must also recognize the goodness and excellence of God’s created order by distinguishing the ways in which technology might be used virtuously or viciously—and that’s where our second principle comes in:

Excellence: Seek Virtue over Vice
Although finite and fallen creatures, we acknowledge that Generative AI can be developed and used to positively extend the human vocation to cultivate the earth and, by God’s common grace, to promote true human flourishing.
However, we recognize that Generative AI creates in ways that mimic human cognition and creativity, tending toward the replacement of these capacities rather than mere augmentation or extension. As a creative technology, Generative AI can also encourage the notion that humans can transcend their created nature through it.
Therefore, we will pursue the excellence of God’s good design for humanity by only using Generative AI in ways that promote truth, human dignity, justice, moral purity, and beauty. Furthermore, we will refrain from uses that diminish our integrity, displace the human vocation, erode academic honesty, or falsely promise transcendence beyond our created nature.

This principle is simple: use AI in ways that cultivate virtue rather than vice. But what is simple is often not easy. Understanding how using AI might—intentionally or unintentionally—lead away from God’s good design for creation requires moral clarity about what is good, true, and beautiful.

A Tool for Cultivating the Earth

Scripture opens with an extraordinary mandate. God places humanity in a garden and calls us to cultivate it—to work, create, build, steward, and multiply goodness in the world he has made (Genesis 1:28). This is the human vocation, and it remains ours in the digital age.

Generative AI, at its best, can aid our vocation. It can help researchers analyze data to cure disease. It can assist teachers in their development of resources to serve students with different learning needs. It can automate administrative tasks to allow a writer or artist more freedom to creatively express truth and beauty. By God’s common grace—the goodness he extends to all people (Matthew 5:45; James 1:17)—wise use of technology can genuinely promote human flourishing.

A Mirror of the Human Condition

But there’s a major problem that gets in the way of the virtuous use of AI: we are fallen creatures. That is, we’ve “exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25). Throughout history, powerful technologies have tempted humanity with the promise of transcendence—the idea that apart from God we can surpass our created limits, solve sin and death, and become something more than human. Though AI is new, this is an old script. The story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:3–7) is just one example of this impulse. Generative AI can encourage the same illusion: that through technology, we can overcome our God-given limits, our fallenness, and even our mortality.

But unlike the Tower of Babel, AI doesn’t just extend our reach. It can reach for us. Today’s AI systems can convincingly imitate many capacities that were distinctively human. It produces writing that sounds like human writing, art that looks like human art, and reasoning that resembles human reasoning.

This is the tension: we can now outsource human work to AI tools that was once distinctly ours. The moral lines are not just between good and bad content produced from AI. We need to think critically about what uses surrender the human vocation or aim at overcoming good creaturely limitations. And the lines are not always clear. For example, keeping a photo of a loved one who has passed away feels morally different than creating an AI replica trained on the loved one’s voice and identity. Would that use honor our created limits and the dignity of the lost loved one? It might be obvious that a student should not use an AI chatbot to write a research paper. That use would obviously diminish a student’s integrity. But could a student use it to help edit or brainstorm ideas? Questions like these, and many like them, require discernment.

Rather than cultivating the earth with grateful and hopeful hearts, Generative AI has the potential to mirror and multiply human pride and sin. With AI, we might generate more content, exercise more control, and solve more problems than ever before. But if we forget our dependence on God and our need for grace, we can turn AI into an instrument of our own vices.

Excellence as a Way of Life

So how do we navigate this tension? The apostle Paul points us in the right direction. In Philippians 4:8, he encourages believers to fix their minds on what is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy.

It’s not an exhaustive list or a set of rules for every situation. It’s a simple yet demanding call to focus our attention on what is truly good. When we consider how to use Generative AI—in the classroom, in research, in our professional lives, whatever God has called us to—we hold each use up against that standard. Does this use promote truth, or make deception easier? Does it uphold human dignity, or reduce people to mere inputs and outputs? Does it encourage justice and moral clarity, or obscure accountability?

This is about more than drawing a line between “allowed” and “not allowed.” It’s about cultivating a community that instinctively reaches for excellence—God’s good design for what it means to be human. At Northwestern, we want our students to graduate not just knowing how to use AI, but knowing when to use it, why to use it, and when to set it aside because the work of being human matters more than the output or efficiency.

That’s a vision for education we believe parents, students, and supporters can embrace—and should seek—because we are about shaping character as well as competence.

Next in the series: how our third principle, “Formation: Emphasize Process over Product,” influences the way we form students for lifelong growth in the age of AI.