Return to Journal of Christian Teaching Practice (in Communication Studies)
Book Reviewed: O’Callaghan, Sean, and Paul A. Hoffman. AI Shepherds and Digital Sheep: Leading and Teaching in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2025).
Journal of Christian Teaching Practice, volume 13.
Reviewed By: Kevin Schut, PhD, Dean, School of the Arts, Media, and Culture; Professor, Media + Communication
Reviewer Affiliation: Trinity Western University
Total Pages: 187
ISBN-13: 9781540968012
Writing and thinking about technology is hard at the best of times; it moves very fast, so the thing we are focused on today may no longer be particularly interesting, important, or remarkable in a matter of months. This is especially the case with artificial intelligence, which is changing our economies more rapidly than most transformative technologies, and is itself becoming something new and very different with every major release—a few times a year, in other words.
So I commend Sean O’Callaghan and Paul A. Hoffman for their foray into the cultural and theological implications of our rapidly morphing AI technologies. And if I don’t love all aspects of their book AI Shepherds and Digital Sheep, it still has some really important points to make that are worth wrestling with. We need Christian leaders and thinkers speaking into the profound transformations we are currently undergoing.
This book is apparently designed to help churches deal with AI technology. It’s rigorously endnoted and the writing isn’t exciting or colorful, but it’s very clear and accessible. Since the writers don’t assume their readers know a lot about AI, they spend a fair chunk of the first part of the book setting up the rest of their arguments. For example, they have a long chapter considering various ways of defining AI and another discussing different social and cultural implications of the new technologies. This is the weakest part of the book, as O’Callaghan and Hoffman try to cover everything, and so end up a mile wide and an inch deep and proceed in a very scattershot manner.
The book really finds its footing as it moves into more clearly theological material. The authors spend a chapter outlining a biblical anthropology—a Christian vision of what God intends humans to be. They follow that with an overview of theories that address the relationship between humanity and technology. These chapters do a much better job of building a coherent and useful framework.
The final three chapters focus on application. Chapter 5 looks at the educational implications of AI—primarily in a church context—while Chapter 6 discusses spiritual formation and Christian discipleship in the age of AI, and Chapter 7 gives the authors’ perspectives on healthy and unhealthy uses of AI technology.
AI Shepherds and Digital Sheep has a number of limitations, both avoidable and unavoidable. The writers speak from their perspectives as a theology professor and pastor, which means they understandably can’t speak equally authoritatively for all people. And the book is clearly church-focused. Artists and creatives will find that many of the issues they are concerned with are not addressed in much detail. I don’t feel this is a book that is particularly helpful for educators focused on classroom and course design implications; there is a chapter on education, but it seems to be mostly about education of church members.
More frustratingly, the authors display a very common shortcoming in their evaluation of AI’s creative potential: most people have a very hard time appraising the quality of material generated by AI in a sphere outside their expertise. O’Callaghan and Hoffman, for example, clearly define psychological counseling by AI as wrong; they reasonably argue, among other things, that the substitution of human-created speech with machine-generated speech undercuts the relational connection in counseling. They also see writing sermons with AI as off-limits. Yet several pages later, they openly advocate the use of AI to create social media posts, sermon illustrations, and other mostly visual material. But visual material and music are forms of communication as well! When talented artists or musicians create their work, they are also connecting with their audience. Saying, “Don’t use AI to write something but do use it to make art and music” is a tremendous contradiction in principle.
More than that, though, in their (again, reasonable) attempt to the avoid a knee-jerk reaction against AI, the authors praise what they see as the positive creative capacity of AI, even going so far as to describe it as “fantastic” (p. 159). I, for one, agree that what generative AI can create is remarkable in a grand historical sense—our technologists have wrought something truly astonishing. And people who are not trained visual artists or musicians may indeed marvel at how good this stuff looks.
But when we peer a little closer and turn a more trained eye and ear to the volumes of video posts, marketing copy, background music tracks, graphic design, and more churned out by today’s data centers, we find that most of it is not that stellar. Much of it is garbage. Some of it is occasionally very artistically impressive. But the vast majority of it is, in today’s parlance, very mid. I.e., it’s just okay. Not only that, but a lot of it has a very distinctive AI aesthetic that many consumers are starting to discern—and are often rejecting.
This may sound like an artist (which, to be clear, I am not—at least, not professionally) wailing about lost privilege: AI is democratizing design and sound, and some people are worried that it doesn’t look quite right according to their snooty standards? But this is an important point. We live in a visual world and our communicative choices matter. A lot of people are excited about the ability of AI to produce words, images, videos, and music. But just about everyone can see in their own area of expertise that AI-produced material has not yet consistently achieved the level of a real human being. Professors have learned to spot the prose of ChatGPT. Anyone with a visual eye knows when a PowerPoint has been spit out by a machine. As the book rightly points out, this short-circuits human connection. AI will certainly improve as will our techniques for using it, but for now, we should be cautious about how we deploy this technology.
At the same time, there is much to recommend about AI Shepherds and Digital Sheep. One of its most important strengths might seem like a problem for pragmatic readers: this is not a how-to book with many specific guidelines. Chapter 7 does indeed provide some more unambiguous guidelines (such as the aforementioned principle of avoiding AI-generated sermons), but this is not the approach through most of the book. Rather than focusing on procedures and guidelines, the book focuses on principles. Again, this may seem frustratingly vague; many readers may appreciate some well-reasoned rules. But AI is a moving target. Not only do the authors risk writing a book that is rapidly outdated, but in real life, the social, economic, cultural, and political impact of AI is changing so fast that hard-and-fast rules will swiftly become useless. The authors rightly realize that rather than rules, we need a set of principles we can apply to the myriad of situations we may encounter in the post-AI world.
There are two emphases in the book that I think are particularly important. First, as I’ve noted above, the authors understand that communication is about connection as well as data transfer. This is, of course, at the heart of any Introduction to Communication Studies course. While cybernetic-influenced scholarship and the experience of broadcast mass media in the early twentieth century encouraged many scholars to reduce meaningful interaction to little more than information exchange, other traditions have noted that communication is also socially and individually constitutive (communication makes us who we are) and relational in nature. O’Callaghan and Hoffman rightly note the Christian affinity to relational notions of communication, and also rightly emphasize that when AI takes the place of a human in communication, there is a strong risk of broken or distorted relationships.
Second, and most important, at the heart of their response to AI is a well-articulated vision of humanity grounded in the Christian Bible and faith traditions. This is, in fact, the key issue that we face with AI: a reckoning with what it means to be human. We are still a ways off from physical robots that can near-perfectly mimic humans, but today’s AI is already quite close to online communication that is nearly indistinguishable from us—and the lifelike robots will be here sooner than we may want. If a machine can perform human activity in a manner that seems fully human to us, does it matter that that machine operates in a fundamentally different way than we humans do?
This is what a book like AI Shepherds and Digital Sheep is so valuable for. I don’t think this will be the definitive perspective on Christian anthropology (as if one could exist), but we need as much wrestling and thinking about this very issue as we can get. It is highly likely that we will get to a time when machine communication will be mostly impossible to distinguish from human communication. But behind the surface, we will be two entities operating in very different ways according to very different logics. What, then, will be most important to keep about the character of humanity? What does God make and call us to be? Without such a clearly articulated vision, it will be hard to use, refuse, and prevent the abuse of today’s and tomorrow’s AI.
AI Shepherds and Digital Sheep ends with a poignant, lovely reflection on what humanity embodied as God intended in time and place can look like. While a machine can now fake a connection to deep heritage and to the richness of family narratives, it is God’s gift for us to truly experience it. If we can find and hold on to the aspects of our created nature that God has given to us, we will be better equipped to face a future that is full of algorithms and machine-generated communication.