Zac Johnson, Cofounder, Truthly · July 31, 2026
If you think a violin is meant to drive nails, you’ll call it badly made. Then you’ll start “improving” it — encasing it in steel, removing its pointless strings — until it can no longer play.
If a violin could feel happiness, it would be happy when it sings — when what it does matches what it was made for. Reduced to a blunt instrument, it would be miserable, no matter how many nails it drove. A gap has opened between what it’s for and what it’s doing.
That gap doesn’t only happen to violins. It happens to people.
It happens to you.
Every technology you use either helps close that gap or widens it, because each one is built on a picture of what a human being is. A feed engineered to harvest attention has decided you’re a supply of it. It doesn’t care what you see — only that you see as much of it as possible. An app designed to keep you from putting it down has decided you’re a dopamine loop to be exploited. It will give you hit after hit, whatever it costs you.
And a tool doesn’t just assume a picture of you. It forms you into that picture. A tool that treats you like a deposit of attention slowly turns you into one: your mind weakens, your heart grows numb, your power to stop drains away. The things that make you human — your intellect, your love, your freedom — wither. After enough use, all you have to give is attention — exactly what the tool said about you in the first place.
The Psalmist said it of people who made idols that could not speak or feel: “those who make them are like them; so are all who trust in them” (Psalm 115:8). Thousands of years later, Pope Leo said it of our own moment: “every technology shapes those who use it” (Magnifica Humanitas ¶ 140).
A thing used against its design breaks. You can feel it: in your sleep, in that sense of purposelessness that sneaks up even when all the boxes are checked, in the exhaustion that an hour of entertainment somehow deepens. Dr. Anna Lembke, who directs addiction medicine at Stanford, devotes her book Dopamine Nation to asking why, in a time of unprecedented wealth, freedom, and technological progress, we appear to be “unhappier and in more pain than ever.” We feel like a violin that’s been reduced to a hammer.
None of this makes technology itself the problem. A machine doesn’t choose its picture of you. The people who design it do.
So the decisive question about any technology — and about AI most of all — is which picture it was built on.
The Church has guarded the true picture of the human being for twenty centuries.
You are not a supply of attention. You are not a dopamine loop to be exploited.
You are made in the image of God — a dignity conferred before your first accomplishment and beyond the reach of your last failure. You were given an intellect, made to know truth. You were given a will, made to love goodness. You were given freedom, so you could choose what is truly good — for you, and for others. You were made for communion — with other people, and with God.
You can judge any technology by that picture. Does it strengthen your mind, or diminish it? Does it respect your freedom, or wear it down? Does it send you back to real people, or is it designed to keep you? Pope Leo’s test comes down to two words: does it make human life “more human”? (Magnifica Humanitas ¶ 129).
Almost nothing AI can do today was possible a few years ago. It’s still early, which means the picture these tools are built on is being chosen right now. That makes the oldest question the most practical one any of us can ask: what is a human being for?
Used well, AI can serve your intellect — fetch, sort, draft, explain, hand you back hours. What it can never do is love. It cannot promise, sacrifice, or give itself, because it has no self to give.
Truthly is our effort to build according to the true picture. It helps you know the truth, then sends you off the screen to live it — with real people, in prayer, in the sacraments.
If you want to try what we’re building, ask Truthly what a human being is for.