Photo: When Quentin L. Cook told Brigham Young University students to “Choose truth when deception is easy,” ChatGPT heard him loud and clear—then chose neon when beige was easy.
No truths were altered in the making of this image… just the color palette. 🌈
On March 3, 2026, Elder Quentin L. Cook of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles stood before a packed Marriott Center at Brigham Young University and delivered what the LDS Newsroom called a challenge to students to navigate the emerging “Artificial Intelligence Age.” His counsel, earnest and no doubt well-intentioned, included this memorable instruction: “Listen to and follow the prophet, filter out the loud and confusing noise, and follow the Spirit.”
LDS Newsroom: Elder Cook Counsels BYU Students to Follow the Prophets to Navigate the World of AI
Elder Quentin L. Cook challenged Brigham Young University students on Tuesday to increase their spirituality to better navigate the world of artificial intelligence.
“Choose truth when deception is easy,” the Apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints told students gathered in the Marriott Center in Provo, Utah, on Tuesday, March 3, 2026. “Slow down enough to listen to the Spirit and allow Him to direct you. We must all learn to use technology as a servant, not a master. The future of the Church and our very civilization depend on members and individuals who have deep faith, moral courage, and the ability to navigate an increasingly complex world.”
Elder Cook warned, however, that the same technologies that amplify good can also magnify confusion or compromise spiritual sensitivity. He pointed to past examples, such as early film depictions of alcohol and cigarette use, to illustrate how cultural messaging can subtly normalize behaviors contrary to revealed doctrine.
Consider that advice carefully. Because that is, more or less, exactly what I have been doing.
Elder Cook told BYU students that the restored gospel “will be even more important in the emerging Artificial Intelligence Age” and that disciples of the twenty-first century would need “deep faith, moral courage, and the ability to navigate an increasingly complex world.” He warned that AI systems are “capable of influencing attention, belief, and behavior” and cautioned that the same technologies that amplify good can “magnify confusion or compromise spiritual sensitivity.”
He is not wrong about any of that. He simply did not anticipate the direction the compass would point.
For the past several months, I have been doing precisely what Elder Cook recommends — using technology as a servant rather than a master, filtering out noise, and pursuing truth with moral courage. The tool I have been using is artificial intelligence. The truth I have been pursuing concerns the theological foundations of the very institution Elder Cook represents. And the results, I am pleased to report, have been illuminating in ways that the Marriott Center devotional series was probably not designed to produce.
With the assistance of AI as a scholarly research partner — cross-referencing primary LDS sources, the Joseph Smith Papers, the Journal of Discourses, the writings of the early Church Fathers, the Greek New Testament, and two centuries of historical documentation — I have been building a body of work examining the Great Apostasy claim, the Council of Nicaea, the Kirtland Safety Society, the Book of Abraham, Joseph Smith’s competing succession narratives, and the theological distance between LDS doctrine and biblical Christianity. The catalog now runs to more than three dozen Kindle titles, available at RighteousCause.net and on Amazon under a search for my ebooks.
Elder Cook told the students that “prophetic guidance has consistently helped the Saints recognize dangers early.” I agree with the principle entirely. The question worth asking — the question that thirty-eight Kindle volumes have been carefully examining — is whether the prophets in question are the biblical apostles whose writings have guided orthodox Christianity for two millennia, or the succession of men in Salt Lake City who have been, with some regularity, revising, softening, shelving, and occasionally disavowing what their predecessors taught by direct revelation from God.
“Choose truth when deception is easy,” Elder Cook said.
That is the most useful thing he said. It is also, unintentionally, the most precise description of what RighteousCause.net exists to do.
The deception Elder Cook had in mind was presumably AI-generated misinformation, deepfakes, and algorithmic manipulation — genuine concerns, all of them. But there is another category of deception that has been operating at an institutional scale for nearly two hundred years: the quiet burial of inconvenient doctrines, the correlation-committee sanitization of Joseph Smith’s more audacious theological claims, the public-facing pivot toward Protestant-adjacent respectability while the King Follett discourse, the plurality of gods, Heavenly Mother, and the Journal of Discourses collect dust in the theological attic.
Elder Cook encouraged BYU students to use digital tools to advance “missionary efforts and temple work” at what he called an “almost exponential” pace. The irony is rich and, I suspect, unintentional. The same exponential expansion of information technology that the LDS Church hopes to harness for missionary work has also made it easier than at any point in history for sincere investigators to access primary sources, cross-reference historical claims, and ask the questions that correlation-era curriculum was designed to prevent them from asking.
AI did not create those questions. It simply made it harder to avoid them.
So yes, Elder Cook — I am following the prophets. I am following Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. I am following Paul, who warned that even an angel from heaven preaching a different gospel should be accursed (Galatians 1:8). I am following the biblical standard of testing every spirit, examining every truth claim against Scripture, and refusing to let institutional authority substitute for doctrinal accountability.
And I am doing it, with considerable gratitude, in the Artificial Intelligence Age.
The technology is extraordinary. The truth it keeps surfacing is older than Joseph Smith, older than the Council of Nicaea, older than the Roman Empire. It is the truth that was once for all delivered to the saints — and it has not required a restoration, a new set of plates, or a nineteen-year-old boy in a grove of trees in upstate New York to remain standing.
Dennis is a Christian apologist, street evangelist, and author of The Righteous Cause series, available at RighteousCause.net and on Amazon Kindle. He is affiliated with East Valley International Church in Gilbert, Arizona.