Searching for Perfect

2025 saw the popularization and widespread use of generative AI. Suddenly, our online searches were offering AI summaries, bots became coded into everyday applications, and grammar checkers morphed from offering corrective suggestions to complete rewrites. For those who intersect with education, conversations about using, avoiding, curbing, outlawing, and embracing AI began much earlier than AI’s widespread rollout.

Suddenly, the tools for creating and manipulating words, images, and videos were widely accessible. People, young and old, were handed tools with little or no training on how to use them. The impact of AI-generated content has the potential to end the careers and professions of some but has also derailed many. Even in my own community, some students have lost opportunities and scholarships, and some will enter college under academic probation. While some have intentionally turned to AI to cheat, others simply didn’t know how to navigate the benefits of generative AI and its shortcomings.

The trap of generative AI is our human search for the perfect. Independent of your audience or social gathering, it would be difficult to find anyone who proclaims that the world is perfect. Daily, we face problems with the economy, wars, crime, prejudice, discrimination, loneliness, and disconnection. The world is not perfect, yet somewhere, written deep within humanity, is the desire to search for the perfect. The search for the perfect may spring forward from Solomon’s revelation in Ecclesiastes 3:11, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end” (NV). Generative AI may be another entry into the human longing for eternity, the search for perfect.

The first two verses of James chapter three say, “Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly. We all stumble in many ways. Anyone who is never at fault in what they say is perfect, able to keep their whole body in check” (NIV). The past seven months have been a dry spell for my blog entries. The search for perfect at its best reflects Paul’s command to focus on whatever is beautiful and good from Philippians chapter four. However, the search for perfect at its worst is pride. Why write and why create when a computer can churn out perfect prose, turning awkward sentences and incomplete thoughts into beautiful manuscripts? Today, apps are available that will invest in the stock market, write and perform music, transform sermons, lengthen prayers, and organize worship services. Why would anyone seek to share themselves and bring judgment upon themselves when it can be avoided through generative AI?

The need to be perfect fuels the beast of human pride. The world is broken, and so are we. Beauty is not in the perfect (mathematicians, please forgive this example) but in sharing ourselves with one another. With eternity written in the human heart, our quest should focus on the only two things that last beyond life: our connection with God and with one another. Generative AI is not perfect, and neither are we. When pride keeps us from taking the risk to share our thoughts, our lives, our selves with each other, we stop searching for eternity in exchange for what we perceive as perfect. Generate AI will never replace our shared humanity. My goal is to keep sharing myself and my hope and prayer is that together, as we long for eternity and the search for the perfect, we will find Jesus.