Artificial intelligence can all but think for today’s undergraduates, but it can’t provide the truth, meaning, and wisdom necessary to live a faithful and fruitful life, Grove City College President Bradley Lingo ’00 said Wednesday as he opened the College’s 150th academic year.
Speaking from Harbison Chapel’s pulpit, Lingo addressed the increasing use of AI and the disruptive technology’s impact and implications for higher education as he welcomed the College’s 2,200 students, faculty, staff, and officers back to campus at opening convocation.
“As we begin this academic year, we face a question that is both new and old,” he said, “How can we learn and live faithfully in a rapidly changing world?”
AI, he said, holds enormous promise, and, if used wisely, can help solve problems and lead to unimaginable advances. But its capacity to do the work traditionally done by students to study and learn raises existential questions about higher education, Lingo said. The College’s academically excellent, Christ-centered education offers an answer.
“AI may help you work faster. It may offer a useful first draft, identify a pattern, translate a text, or accelerate a calculation. But it cannot decide what is worthy of your life. It cannot renew your mind,” Lingo said.
Students must learn to use AI without outsourcing their humanity, intellectual, and spiritual formation and Grove City College is uniquely positioned to guide them. “As Christians, we know a truth no algorithm can generate: not a string of words drawn from a dataset, but the living Word through whom all things were made and who became flesh and dwelt among us,” Lingo said.
Education is about more than finished assignments and passing grades, Lingo said. It emphasizes “the habits, loves, judgement, and character being formed” by studying and learning, he said. “In other words, the paper matters. But the person you become in writing the paper matters more,” he said.
“So as this academic year begins, let us build with care. Let us refuse to outsource the work of becoming wise. Let us pursue truth, goodness, and beauty with courage and humility,” Lingo concluded.
Lingo’s remarks were the centerpiece of Grove City College’s opening convocation, a service that opens with a trumpet fanfare and a procession of regalia-clad faculty and features scripture, prayer, and song.
“We begin each year gathering in this beautiful chapel, not simply for the purposes of pomp and circumstance but in order to root our year in worship and gratitude for all that God has done,” Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Peter Frank ’00 said.
Watch opening convocation at gcc.edu/chapellive.