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AI Is Coming For Your Systematic Theology

A recent article at The American Scholar asks Who Is Blake Whiting? Whiting appears to be the most prolific scholar of our age, sometimes publishing up to 13 books a week “on a host of complex archaeological and historical subjects, ranging from the collapse of Near Eastern civilizations in 1177 BCE to the recent discovery of a huge Silk Road–era city in Central Asia.” He must be quite the individual!

But as you no doubt guessed, he is not an individual at all. Rather, Blake Whiting is fabricated, and the books under his name have been generated using AI. Andrew Lawler, who wrote the article for The American Scholar, warns that, “His fake persona is harbinger of an alarming trend threatening disaster to academics and journalists alike.” And theologians, I would add, as well as those who read books by them.

When I read Lawler’s article, I was already working on one of my own that addresses the same phenomenon, but from the perspective of a Christian reader. If you were to visit Amazon today and search for “systematic theology,” it would not take you long to find a host of similar works. Many of them have scads of enthusiastic reviews and feature realistic-sounding author bios that say things like, he “is a Christian author and teacher of systematic theology with a passion for making biblical doctrine clear, accessible, and meaningful for today’s readers.” Yet in reality, he does not exist at all, and the books under his name have been generated through nothing more than clever prompting of a Large Language Model.

I want you to know about these books because I want you to be aware that this is happening. I want you to know it’s happening because it’s likely that things will get far worse before they get any better. I’ll first introduce you to this slop theology, then discuss the threat these books represent, and then tell you how you can identify them.

Slop Theology

You’ll find that these systematic theology texts follow a fairly standard pattern. They tend to offer multiple variations of the book, most often editions for adults, teens, and children. At this point, the majority of them seem to be structured around 52 chapters representing 52 weeks of study. So, for example, here are three “authors” and their works:

Paula Hartwell

The author’s biography is a stream of nonsense: “Faith is a gift from God—something the heart recognizes even when the mind is still catching up. I write Scripture-centered workbooks for the whole family—kids, teens, and adults—with one mission: to put real, grounded faith back in your hands—clear enough to teach, strong enough to lean on, and close enough to live.”

Ella Radley

There is no bio associated with the name.

Cornerstone Press

The bio for Cornerstone Press says it “publishes faith-centered books designed to strengthen understanding, deepen conviction, and help readers build their lives on timeless biblical truth. Our mission is simple: create clear, practical resources that make Scripture easier to understand and apply in everyday life.” While there are many legitimate Cornerstone Presses out there, I could not find any information about this one.

These are just three of the many similar “authors” you can find on Amazon and other resellers. So far, these books appear primarily within the systematic theology category, but I am beginning to see them appear in other categories as well. I have little doubt that, unless Amazon and other retailers crack down on them, they will proliferate across every category and genre in the days to come.

Can you identify which of these authors is real?

What’s the Threat?

When writing about this kind of AI slop in the world of academia, Andrew Lawler says the fake author Blake Whiting is a “harbinger of an alarming trend threatening disaster.” What is the threat?

First, the works attributed to Whiting do not offer anything original, but simply reshuffle and reorganize existing writing, including articles by Lawler. This is, of course, plagiarism. Yet “this is not plagiarism in the old-fashioned sense,” he says, “in which a few sentences or paragraphs are lifted from a previously published work. This is word-laundering on a truly industrial scale.” Some human beings, hiding behind an app and a pseudonym, are profiting from the work of other people at a scale that was formerly impossible.

Second, “they are limiting what we can write about in the future.” Why? Because “what publisher wants to publish a second book on an archaeological discovery, no matter how significant?” It’s a valid question. Even if the first book on the subject is illegitimate, it may still keep publishers from taking a chance on a legitimate book that would overlap it.

Third, this kind of work can make it to store shelves (or Amazon, at least) much faster than any legitimate work. So, for example, “if an AI program accesses your just-completed dissertation and salts it with data and text from other sources, then that book you planned to write for a general audience, based on years of research, might be available online before you can get your proposal to a potential publisher.” AI can access any public information from the moment it appears online, combine it with all the world’s existing information, turn it into a book, and get it on Amazon before you can so much as say call your agent to talk about a proposal. That’s easy to do when the book is written by an app in less than an hour, and is given no editing, proofreading, or quality control.

Fourth, and unique to Christian books, is that many of these works may be full of error. They are certainly poorly written, like this monstrosity of a paragraph in a book by Valorrea (a company that has been heavily marketing their works across social media): “When someone says ‘The Bible was written by men, not God’ — agree that human hands wrote it. But God used over 40 authors across 1,500 years, writing in 3 languages on 3 continents — yet the message is unified. As Norman Geisler argued, that consistency is itself evidence of a guiding intelligence.” But of greater concern is that these books may contain theological error. Who’s to say when there is no author, no editor, and no publisher behind them? No one is staking their reputation on these books, and no one is invested in them beyond hoping they will earn a few bucks. In fact, it’s likely that not a single person has even read these books before they are made available for sale. So who even knows what they contain, other than an AI’s best attempt to please the person who entered a prompt and asked it to create something like Grudem’s Systematic Theology? It’s possible that they are perfectly orthodox, but also possible that they are grossly heretical.

Such books represent the commodification of information. They are not created to better anyone’s life or convey sound doctrine. Rather, they are created to overwhelm the system with books that are low-effort, low-cost, and low-quality, so they can fool buyers and slurp market share away from books that would actually be far superior in every regard.

How Can You Tell?

How can you tell these AI-generated books from real books written by real authors? Here are a few tell-tale signs:

AI Systematic Theology Slop

There is no need to use an AI detector to recognize this as written entirely by AI. However, just for kicks, I did use an AI detector, and sure enough, it received a perfect (imperfect?) grade.

What To Do About It?

So what do we do about this?

First, be careful when buying books on Amazon and other online retailers. The slop is coming, and it’s coming fast. Just as we learned to filter spam in our inboxes and robocalls on our phones, we will need to learn to filter spam in our reading lists. Learn to identify legitimate authors and publishers. Thankfully, at this point, it is not difficult to do. (Of course, it’s also not difficult to identify the Nigerian prince scam as fraudulent, yet somehow people fall for it.)

Second, return those books if you bought them, and attempt to lodge a complaint with the retailer. I am skeptical that this will help, but it may just. I wouldn’t be surprised if we eventually see these books become like so many products at Amazon, where they show up for a while under one name, then disappear and show up under a different name.

Third, make use of legitimate bookstores. Even if you want to buy the Kindle or Kobo edition of a book, check to see if it is carried by Westminster Books, 10ofThose, or another legitimate bookseller. If you can’t find that book at any other store, then it’s probably better to buy something else.

Finally, prepare yourself, because I am quite sure that this is merely the beginning of a problem that is going to grow in prominence in the months and years to come.

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