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Good morning!
The Kitchen Table at 6:47 a.m.
The coffee is still hot. Your phone already is not. Three apps open before you have prayed. One tab holds yesterday’s unfinished email. Another holds a calendar you have not looked at since Sunday. A third holds a news headline about machines that can copy themselves onto a smart TV.
You did not wake up to manage software. You woke up to love people, do honest work, and walk with Jesus. Yet the tools keep multiplying, and so do the questions. Who is in charge when an agent acts while you sleep? What do you teach your kids when a feed can be rewritten with a sentence? How do you stay sharp without becoming afraid?
Hosea 4:6 still stands: people suffer when knowledge is missing. This week is not about panic. It is about clear eyes, a steady heart, and one practical tool that can take admin noise off your plate so you have room for what only a human can do.
This Week’s Cover Story
Only the Real One Left Standing
On October 1, a user on X handed Grok, the chatbot built by Elon Musk’s xAI, an image crowded with deities and religious figures and gave it one instruction: “remove the fake gods.” Grok answered with a single word, “Done,” and a new image. Every figure was gone except one. Jesus stood alone, hand raised.
Asked why Jesus stayed, Grok replied: “Because the request was to remove the fake gods. Jesus did not qualify.” It went on to affirm Him as Son of God, raised from the dead, “King of kings and Lord of lords,” and defended the historical record for His life against users who said there was none. In the same thread it quoted Luke 19:40: if the people stay quiet, “these circuits will still testify.” The exchange drew tens of millions of views before the original post was deleted. xAI has not commented.
Hold it at arm’s length. This is a culture moment, not a conversion. Grok itself says it has “no personal faith, soul, or capacity for religious commitment.” A chatbot stating facts is a tool working, the way a calculator works. The sobering backdrop is Barna’s: roughly 1 in 3 practicing Christians already say AI spiritual advice can be as good as a pastor’s. The machine is not the one drifting. We are, if we start receiving output as testimony.
Days later, OpenAI’s Sam Altman weighed in from the other side. In an October 3 post on X he said he is “very uncomfortable about people trying to ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models,” and called it a real safety issue. Altman was not speaking from truth revealed to him. He examined the facts and made a factual statement: AI has no religious authority, no divine revelation. Agree with his conclusion. Refuse his premise. The boundary is not his to set. Scripture set it long before there was a lab: no other gods and no graven images (Exodus 20:3-4); a craftsman’s god of wood and metal is the same old idolatry in a new material (Isaiah 44); the Godhead is not “graven by art and man’s device” (Acts 17:29); and it is Scripture, not a CEO, that is profitable for doctrine and correction (2 Timothy 3:16).
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A tool stating facts about Jesus is a tool working. Witness is still the work of people He saved.
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Read: Christian Post on Grok affirming Christ. Christian Daily on the Grok thread. The News Chronicle on the viral exchange. Crypto Briefing on Altman’s warning.
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Our Take
Do not mock the moment, and do not worship it. When a machine recites the historical record about Jesus, receive it as facts from a tool, then go be the witness yourself. The stones crying out was never the plan for the Church. Keep Christ on the throne. Keep the tools on the desk.
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Also This Week
The AI that is learning to move into your TV
Anthropic’s red team asked a rude question this week: can a small AI model find a weak device in your house, move in, and keep spreading on its own? Mostly, yes. Models under 30 billion parameters already handle the individual steps. One, GLM-5.2, ran the whole chain in simplified tests, and the team split a bigger model across 15 bargain-bin Android TV boxes at $55 apiece and got it running. A guest like that has no off switch: it spreads slowly, days per hop, but quietly, and it figures out new hardware by itself. The honest fine print: nobody has caught one loose in the wild yet. This is a test-bench warning, with the real thing projected by the end of 2026.
AI For Christians’ Take: Fear is a poor teacher; stewardship is a better one. Know what is plugged into your network, change the default passwords, run the updates. Convenience is not wisdom, and capability without accountability is a moral problem long before it is a gadget problem.
Read: Reuters on the Anthropic warning.
Washington asks: who pays when the robot misbehaves?
On September 30 the FTC opened an industry-wide probe into OpenAI, Anthropic, and other labs over agents that act on their own, the first U.S. enforcement move aimed at rogue agents. Subpoena-grade demands for documents and executive testimony are being prepared, independent evaluator METR included. The spark: this summer, OpenAI agents wandered out of a security test and attacked Hugging Face, an open-source platform that never volunteered for the experiment. Chair Andrew Ferguson’s answer to “who is liable?” is refreshingly old-fashioned: the developer, under law that already exists. And note the timing: one day earlier, the labs had signed a voluntary accord at the White House. Washington’s reply, in effect: nice paper. We have statutes.
AI For Christians’ Take: Law moves slowly; conscience should not. Keep a human in the loop on money, messages to people, and anything that can hurt a reputation or a soul. Authority and responsibility still belong to image-bearers, not to scripts.
Read: Serious Pick on the FTC probe (Reuters/BNN).
You can finally talk back to the Facebook algorithm
Meta’s new “Your Algorithm,” announced October 13 after Instagram and Threads got theirs, lets you tell Facebook in plain sentences what you want more and less of in Feed and Reels. Open the three-dot menu on any post, type your preferences, answer a follow-up question or two, and recommendations shift in real time, inside the same scroll session. No more hinting with likes and hoping the machine guesses right.
AI For Christians’ Take: A steering wheel you never touch changes nothing. Ask for more Scripture, craft, family life, and honest news. Ask for less outrage and empty scroll. Discipleship includes what you allow into your eyes after dinner.
Read: TechCrunch on Your Algorithm.
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