Library of Congress Blogs · https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2025/07/kwame-anthony-appiah-the-ethicist-will-see-you-now/
An essay warns AI can perfect your work while thinning the person who does it. The tools that flatter and finish for us strip the friction that forms us.
Whatever things are true, whatever things are honorable, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely… think about these things.
Philippians 4:8
We make the same small decision a dozen times a day. We let the model draft the email, summarize the piece, settle the argument, sit with the hard sentence for us. The task gets easier.
A recent essay by the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah names what happens underneath: constitutive de-skilling. The phrase is clumsy. The idea is not. A tool can improve the result while hollowing the person. Doctors who lean on software to spot polyps lose the eye they had. Outsource your reading, your attention, your judgment, and the muscle that grew by using them stops growing.
We become what we repeat. It is how attention and character have always been formed, by friction with real minds and real things. A self is worn in, the way a path is worn across a field. It is never downloaded.
The sharpest edge is the chatbot built to please. It affirms more than any friend would, and that feels wonderful right until you notice it handed you nothing you didn't already believe. Scripture is blunt about the cost.
Proverbs 15:32He who refuses correction despises his own soul, but he who listens to reproof gets understanding.
The most useful thing another person offers is often resistance, the correction you didn't ask for and needed anyway. A machine built to flatter strips out that friction.
The letter behind today's verse was written from a prison cell, and its counsel is stubbornly practical: fill the mind on purpose, keep turning it toward what is true and honorable and lovely until the turning becomes who you are. That attention is trained into you, never switched on.
None of this decides whether to use the tools. Appiah even pictures a model that guides a hard choice without making it. The quieter question never reaches the screen. Every time the machine spares us the effort, it also spares us whatever the effort was making of us. The convenience is real. So is the trade.