Artificial Intelligence and the Church: Troy Miller on Tools, Teammates, and Human Flourishing

AI is already cutting the audio, designing the graphics, and answering questions people used to bring to their pastors. Troy Miller, president and CEO of National Religious Broadcasters, joins Dr. James Spencer to talk about what happens when a productivity tool starts getting marketed as a teammate.

Miller lays out three buckets: AI as production efficiency for ministries and nonprofits, the industry push to make the tools feel more human, and the legal and ethical tangle of intellectual property, deepfakes, and platform liability. From there the conversation turns to NRB and Barna survey data on how much Christians already trust these systems, research on what cognitive offloading does to our ability to think, the energy and water costs of the data centers nobody is counting, and why the answer has to start with what it means to be created in the image of God rather than with the technology itself.

If AI is forming us, the question is what it is forming us into, and whether analog practices like radio, print, and actually sitting in a room with other believers are worth defending.

Learn more about NRB at nrb.org.

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For more thoughts on AI, see James's Christianity.com article: https://www.christianity.com/wiki/current-events/christians-ai-spiritual-formation-discernment.html

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