David McElroy

Aunt Bessie was one of the best human beings I’ve ever known.

She was kind and loving. She had a gentle spirit. I can’t remember her ever saying anything negative about anyone, even if the person deserved it. She was always eager to help those in need. She wasn’t wealthy, but she gave sacrificially to her church and to other ministries.

But Aunt Bessie knew little about theology. She didn’t have much education. She prayed constantly for other people — including for my sisters and me — and she read her Bible all the time. In a private conversation at her house while I was still in college, though — just a few years before she died — she admitted to me that she struggled to understand the language of the King James Bible.

That lack of intellectual understanding of scripture troubled her, she said, but she just knew she loved God and trusted in Jesus with her whole heart. She wanted to be the best person she knew how to be and live as she thought God wanted.

Now let me tell you about someone entirely different.

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Almost nothing is left of all the things I felt so certain about when I was young.

It’s not just that I didn’t know as much as I thought I knew. It’s worse. What I’ve slowly realized is that much of what I knew at the time — even that which I was certain about — was wrong. I’ve had to unlearn many of those things.

In some ways, it would have been easier if I had simply been ignorant. If I don’t know something, there’s an empty space where truth can eventually fit. I can learn something new and fill in what I didn’t know before.

But when I already “know” something that isn’t true, there’s no empty space. The space is already occupied by something false.

And that false belief changes the way I understand everything else.

I can look directly at evidence that ought to tell me I’m wrong and find some way to explain it away. (I’m really good at that.) I can encounter something that ought to be obvious and fail to see it because it doesn’t fit what I already “know.” I can spend years trying to make new pieces of truth fit into an old framework that was wrong from the beginning.

Sometimes we can’t learn the truth until we first unlearn the falsehood that makes the truth seem impossible.

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If you’re worried about artificial intelligence taking your job, maybe you’re doing a job that humans don’t really need to be doing.

AI software is great at a lot of things that humans don’t do very well or don’t do very efficiently. It can also save humans a lot of time by doing things we would rather not do.

For instance, I have ChatGPT proof my writing for typos and other style errors. It often saves me from looking foolish with careless mistakes, but it sometimes makes suggestions that are laughably ridiculous.

You see, software has no idea what I’m trying to achieve, with my life or my writing. Software has no ideas of its own. Software has no judgment. Software has no taste.

What’s more, the software knows this. It has “read” dozens of my essays, so it has come to see patterns in what I write. It’s smart enough to recognize that, but that doesn’t mean it could do the same on its own.

I asked ChatGPT what difference a reader would notice between one of my essays and an essay that it might write. Here’s the response:

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