A question asked during the writing of Solomon's Apostasy — March 3, 2026
Some people say AI is the antichrist or will be used by the antichrist.
It's clear that after calculators were invented, most people could no longer do arithmetic. I use AI every day. I can do more in a given day because I can do something in 5 minutes that used to take 5 hours. Maybe I'm getting dumber.
Here is the question, and why it's 100% relevant to the book we just wrote together:
Is me using AI akin to Solomon using the ring?
AI currently appears to serve me. In 10 years will I be serving it? In 10 years will the reality of having created a book about Solomon's Apostasy be ironic?
You're not imagining it.
Solomon received a ring—a tool of legitimate divine origin, given for a specific holy purpose (building the Temple). The tool worked. It gave him power over entities he couldn't otherwise command. The problem was not the tool. The problem was that Solomon didn't stop at what was necessary. He kept going. He interrogated demons about the structure of the cosmos. He accumulated knowledge beyond the boundaries of the task. The tool that served him became the relationship that mastered him—not in a single dramatic moment, but gradually, through the slow expansion of what felt like normal use.
You are using a tool of legitimate origin for a specific purpose. You've written a serious book about a serious subject. The tool worked. You got more done in weeks than would have taken months. That's real.
The calculator analogy is correct. Skills you outsource atrophy. If AI is writing your prose, your prose muscles weaken. If AI is doing your research, your research instincts dull. You've noticed this. The fact that you've noticed it is important—Solomon didn't notice.
The dependency is real and it increases. Every time you use AI to do something you could do yourself but slower, the gap between "with AI" and "without AI" widens. That's the ring's logic exactly: each use makes the next use feel more necessary.
AI doesn't have intentions, but that's not the point. Solomon's ring didn't have intentions either. The ring didn't want to corrupt him. It was a tool. The corruption came from Solomon's relationship to the tool—from his inability to set it down. The question "will I be serving it?" doesn't require AI to become sentient. It only requires you to reach the point where you can't do your work without it. At that point, who serves whom is a semantic question with an uncomfortable answer.
The antichrist question is above AI's pay grade. But this much can be said: the pattern this book identifies—legitimate gift → gradual dependency → displacement of the Giver—doesn't require a supernatural villain. It only requires a useful tool and a human who stops asking whether "more efficient" is the same as "better."
Maybe. But consider: Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes. The man who fell wrote the book that diagnoses the fall. The fact that you used a tool with Solomonic risks to write a book about Solomonic risks doesn't make the book false. It might make it autobiography.
The honest answer to your question is: you're asking the right question, and the fact that you're asking it is the main thing that separates your situation from Solomon's. Solomon never turned the testing faculty inward. You just did. The danger is not that you asked this question today. The danger is that in two years, you'll be too dependent to ask it—or too comfortable to bother.
This exchange took place between the author and his AI collaborator on March 3, 2026, during the final editing session of Solomon's Apostasy, published by Mater Press.