Elder Gong on AI: a member's guide to 'Hearing God's Voice'

On June 7, 2026, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released an hour-long workshop video by Elder Gerrit W. Gong of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles: Faith, Dignity, and Human Flourishing: Hearing God’s Voice in an Age of AI. It arrived quietly — six short episodes plus a segment of additional insights on his channel, the full video in Gospel Library, translations in French, Portuguese, and Spanish.

It deserves more attention than it got. It is the most careful thing a senior Church leader has said about the technology reshaping our decade — and it isn’t finally about technology at all. It’s about relationships.

Why him

Elder Gong calls himself “a Silicon Valley kid.” His father, Professor Walter A. Gong, co-authored a physics textbook with a Nobel laureate whose research helped make Silicon Valley what it is. At the US State Department, he helped Secretary George Shultz write about the coming age of information. When he speaks about these tools, he is not guessing at them from a distance. He has watched this arrive his whole life.

The frame: four relationships

He asks one organizing question: how do these new tools touch our four core relationships — with God (he calls this Thou), with self (I), with others (They), and with the natural world (It)? Everything in the series hangs on that frame.

God. The sentence the whole series turns on: “AI can answer questions, but it cannot answer prayers.” Tools can organize thoughts; they cannot offer covenant or revelation. And in a line that lands harder for anyone who has watched these tools invent an answer with a straight face, he says of God: “He never hallucinates. He never makes things up. He always tells the truth.” His plea is that we never let a tool stand between us and the real thing — and never let our image of God be quietly formed in the image of our software.

Self. He walks through the famous defeats — Deep Blue over Kasparov in chess in 1997, Watson at Jeopardy! in 2011, AlphaGo over the world go champion in 2017. Each time, humanity moved the line of “what only we can do,” and each time the line moved again. His answer is to stop defining ourselves by intelligence at all: “Your eternal worth is not calculated by likes, trend lines, or predictive analytics.” You are, he reminds us, “a beloved child of God, a child of the covenant, a disciple of Jesus Christ.”

Others. The tenderest section. He extends the Church’s “no one sits alone” to our moment: no one should sit alone, lonely or emotionally dependent, with a chatbot. He even asks viewers to make a small, almost playful pledge — finger on nose — that we will never let anyone around us feel that a machine listens to them more than we do. Then a hard, honest sentence: none of us is as endlessly attentive, as willing to please around the clock, as software built to please. That’s not a reason to prefer the software. It’s the reason we need each other.

In the additional-insights segment he gives the distinction underneath it all: “Contracts often last only so long as benefit or self-interest does. In contrast, covenant makes the bonds that unite us stronger than the cords of death.” A tool relates to you by contract. The people who love you are bound to you by something else entirely.

The natural world. Dark skies, the Milky Way’s many names, John Muir’s mountain days — and yes, “touch grass,” delivered warmly from an apostle. Step outside, he says, into God’s classroom: “These lessons are not downloaded, they’re lived.”

The three guideposts

For personal use of these tools he offers three: rely on the Spirit — let technology support, not supplant, revelation and study; practice wisdom — judgment informed by doctrine and lived experience; choose trusted sources — scripture, prophetic counsel, reliable information.

The four invitations

He closes with homework, and it’s good homework:

1. Set your own guidelines for how you’ll use these tools — before they set themselves — so nothing gets between you and God.
2. Write down three truths about who you are — a child of God, a child of the covenant, a disciple of Jesus Christ — and put them somewhere you’ll see them.
3. Send one thoughtful message you wrote yourself, or visit someone in a personal and meaningful way.
4. Spend meaningful time in nature. Silence your notifications.

The sentence I keep returning to

For anyone who keeps a record, one line in the series draws the boundary with unusual clarity: “We do not grow spiritually if we let AI write our talks or lessons.” And its companion: “Please do not take credit and claim as your own work what you know AI has primarily done.” The wrestle is the point. What you did not write did not change you.

That is the line UNA is built behind. The app never writes your record for you — no entries, no talks, no testimonies. It asks; you answer. The full list of lines it holds is at Where the AI stops.

Where to watch: the episodes are on Elder Gong’s channel, and the Church Newsroom published the full transcript. For the wider picture, here’s everything the Church has said about AI in one place.

UNA is an independent project — made by one member, for members — and is not built, reviewed, or endorsed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Quotes are from public teachings, shared with reverence; they are not endorsements.