I’ve been thinking about where I sit in the wider conversation around LLMs. It’s a strange position to occupy. I use them most days, both professionally and personally, yet I understand completely why so many of my friends distrust them.
There are the creatives: the critics, artists, storytellers, hobbyists who make things for the love of making them. For them, these tools feel like an intrusion. A shortcut that threatens the very process that makes art meaningful. I see their point. The ease with which I can now generate images that once took hours of searching or commissioning is astonishing, and also unsettling. What once supported creative individuals now funnels into corporations and their shareholders. It saves time, yes. It also changes the economy of creativity in ways I don’t think we’ve fully reckoned with yet.
Then there are the professionals. The marketers, strategists, content producers for whom these tools aren’t optional. They’re something to master to stay relevant. I live in that world too, where speed matters and curiosity tends to be rewarded more than caution.
So I find myself somewhere in between, which is an uncomfortable place to be, and probably an honest one.
I use these tools to help me think through ideas that might otherwise stay half-formed. And yet every time I do, I’m aware I’m participating in something bigger, something that raises questions I don’t always have clean answers to. About ownership. About what gets lost when the human parts of work get quietly outsourced.
That tension isn’t abstract. Sometimes the use is practical. I need a clearer sentence, or a spark of phrasing that gets me moving again. Other times it’s more like dialogue. I throw out a half-formed thought, something gets thrown back, and we go from there. There’s something genuinely valuable in that rhythm. But it also makes me stop and ask: where does my thinking end and the machine’s begin?
An LLM doesn’t think in any human sense. It predicts, producing the next most statistically likely word given everything it’s been trained on. No awareness behind it, only probability. Yet somehow the output can sound so human that it’s easy to forget who’s actually doing the thinking. Easy, and worth resisting.
Reading Dan McClellan’s work recently brought this home for me. He’s a biblical scholar who often reminds people that Scripture isn’t divine dictation. It’s ink on a page. The meaning isn’t sitting there in the scribbles. It happens when we read, interpret, and give those marks significance. Whatever the original author intended, we’re always filtering it through our own context and lives.
As the saying goes, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Writing works the same way. Whatever an author intends, the moment those words meet a reader, something changes. Context fades. Interpretation takes over. Meaning becomes a moving target.
You can see it in how we revisit films years later. Fight Club was once seen as a satire about toxic masculinity and disillusionment with consumer culture. Then it was misread by some as a rallying cry for the very behaviours it mocked. With time it seems to have come full circle, recognised again as the commentary it always was. A similar thing has happened with The Matrix. The term red-pilled, once a metaphor for awakening to hidden truths, was stripped from its original narrative and rebranded by online masculinity movements that use it to justify the very control and conformity the film opposed. The Wachowskis have been clear about this for years. The Matrix was written as an allegory for trans identity and self-realisation. That some audiences turned it into its own opposite says something about how meaning travels, and what happens to it on the way.
That, to me, is what makes powerful stories endure. Not fixed meaning, but being open enough to invite challenge and reinterpretation. Sometimes that enriches a story. Sometimes it distorts it. Either way, the conversation never quite stops.
I think that’s part of what has been shaping my Christianity too. Over the years I’ve found myself engaging more with biblical scholarship, not at an academic level but through the public work of scholars who explain language and culture in ways that sermons rarely touch. The kind of teaching I once accepted at face value now feels like the beginning of a conversation rather than the end of one. I still hear those same sermons most Sundays. I’m just more comfortable asking questions now, weighing things against history, occasionally disagreeing. The goal isn’t dismantling faith. It’s meeting it with more honesty, which I think is something faith can handle.
In a strange way, these tools work the same. Some of these sentences on your screen aren’t mine in any fully conscious sense. They’re patterns of data, fragments stitched together in plausible order, that I’ve refined and edited and in some cases completely rewritten. You give them meaning the moment you read them, decide which parts to keep, which to question. Intent doesn’t live in me, the author. It lives in you, the reader. Which is either liberating or terrifying depending on the day.
That thought has changed how I write. Less preoccupied with authorship, more interested in interpretation. When I work with these tools, I’m not transcribing their output. I’m translating my own thinking through it, which is a different thing. It’s a process of discernment. I look for what resonates and what feels hollow. The hollow bits are usually where the machine is speaking without me.
There’s a responsibility that comes with that. Just as readers of sacred texts need to handle them with care, aware of the context and the power they carry, writers using these tools need to stay awake to what they’re shaping. Meaning isn’t automatic. It’s chosen.
So when I sit here, typing into a chat box and watching words appear in real time, I remind myself: these are only the scribbles. The meaning and the humanity still have to come from me, and I hope land well with you.
Jonathan Pay - email marketing consultant 