Dispelling the Lie of AI Timesavings

Foundational Lies

Time to dispel the hottest lie we’ve been told by marketing. AI is a time saver.

If you are a consistent user or a new user of AI tools and your inclination is to start or revisit the tool with the thought, “This is going to be so great. I’m going to save so much time.” STOP. This is a foundational flaw in your understanding and use of any artificial intelligence tool. AI might save you time, but you should never use these tools with that goal in mind.

Furthermore, a subliminal lie you may be operating on as a result of having used or seen the byproducts of these tools is, “I now can do anything I’ve ever dreamed of with AI.” This seems partially true, but it can also put you in the same trap as the time savings if you don’t proceed carefully.

The combination of both of these thoughts, but especially the first, is seeding what will likely be a long-term harm to your organization. As the college demographic, possibly the highest-using demographic¹, uses AI to manage schoolwork, parallels will be drawn to your organization’s use of AI. We see the pushback that is common to disruptive technologies like AI, but what starts as moral concerns about AI infrastructure and worker displacement will turn into a much more subtle issue for your organization.

The Landscape of the Problem

If you are able to navigate the moral issues of AI use that predominate the conversation at this point — data centers, job displacement, plagiarism — what may not be avoidable is a perception of poor quality, laziness, or ‘slop’. If you are unfamiliar with the term slop, it’s a term used for AI content in general that has very little human input. It doesn’t just carry the notion of poor quality; it suggests that the content doesn’t even really reflect the person/organization that generated it, but rather comes from the broader pool of societal information the tool was trained on.

Why does slop matter? The college parallels I mentioned above show up in the perception of a brand/organization’s quality. Many perceive the tool as making college easier or generating the work for them in a particular course. The standards have not shifted fast enough to keep up with the technology’s abilities. This is likely to evolve as that demographic ages, and you interact with them as adults, or presently, if you are an organization that connects to college students now. The perception of an organization just having the work done for them is not a positive label.

As a Christian organization, the concern deepens when integrating the ideas of human dignity. A poll recently found Christians to be frequent users of AI tools². That could stand as a stark contrast to a seeking world looking for truth and realness from Christianity, which bombards them with the same tools they use to make college easy. The moral conversation is important, but we don’t have time for it in this article. You can find many articles encouraging the ethical use of AI that upholds human dignity, and to the Christian reader, I strongly recommend doing so morally and theologically.

“AI might save you time, but you should never use these tools with that goal in mind.”

Organizational Risk

From the personal lens of marketing and communications, this lie is also causing organizations to commit a cardinal marketing sin: fading into the crowd. The whole point of marketing is to stand out amongst the crowd. Especially when it comes to ChatGPT images, not only are they bad design, but when everyone is doing the exact same thing, how is your organization going to be remembered? It might increasingly be the case that sacrificing design quality or losing the wow factor is better for organizations. Realness and imperfection may become, or may already be, a desired trade-off. If anything, your content will stand out by being different.

Remember quiet quitting? There may be a similar/parallel phenomenon happening. It may not result in an unsubscribe, but you may lose people who believe, through irresponsible AI use, that they can no longer derive value from you. The analytics may not show it, but you may lose traction with your audience. That goes for a church, company, independent business/author, or nonprofit organization. No one will be able to escape the loss of followers/audience when the organization is deemed to be content that can be received directly from AI. That includes using AI across all the disciplines mentioned above, such as graphics, writing, coding, and slide decks. It will all matter for perception.

In summary then, we’ve outlined a serious problem. Using these tools with a time-saving mindset will invariably result in corner-cutting and ‘slop’ output, which will likely lead to audience loss and create more problems to solve than the minor time savings you might have achieved.³ Furthermore, undertaking projects you don’t feel equipped for, but are possible with AI, without allotting enough time will yield the same problem. AI can’t substitute in those situations either. You’ll need to use your skillset and invest in AI helping you learn before embarking on things you’ve never been able to do previously.

Therefore, let me propose a better approach to using AI in your organization that will both protect it and enable you to use these tools effectively.

An Alternative Framework

1. AI augments, not authors

AI’s best value at this point is to improve upon what you already build. Not only does this place the human at the center, which is ideal for many reasons, but it also prevents your voice from being overtaken by the AI and preserves the uniqueness and value of your team and organization. That means it isn’t writing for you, but it can adjust your content in minor but impactful ways, such as grammar, clarity, and structure.

2. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should

This one especially applies to design. Just because you can make an image far better than you think you can design on your own through ChatGPT doesn’t mean you should. Canva templates with minor edits will probably give you a better return for your time at this point. Prioritize content that will feel more human-led and unique.

3. AI as Assistant

Let AI assist in your research, help you be a better writer, play devil’s advocate, critique your product, and let it come along as a co-creator in the sense of a team contributor or a coach. Develop skills, projects, and workflows in your building that give the AI tool time to ideate, argue with your work, and improve your skillset in production.

4. If you have limited time, don’t use AI

In light of #3, don’t plan to use AI significantly when you are already under a time constraint. Instead, think of AI as a tool to help you build a better product overall, not simply to build something faster. You need to take away any possibility that you’ll cut corners instead of using AI to maximize your work. Whatever time you gained ought to be reinvested into what you’re building.

Perception Shift

What I’ve hoped to help you understand is the faulty mindset that comes with using these AI tools. The position of this article is not that AI will never save a user time, but that time savings is the wrong perception of AI use. For example, when applying this framework, I wrote this article without a hard deadline. I wrote the entire article. I used Grammarly to improve my grammar and phrasing, and I had AI help me identify resources to reinforce my arguments, but it did not write any of the content. Therefore, this content is mine unambiguously and informed by my human experience in this subject. Applying this mindset similarly will help when you attempt to use AI for things you have previously been unable to accomplish. The goal is to preserve the human layer rather than cut corners for other reasons.

If nothing else, applying this framework will certainly help us be better stewards of the organizations, ministries, and churches we have been called by God to work in.

This article was originally written for The Baptist Foundation of Alabama.

TBFA looks at stewardship holistically and can also help you rethink misconceptions beyond AI, including common church financial issues like investments with church reserves, the legacy of the estate you leave, and giving more generously and powerfully in your lifetime, to name a few. Feel free to start a conversation.

Footnotes

Gallup, “AI Is Routine for College Students, Despite Campus Limits,” April 2026. https://news.gallup.com/poll/704090/routine-college-students-despite-campus-limits.aspx
The Christian Post, “Practicing Christians use AI more than most Americans: Barna,” July 2026. https://www.christianpost.com/news/practicing-christians-use-ai-more-than-most-americans-barna.html
Axios, “AI ‘workslop’ sabotages productivity, study finds,” September 24, 2025. https://www.axios.com/2025/09/24/ai-workslop-workplace-efficiency-study