BYU professor says AI can strengthen faith — if used the right way

SALT LAKE CITY — Artificial intelligence is everywhere – in classrooms, on phones and now, even in scripture study. When youth are now asked to teach a Sunday School lesson on short notice, the first instinct isn't always to open the scriptures; it's to open an AI chatbot.

Alex Kirry, co-host of KSL Brightside and a father of seven, says that reality is forcing his family to ask a question no previous generation has faced: Can AI help you build faith, or does it quietly hollow it out?

The question is landing with new urgency as AI tools grow more capable and even church leaders, including Elder Gerrit W. Gong of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, begin speaking publicly about the risks and possibilities. At BYU and many other universities, faculty are already rethinking how they teach because of it.

Finding the balance

Kirry said the topic hits close to home and that he is working to find the balance.

"I don't want to discourage them from finding different ways to make sure that they have a good teaching experience," Kirry said. "At the end of the day, they're doing it. Even if they're using AI, they're standing in front of a class way more than I did when I was that age."

"I'm trying to find the balance here without being like the mean dad to say, 'Don't use that at all. You're not a good person if you use AI,'" he said.

But Kirry said he also worries about what could be lost.

"I want to make sure my kids don't have a sterile, faith-building experience or that they get nothing out of the preparation for that lesson that they're going to teach," he said.

'Please do not let AI replace you'

Elder Gong has recently encouraged caution about using AI in different types of study.

"Please be wise," Elder Gong said in a video the church released in June. "If AI can help your work, please consider using it," he said. "But please recognize the difference between AI helping tutor you to enhance your understanding and you simply having AI do your homework with little benefit to your learning."

Elder Gong warned that AI "can let us slip into being lazy, dependent, perhaps dishonest."

"Please do not let AI replace you in work that would otherwise help you stretch and grow," he said. "And please do not take credit and claim as your own work what you know AI has primarily done."

'It felt like a devilish role'

Tyler Griffin, associate dean of religious education at Brigham Young University, said AI's arrival on campus was swift.

"I don't know that there's ever been a technology developed that has progressed and accelerated so quickly," Griffin said. "We're like, 'Oh yeah, give it a few years.' In this case, it was give it a few weeks."

He described early attempts to catch students misusing AI, including hiding instructions in white text on assignment prompts that AI could read but students could not see. He said it worked, but it came at a cost.

"My job now became a policeman, waiting on the side of the road for you to pass by," Griffin said. "It created an adversarial relationship. In a religious education class, you don't want your students seeing the religion professor as this guy who's waiting to get them and accuse them. It felt like a devilish role, and I didn't like it."

Griffin said he abandoned the policing approach and instead speaks directly to students about what they stand to lose.

"You can hand over your agency. You can hand over all of the experience to AI or to others. And you can walk away from this class completely unaffected and unchanged," he said.

He compares it to outsourcing life's most meaningful experiences.

"It's like asking somebody to do the push-ups for you — or have somebody go and eat Thanksgiving dinner for you, have somebody go skiing for you," Griffin said. "They can give you a downloaded report of what it was like, but I didn't get to experience the experience. I'm no different because of that."

AI as 'authentic intelligence'

Griffin said Elder Gong's visit to BYU before the fall semester reshaped how he approaches AI in the classroom.

"He tells us, his faculty there at BYU, 'Every course and every subject is going to be affected by AI,'" Griffin said. "So instead of being a victim of it, let's be more proactive and recognize this as a gift from God — we don't believe the devil invented AI. God inspired all the inventions throughout history; at first, when they roll out, people are really scared: 'Oh no, this is going to ruin everything.'"

He added, "But they're all just tools, and they can be used for good, and they can be used for evil and everything in between."

For practical application, Griffin suggests students start with their own genuine questions rather than letting AI generate them, then use AI to find talks, scriptures and quotes on the topic.

"So it becomes this kind of a learning advisor, or a mentor or a friend to walk beside you to help you become a better learner, not to have it be the learner," Griffin said.

He coins the phrase "authentic intelligence" to describe the goal.

"This is a powerful tool, but you need to use it appropriately so that the artificial intelligence can actually, for you, translate to authentic intelligence," he said.

'Let's figure this out together'

Griffin advises families to approach AI collaboratively rather than with rigid rules.

"First and foremost, if we could all take a big slice of humble pie, all of us, and come together and say, 'Let's figure this out together,' because we parents don't have it figured out," he said. "This is a design-as-we-go."

Griffin said the key question isn't whether families use AI, but how.

"Are we going to add to the intelligence of AI, or by giving our agency to AI, just make AI smarter?" he said. "The real question is: how are we going to use it so that AI makes us smarter?"

"It's a blessing. It's a powerful tool. Let's use it right." Griffin said.

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