When a Church Nails AI Ethics (From a Privacy Hawk Who's Agnostic)

I'm an agnostic, anti-organized-religion privacy hawk who's spent nearly 30 years in the surveillance-and-enterprise-tech trenches.

So I did not expect to say: “Hey, this church's AI guidance is actually a solid starting point for responsible AI use.”

Yet here we are.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recently published guidance on artificial intelligence as section 38.8.47 of its General Handbook. Strip out the theology, and you're left with four principles that are surprisingly useful for anyone who cares about privacy, surveillance, and not turning your life over to SaaS vendors.

Doesn't sound radical, right? But when you work in surveillance-tech-adjacent spaces... whether that's endpoint management, retail analytics, or AI tooling... you start to notice how few people think critically about data pipelines, model training practices, or the second- and third-order privacy implications of their AI use.

1. Use AI in Ways That Uphold Your Integrity

“If members use AI, they should do so in positive, helpful, and uplifting ways that uphold the integrity, standards, and teachings of the Church.”

What this actually means: don't let AI pretend to be you. Don't let it write your emails with a “voice” that isn't yours, craft fake authenticity for LinkedIn posts, or generate responses that deceive others about what you know, what you're capable of, or whether a human was actually involved. Integrity means people should reasonably expect that the person they're communicating with is who they think it is, and that you're taking responsibility for what you put your name on.

Where this collides with the surveillance economy: the more you let AI systems ghost-write your communication, make your decisions, or infer your intent, the more those systems, and the companies running them, know about you. Your behavior becomes predictable, modelable, and monetizable. If you blur the line between “me” and “AI-assisted me,” you're also blurring the line between private thought and a logged data feed.

2. AI Cannot Replace the Individual

“AI cannot replace the individual work and spiritual guidance required to prepare divinely inspired talks, lessons, prayers, or blessings. However, AI can be helpful for research, editing, translation, and similar tasks.”

The Church is talking about sermons and prayers. The secular translation is just as sharp: AI can help you research, edit, and translate. It cannot do your thinking for you. You are still responsible. AI is a tool, not an actor. It synthesizes patterns from data and gives you plausible outputs. If you treat it like an authority or let it become your substitute decision-maker, you're offloading judgment you should be keeping for yourself.

Surveillance and power asymmetry via outsourced cognition: letting AI replace your thinking isn't just ethically iffy, it's a privacy and autonomy risk multiplier. Humans are legible through their outputs, but AI prompts are even more so, because they log your decision process in real time. Every time you let AI mediate your communication, your decisions, or your relationships, you increase what gets logged, what can be inferred, and what can be repurposed later. Let it replace your thinking instead of assisting it, and you get de-skilled, you become more predictable, and you normalize the idea that “the system decides, we comply.”

3. Leaders Should Not Rely on AI for Sensitive Advice

“Leaders should not rely upon AI to provide advice to members on medical, financial, legal, or other sensitive matters.”

Why this is more than “AI might hallucinate”: advice is power allocation. When you outsource high-stakes advice to an opaque system owned by someone else, you shift power, and data, to actors whose incentives you don't control. Advice usually requires sensitive context: detailed financial data, health information, the specifics of a legal situation, HR or interpersonal conflicts. That is precisely the kind of data that hurts people long-term if it leaks or gets misused.

If you're a leader, whether in a company, a project, or a small distributed team, you own the consequences, not the model vendor. “The AI told me” is not a legal defense. Using a generic AI tool instead of a licensed professional for someone else's serious problem may breach a duty of care, and you're quietly training vendors on your edge cases.

4. Keep Sensitive Information Out of AI Tools

“Sensitive information, such as Church records, personal member data, or confidential communications, should not be entered into AI tools that are not provided or managed by the Church.”

This is the one every privacy hawk wants printed on posters. Notice the exact wording: not “never use AI with sensitive data,” but never in tools the organization does not provide or manage. That is a data governance rule, and it is the right one. It lines up with the security community's own list: the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications (2025) ranks sensitive information disclosure as the second biggest risk in AI applications. “Don't paste sensitive data into random AI tools” isn't paranoia. It's basic data hygiene.

What counts as sensitive in the real world?

• Medical records and health history
• Financial statements tied to identity
• IDs, passports, Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers
• Passwords, API keys, internal URLs, VPN details
• Detailed travel plans, addresses, and routines
• Internal HR complaints or performance issues
• Full, unredacted contracts and NDAs
• Detailed internal architecture diagrams and security configs

Safer patterns: redact and abstract wherever possible. Prefer environments with explicit data protections, like enterprise contracts or self-hosted models. And design for minimization: only send what is absolutely necessary.

A Privacy Hawk's AI Use Principles

1. AI is a tool, not an authority. It can suggest and synthesize; it doesn't get the final say, especially on high-stakes questions.
2. I will not use AI to deceive. No synthetic authenticity, no hidden manipulation, no quiet profiling beyond what people reasonably expect.
3. My judgment and skills stay in the loop. I use AI to amplify my thinking, not to replace it. I remain responsible for outcomes.
4. High-stakes advice requires humans. For medical, financial, legal, or life-altering decisions, AI is prep and context... never the final advisor.
5. Sensitive data does not go into tools I don't control. If it can significantly harm, embarrass, or materially impact someone, it doesn't belong in a public AI system.
6. I design for data minimization by default. Share as little as possible, as late as possible, with as few parties as possible.
7. I respect that my prompts are also data. Every prompt is potential training material, a log entry, or a subpoena target. I type accordingly.

Sources & Further Reading

• Church Newsroom: “Church Handbook Offers Enduring Guidance on Artificial Intelligence” December 16, 2025, the source for all four quoted principles.
• The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: General Handbook, chapter 38, where section 38.8.47, “Appropriate Use of Artificial Intelligence,” lives.
• OWASP: Top 10 for LLM Applications 2025, the source for sensitive information disclosure as a top AI application risk.

Sourcing note: the four principles are quoted exactly from the Church's own announcement. The interpretation, the translation for secular readers, and the seven principles at the end are mine. I am not a member of the Church and do not speak for it. Revised September 2026: the principles were previously paraphrased and are now quoted verbatim, and the post's date was corrected from January 2025 to January 2026, since the guidance it discusses was published in December 2025.

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Casey writes about privacy, AI, cybersecurity, nomadic life, and navigating the world as a late-diagnosed AuDHD adult. New posts drop on my professional website.