(RNS) — Responses to the rise of artificial intelligence have tended to fall into predictable patterns: enthusiastic adoption, calls for cautious regulation or outright rejection. These approaches assume, however, that AI is primarily a technical or managerial problem. In this new age, the most pressing question is not whether we will use these technologies, but whether we will have the courage to shape them around practices of judgment, interpretation and moral imagination.

The deeper question, in other words, is not whether AI works into our workdays or professional codes, but what it does to those who live alongside it. How does constant interaction with intelligent systems shape judgment, attention, responsibility and the stories people tell about who they are becoming?

These are questions that matter deeply to those of us who work in religious higher education. Religious leaders and theologians have recognized this AI moment as one shaped by “digital empire.” 

AI systems are built by powerful actors, trained on uneven datasets and deployed in ways that often marginalize already vulnerable communities. As the American Civil Liberties Union’s chief technology officer, Ijeoma Mbamalu, wrote in July, “AI-powered surveillance systems — whether it’s facial recognition or predictive policing — are trained on prejudiced data and used in ways that disproportionately target communities of color, further embedding discrimination into our social reality.” 

What is being extracted today by the AI models is not only writers’ labor or resources, but knowledge itself: AI is deciding for us whose stories count, whose perspectives are “objective” and whose ways of knowing are treated as peripheral or expendable. Its benefits, risks and formative influences are then being unevenly distributed around the globe, creating new divides.

This is not new. It is a familiar logic, dressed in digital clothes. Artificial intelligence has quickly become the latest phenomenon in which long-standing patterns of power reassert themselves. Western scholarship once trained generations to see the human figure in pristine white marble as the “natural” image of the ancient world — never mind that classical era statues were initially painted in vibrant colors. Today’s digital systems are similarly shaping what feels credible, neutral and authoritative. Over time, these distortions no longer appear ideological; they seem obvious.

When knowledge systems are designed without paying attention to whose epistemological ground they stand on, entire communities are rendered data-rich but voiceless. AI accelerates this process.

Naming these realities is not alarmism; it is moral clarity, a prophetic act. But prophecy has never ended with naming alone. Formation must follow, and this is where my community, religious and theological educators, faces its own moment of decision.

If we stop at denunciation of AI or refusal, we risk quiet abdication. Students continue to use AI, often intensively, often invisibly, outside the structures of education, theology and communal discernment. When institutions refuse to engage, they do not prevent formation; they leave it to the very systems they distrust.

The more faithful response is neither rejection nor uncritical embrace. It is intentional formation.

This requires a shift in posture. AI must be approached not only as a tool that produces outputs, but as an environment that shapes interpretation. Every interaction with an intelligent system influences how questions are asked, how answers are weighed, how uncertainty is tolerated and how responsibility is understood. Over time, these interactions accumulate into patterns, which can lead to interpretation and moral imagination.

The task, then, is not to “use AI ethically” in the narrow sense of compliance or control. It is to design learning environments in which judgment can be practiced rather than outsourced, where meaning is constructed rather than delivered and where ethical reflection unfolds over time rather than at the moment of engagement.

This is where religious education matters in a distinctive way. Long before the advent of computational machines, theological traditions wrestled with questions that are now unavoidable: How do human beings make sense of their lives across time? How do we discern meaning amid ambiguity? How do we relate to the divine? How do we weigh competing goods when no option is without cost? How do memory, narrative and community shape moral and spiritual identity?

Religious education has developed pedagogies precisely for this kind of work. Practices of interpretation, confession, testimony and discernment train students to step back from immediacy, recognize patterns in experience and narrate who they are becoming. Formation is about cultivating the capacity to live responsibly when answers are incomplete.

That expertise is urgently needed now.

AI excels at processing information and identifying patterns. What it cannot do, at least not on its own, is exercise judgment: the ability to arbitrate among competing values, to act under conditions of uncertainty and to take responsibility for decisions whose consequences cannot be fully predicted. Judgment is not a data problem. It is a human achievement, developed over time, through reflection and relationships.

The challenge now is whether institutions will bring that wisdom to bear on AI. This does not mean turning technology into theology or baptizing systems that remain entangled with power. It means acknowledging that AI is already shaping lives and asking how communities committed to justice, dignity and human flourishing will respond. Will they retreat into critique alone, or will they take responsibility for shaping the conditions under which formation occurs?

To design intelligent machines for formation is to accept a long horizon. It requires patience rather than hype, architecture rather than improvisation. It asks institutions to think in stages: how ethical memory is established, how interpretive environments are configured and how learning is carried into lived contexts. It demands attention not only to what students know, but to who they are becoming.

Prophetic witness remains essential. Naming the empire remains necessary. But prophecy, at its best, also imagines alternatives. It not only exposes what is broken; it gestures toward what could be otherwise.

If religious education cannot help communities do that work, it risks surrendering formation to systems that were never designed to carry it.

(Uriah Y. Kim is president of Graduate Theological Union. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)