I worry about how AI is going to change writing, publishing, and other creative industries. I personally avoid it and caution other writers to avoid it as much as possible in all steps of the writing process (ideation, outlining, writing drafts, editing drafts). At TGC, all of us editors are working hard to ensure what we write, edit, and publish comes from human minds—which hopefully means it is more interesting and more trustworthy.

But even as an AI skeptic, I do find it occasionally useful in small tasks in my life and work.

On the personal front, for example, I recently took my family on a Spring Break road trip on the California coast. Given the unpredictability of long road trips with four kids (including one 4-month-old baby), we had to be nimble with lunch or coffee stops on the fly. For example, we needed to stop for lunch in Marin County at one point, and I wanted something fast but good. So I asked Claude: “best fast casual lunch stop for families in Sausalito, Calif?” Claude delivered the perfect result: The Joinery. “This is your spot,” it immediately told me, with the sort of confident clarity that engendered trust. And it was right. The Joinery ended up being one of the culinary highlights of our trip. As a faster, more thorough, more targeted-to-my-tastes form of Google search, Claude consistently impresses me.

In my TGC work, one way I’ve recently experimented with using AI is in playlist making. For example, I recently set out to curate a 100-song playlist for TGCW26 (register today before the price increases!). I wanted to find songs inspired by each of the Psalms that will be explored in the conference’s keynote sessions. I started with my own knowledge, then added songs I found via Spotify’s platform search. But wanting to be sure I didn’t miss any good contenders, I asked Google Gemini: “What are some songs by Christian artists based on Psalm 107?” Sure enough, it quickly churned up a few songs I hadn’t come across. A few made it into the final playlist. As a research assistant in this way, AI is basically just 10x, next-gen search. Still, for curators like me, I’ll never let AI take the place of my old-fashioned sense for what makes a song good or what artists are worth highlighting. Algorithm-reliant playlists are lame.

But whether in lunch restaurants or Psalm-based songs, AI will be helpful for me in locating gems I simply didn’t know about, and might never have otherwise discovered.