Episode Transcript
[00:00:09] Speaker A: Welcome back to the Think Deeper podcast. I'm your co host, will here I'm joined by Joe and Jack Wilkie. As always, we're excited to be back with another episode, a very, very interesting episode this week that we're excited to get into and kind of talk about what our response should be from a christian perspective. Before we do, I'm going to mention one more time, I think we mentioned it several weeks ago, that we have focus press that is has launched a new curriculum. We're calling it the renew curriculum, renew your mind curriculum. One of those two, I think just renew is what we went with. Essentially it's four quarters worth of excellent Bible class material.
You as your congregation basically let us know, do you need five for a class of five? A class of 1015 whatever, and we ship you everything you need. The books the teacher guides covers a wide range of stuff from christian evidences to kind of first principle new christian type stuff to church life stuff. With Jack's book, church reset all the way to an exegetical kind of verse by verse, chapter by chapter guide to the Book of Mark. So a lot of stuff there. We've talked about it before. I didn't want to spend a ton of time. But we do know there's always kind of need for Bible class material, some really good curriculum that people are looking for. And so that is what we're going to push this morning is if you are in need of some kind of Bible class curriculum for your congregation, or maybe you're in charge of the education committee or whatever it is, focuspress does offer that renewed curriculum. But guys, that is all that I've got to get into this morning. Joe, I'm going to let you take it away. Mean you put together a great outline for what we're talking about today. I haven't even revealed it yet. I guess people click on the title, they know what it's about. But Joe, what are we talking about today for this episode?
[00:01:57] Speaker B: Absolutely. We're talking about how a Christian ought to respond to artificial intelligence. And for those watching, by the way, Jack may be glitching. If you're listening, you're not going to pick up on it all. Jack may have some computer issues. We're just going to acknowledge that right out. For those watching on our Patreon sign.
[00:02:13] Speaker A: Up, it's Joe's way to sabotage him since they got into that heated debate two weeks ago. So Joe's trying to sabotage him.
[00:02:21] Speaker B: Don't say anything yet. Now you're spilling all my secrets. No, but yeah, make sure to sign up for focus plus. And you can watch Jack Glitch this episode. But the audio is working well anyway.
Yes, we are talking about artificial intelligence AI, which has been, I'll be honest, this is an episode that if we were really on the ball, we probably would have dropped last May or so. Chat GPT came out in November 2022, but it really came into the public consciousness, probably March, April, where people started going, whoa, this is incredible. Look what it can do.
And so we've grown so much as a society, and we've seen this America being founded in biblical principles, capitalism, things like that.
We've always been a big pusher of new technologies, things like that. We had the Internet coming out in the such, really making its way with AOL and things like that. Well, I would say this is the new thing, in my opinion. This is the biggest thing of the. Sure. Internet, I would say maybe dwarfs it. Some people would say, no, this actually is bigger than the Internet.
This is the most exciting thing perhaps ever. And there's a lot of debate back and forth on that because I'm one that kind of pumps the brakes on it. I'm a little nervous about it. And others, other christians are going all in on the AI train. And so that's what we wanted to talk about. Is artificial intelligence a Christian's response to it? Is it dangerous? Is it a tool?
Is it a tool? Can it be both? Can we understand the dangers? Can we still use it as a tool? And so those are the questions that we want to grapple with. We're going to look at the history, a brief history of it, how we got here, because there may be people that go, okay, what's the point? Why are we talking about this? It's a lot worse than, we're a lot further along than I think a lot of people realize. Talk a little bit about what it can do, the powers that it has, so to speak. And then we want to look at the threats, unique threats for us in the church that we are facing due to that, and then some general discussion questions, and then what we as the church can do about it. So that's kind of the outline, just so as we're walking through, you can understand where we're going with this. And so I think we got a pretty good episode lined up. But Jack, I was going to throw it to you because I guess I'll just ask the question for people that are listening. Artificial intelligence, we all hear all, it's in the news. What is AI?
[00:04:41] Speaker C: Yeah, it's one of those that the more you see it, the more it just kind of defines itself.
You have the dictionary, the Oxford definition down here. Theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision making, and translation between languages.
And so that says a lot. But I mean, you just see things like, you can ask it questions and it will search and compile the answers for you. It'll put together an image, I mean, like all the graphics. We're going to get into that later of some of the good and bad ways these things are being used. And so as for what it is, I think it said it pretty well there of stuff that you would think would take human intelligence, somebody designing, somebody crafting words, putting things together, that the skill is being developed where it can do those things for us. And so you can designate tasks to it. You can, again, as I said, ask questions, things like that. And so it's been very interesting to see its growth, as you mentioned, in the last year or so. And the change, I don't know.
As you said, this is going to be one of those episodes. It might be a little late. In another sense, it's going to be pretty early. People might be like, yeah, this is kind of a waste of time. Five years from now, I'm going to be thankful we've got this in the back catalog that, hey, we talked about this early. We warned you about some of the things, porn, things like that, and things that you need to be worried about, because I think it's very easy to get caught off guard by these things, by not paying attention to them in the same way the Internet did to a lot of people.
[00:06:11] Speaker A: That's what I was going to say. We're about to get into.
Why are we devoting an entire episode to this? Why are we talking about this? And I do think the church is late to the party in a lot of instances on things 1520 years late. And as far as figuring out, okay, how do we handle this as the church, what is our answer to it?
They say that some of the most successful people in life are the ones that can kind of see around curves and anticipate what's coming and be prepared for it, whether that be financially or whether that be just in business or whatever. Man, the church is kind of the opposite. Again, we're typically ten to 15 years late on things. Kids dive headfirst into things before we, as the church, have an answer for it, maybe figure out, yeah, that's probably not a great thing. And so, yeah, again, we're about to get to. Why are we talking about it? But that is a big reason why we're talking about it, because we don't want to be late to the party. We don't want to be unprepared for this. And I think the church is typically unprepared for a lot of things that come with technological advances, that come with new challenges that technology presents. But before we fully delve into, I guess, more reasons why we're talking about it, I'm going to cover, and then, Joe, I'll let you take it away if I leave anything out. Kind of the difference between weak AI, weak artificial intelligence, versus strong artificial intelligence. I think most people are familiar with the concept of weak artificial intelligence. Could also be called narrow or artificial narrow intelligence. Basically, where it's a computer system that's trained and focused to perform specific tasks. Things like Siri, things like Alexa, the Echo dot, or whatever. Things like IBM Watson. These are things that have been around for a while. I still remember when Siri first came out. I think it was the iPhone four s. And, of course, we're on the. What are we on, the 15 now? So that's been a while. My mom got the iPhone four s, and I just thought Siri was the coolest thing on earth.
That's what weak AI is. Again, I think everybody's familiar with that. Strong AI, on the other hand, strong artificial intelligence is essentially a theoretical form of AI, where a machine would scarily have an intelligence that is basically equal to humans. It would have a self aware consciousness. You think about things like Alexa and Siri and even IBM Watson, they don't have any kind of self aware consciousness. It's kind of just like a robot that answers questions and can start a song for you, can send a text message. As opposed to the strong AI, which, again, has the ability to solve problems, has the ability to learn, has the ability to plan for the future. Again, Alexa and IBM Watson can't do those things. But strong AI, again with the self aware consciousness, has the ability to learn and kind of expand its knowledge, has the ability to plan for the future.
That's really what we're talking about when we're talking about AI. And it's interesting, you see all the superhero movies where they invent a robot, and that robot could take over the world. Avengers, age of Ultron type stuff.
I think, really, that's what people are talking about when we're talking about AI, because it is kind of daunting when you have a machine you have some kind of computer system, I guess, that has an intelligence equal to humans. I mean, that line by itself is daunting. It is kind of scary. In fact, Joe, you got a stat on here. One report said that there's a 50% chance that we have this strong artificial intelligence by the year 2040. We have the system that is, again, intelligence equal to humans. Planning for the future, making decisions, solving problems of learning. Yeah.
And so that's the main difference, and that's what we're talking about. And that is a huge threat. So, Joe, I don't know if you want to fill in any gaps there that I left and then get into kind of, why are we talking about it?
[00:09:59] Speaker B: The reason for the distinction is because we do kind of bounce back and forth. When we say AI, it's like, well, it's all of it. Well, there is a difference between these things.
We don't have that general intelligence, the strong, the super intelligence, as they call it, asi, we don't have that yet. We are well on our way to developing that. One said 50% chance by, I think, 2056. The other one said 50% chance by 2040. So it's difficult to know.
[00:10:27] Speaker A: In our lifetime.
[00:10:28] Speaker B: We are on this, though, in our lifetime, that will probably come about. That's the major threat that the Elon Musk's and everybody else seem to be very afraid of, is that it's going to replace us as humans. It's going to look around and go, well, you guys have emotion. You make things messy, and you're ruining the world.
Therefore, you're done. And that's kind of what all the movies are about and such. What we're talking about today is, yes, the threat of that on the potentially into the future, we're going to get into that maybe toward the back end, but as it stands right now, I still think that the weak AI with all of that, and this gets us into why we're talking about it. I think that has become a major threat to the church this has presented.
[00:11:08] Speaker A: Because chat, we haven't brought it up, but chat, GBT, falls into this weak AI category.
[00:11:13] Speaker B: To weak AI. Yeah, you go after the certain information, and it's amazing what it can do. But there's also some threats that are involved in this, some things that I think we, as christians, again, need to be grappling with and need to be thinking about and prepping our kids, prepping ourselves for things like that. And so with those threats, we're going.
[00:11:29] Speaker C: To get into that.
[00:11:30] Speaker B: That's one of the reasons we're talking about it. And the other thing is, you may look at it and go, this is hokey. This is kind of dumb. Why devote an entire episode specifically to this?
But again, this is already changing the world. We don't want to be behind and go, oh, man, well, now what are we going to do? But no, we want to be ahead of this. We want to be looking at it. Like I said, being real ahead would have been last year, which actually, a lot of this comes from a sermon that I did preach last year, because I'm looking at it going, this is not good. Well, I said this to you guys.
[00:11:56] Speaker C: Before we got on that in the 90s, early two thousand s, a lot of people got computers and Internet in their house and they were using it to check their email and their kids were using it to get into porn in these chat rooms with strangers. I mean, like crazy. And like, we would be so foolish to repeat the same thing where maybe you are getting on your computer or even your phone to get onto Facebook and Instagram and the same way your parents were doing it to get on email. Now your kids are going to do it to get on and make a new AI best friend, or look at AI porn, or have AI do all their schoolwork for them and never apply themselves ever again. Preachers, I mean, that's kind of become a thing of letting AI write your sermons and things like that. There are so many real world implications. And again, you can almost give us grace for getting caught unaware the first time. You can't get away with that twice.
[00:12:49] Speaker B: Yeah, that's exactly it. We want to be prepared. We want to make sure that we are reacting appropriately to this and that once again, as the church usually is ten to 15 years behind the culture, we don't want to be. We want to make sure we're aware of all the threats and that we can really walk our kids, because I'm scared for the next generation. They're the ones that are trying to plagiarize with their papers. They're the ones that are using it to get majorly into porn. It's not that there aren't those in the older generation doing it, but our generation down is starting to use this for a lot of different reasons. And we need to be aware of that as parents, but also as a church.
[00:13:22] Speaker A: One last thing I'll say on this as far as why we're talking about it. And then, Joe, you can get us into the history here, hopefully throughout the episodes on this podcast, especially if you are a time listener, you know that we are firmly in the camp of, we are going to talk about things that affect christian families here on this earth. There is a push right now to, well, if it doesn't really have anything to do with heaven or our spiritual lives, then it's kind of not really worth talking about. And I think a lot of people who might be in that camp would look at an episode like this and go, this is pointless. Why on earth is the think deeper podcast doing an episode about artificial intelligence that's so beneath any kind of. We just need to focus on the spiritual. These things matter. Christians are going to, especially goodness knows, in ten to 15 years when it really does start developing into who knows what christian families are going to want to know, what are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to handle it?
What access do we give our kids to these things? And so I just wanted to get that out there, because again, we do think stuff like this matters. If christian families have a question about how to disciple their kids, how to keep their kids faithful, how to live in this world based on new technological advances like this, we're going to talk about it because I think we need to know how to handle it. It's the same thing as when the Internet came out. I mean, do you think that if the pulpits and if the quote unquote spiritually elite had tried to spread the message of, well, we don't really need to discuss the Internet, that's not really that big a deal? Well, now look at all the damage the Internet has caused over the last 20 years. And so again, I firmly believe that this is something that you might look at and go, that's not that big a deal. It will be a big deal, and christian families need to know about it.
[00:15:10] Speaker B: I love that point because imagine if every pulpit in America was talking about the dangers of porn, dangers of AOL chat rooms, dangers of the things that everybody else got into at the time, and they were really ahead of the curve going, hey, guys, this is potentially very dangerous. This is what, yes, this is what could happen. We need to know what we're going to do about it. And it's not just shut it down, don't ever use it. It's let's consider the risks, let's think about it. Let's be aware of what's going on here and not just shut it down where our kids get it behind our backs, but let's have a conversation about it. That's all we're looking to do, is to spread awareness on this one to make you aware of kind of the dangers that are present here. We're not scientists. I'm going to say that right up front. We are not scientists. We don't work on AI. I have a client right now who's getting his master's in artificial intelligence, which is pretty interesting and very fascinating guy. He knows a lot about this stuff and is very intrigued and such. For me, I'm a little on the. I don't know, end, but to give a brief history of it, and I'm going to run through this fairly fast because the whole point is just to kind of understand, how do we get here, right? Because a lot of people still have it in their mind going back to 1950 with Isaac Asimov, with irobot. This is a Will Smith movie way later, but in his book iRobot, where they end up taking over the world type of thing, he had laws that he put out for computers and artificial intelligence and such in his books that he spoke about that actually people kind of use today. It was all Sci-Fi back then. But then you have Alan Turing. He comes along and this is the Benedict Cumberbatch movie with the imitation game. And he has his paper, computing machinery and intelligence, in which he kind of posited some of these ideas and such and got the ball rolling, so to speak, on what if machines could outthink man? Which is kind of what the whole thing is about. He does in the war. Go watch. It's a very interesting movie. I wouldn't say go watch the movie because, spoiler alert, he's gay. And there's a lot in that. But either way, interesting movie on the imitation game with the war side of it. 1966, Joseph Weisenbaum creates the first chatterbot, which we now know as chat bots, which is Eliza, a mock psychotherapist. They use natural language processing NLP to converse with humans. 1966, of course, 1968, you have 2001 A Space Odyssey with Hal the supercomputer or whatever. And then the 60s through the 80s, really, 60s through, the lot of things were taking place, but they were behind the scenes. Yeah, we know computers were exploding. Obviously, that was a big deal. But from the artificial intelligence, there is a website that I found that gave the history of it, and it's like, man, there's a ton of things behind the scenes. You don't know anybody's name. Joseph Weisenbaum. Never heard the guy's name. You don't know any of these guys names. You don't really know the inventions, but they've all been leading up to where we are today. You get to the other part, and then you have Sci-Fi movies, the Terminator, things like that coming out. So people are kind of freaked out about it. But also at the same time, we're exploding scientifically in that field without even realizing it. 1997, deep blue by IBM. Their computer beats the world chess champion in a Game 97. We're talking almost 30 years ago. They had that ability to do that. And then throughout the was breakthrough after breakthrough in a lot of different ways. We had that 2013 movie kind of looking ahead with Joaquin Phoenix, called her Spike Johns Jones, whatever his name is.
And it was about him falling in love. And at the time, it's like, what a dumb concept.
Like a decade later, we have people, we're going to get into that. But a decade later, we have people that are falling in love with their chatbot. So we're starting to see that. And then it brings us to today, OpenAI, as I said, develops Chat GPT that was a company started by Elon Musk and then as a nonprofit to basically fight against these things and say, hey, we're very nervous about what's going on in the world of artificial intelligence. And then he got out, and they turned it for a for profit company, and they're making tons and tons of money on this. And Chat GPT ended up coming out. I think they beta tested in 2020, came out in November of 2022. Just yesterday, speaking of Elon Musk, just yesterday, this was in the news, January 29 that we're recording. So we're a little bit ahead. But on January 29, Elon Musk just said that the first human has been implanted with his chip to integrate AI with human consciousness.
[00:19:14] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:19:15] Speaker B: So this is Neuralink, his company. They're starting to work on it. He's very afraid of AI, quote unquote.
But he's really trying to preserve public consciousness and his ideas. What if we just blend them and make sure humans are in charge? I think he's messing with things that are just, he should not be messing with. But that's just yesterday. That's big time news that's moving into maybe potentially the next phase of transhumanism, which a lot of people get worried about in conspiracy theory and everything else.
I went a little longer than a minute on the history, but that's where we got to today is this has been taking place since thirty s, forty s, fifty s in these novels. We're now living that out. The movies that were like, yeah, right. We're now living that out, and it did not take very long for us to get here, where these things are taking place. And so you consider what all this thing can do, what all AI has the ability to do.
Again, with AI, you can plagiarize entire papers. People write full fledged Hollywood scripts. They fix codes on websites. They do art that perfectly mimics van Gogh and some of the greats. You can hold conversations on deep can we now know, as we'll get into on some of the threats we now know you can sext with this. There's so many things that are just.
I don't think people realize what all is out there. We don't say that for. Again, a lot of these things are negative. So certainly we're not looking to have you go explore in those areas. We're saying be very aware of the risks. This thing has the power to do more than you can begin to imagine. This is from brainy insights. This kind of gives you an idea where we're at today. Global generative AI market is expected to go from. To grow from 8.65 billion in 2022 to 188.62 billion by 2032. In a decade, from 8 billion to 188,000,000,000. Like what? Well, that's how much money is being pushed into this. So certainly something that gets your attention, that you look around and go, whoa, this is big. The world is going all in on this, on all this technology. They're spending a fortune to try to get this right.
It's pretty wild. It's pretty wild where we are today and how far we've come, just even in the last 30 years. But specifically, we have some 70 year olds listen to podcasts within their life. They've gone from what a great novel by Asimov that's incredible. To, okay, this thing's actually real, and we're doing these things well, the other.
[00:21:37] Speaker C: Thing is, I remember, I think it was the, was one of the art ais. And a year or two ago, people were posting them on twitter. Like they would give it a prompt, hey, make me a picture with such and such and such and such. And it was, I mean, these very crude, ugly things. And within, like, three, four months, it got better and better and better. And now you see what they do with AI images, like realistic stuff. Like, Allison showed me this quiz the other day where they would do a side by side of two pictures of a real picture of a cat and an AI picture of a cat, and you had to pick which one is the AI and which one is the real one. And I got the majority of them, but a few of them, I couldn't tell the difference. I got a few of them wrong as far as what AI could generate and an actual, real photographed picture of a cherry blossom tree, or like I said, a cat. Or there's people, things like that.
[00:22:30] Speaker A: Just imagine, ten years down the road, what that's going to look like.
[00:22:32] Speaker C: Well, yeah. I mean, if it's compounding that quickly, the knowledge, the ability and all that, the stuff about what is our workforce going to be if tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of jobs are eliminated by these things that can do it for you. Or again, like we talk about kids, school papers and all of these possibilities, not even getting to the transhumanism thing.
Again, I think this is an episode that in some ways is late, in some ways is early, but down the road, we're going to look back and think, well, it's probably a good thing we started talking about.
[00:23:05] Speaker B: So that is pretty wild.
Well, I was just going to say real fast, I was listening to a podcast, this was last year. They said that. Exactly what you're talking about, Jack, with the images, I think from November to January, maybe October to January, they said it was growing at such an exponential rate, like they couldn't track its growth as to how fast, because this is why Chat GPT got so good. The more people put into it, the more it grows. So Elon Musk is a huge name in this, and I'll mention him probably a few more times on this podcast. What's interesting is, when he buys Twitter, what do you think he does? He opens it up to all the chat bots, meaning every tweet that's ever happened, which is in the trillions at this point.
AI gets to mine all of those and understand, how do humans talk? How do humans interact in this? How do they respond to XYZ? So he's doing this with Tesla as you drive? I just read Elon's biographies. It's all in my mind. But it's all very relevant because he has Tesla and they have millions of hours of driving captured on cameras up front and how humans interact. They're letting AI learn from that. So the more you put into this, the more it learns, the better it gets. And that's why you went from crude images to seemingly overnight. It's doing pictures that you can't tell the difference. And it's because the more you use it, the better it interacts. That's what Google four one one. If anybody remembers the phone calls, you could call in and it would do it. That was Google training its AI to understand and recognize human voice and inflection and be able to recreate that. So a lot of people don't realize we've been doing this for a long time. Google 401 was like 2004 or whatever, and it was their speech recognition artificial intelligence software that they were trying to do it and they put it out for free. And it's been said anytime they put something out for free, especially in the tech world, basically you're the guinea pig and you're the one that's training these things like they're using you. You're the product, pretty much.
[00:24:55] Speaker A: I'm going to ask a question here that is going to be strictly you all's opinion before we get to the threats, which we need to go ahead and jump to.
So you have the Internet, which some would argue is a very useful tool. Some would argue the Internet is a deadly weapon. I think AI is similar. So if you take that scale of one end being tool, the other end being deadly weapon, my personal percentage on that would be, I think the Internet is honestly about a 40% in the realm of tool and a 60% because of how widespread porn is and the chat rooms and things like that. Probably 60% deadly weapon. That's where I fall on the scale. Obviously it's still very useful. Obviously I use the Internet every single day and so does pretty much everybody listens to this podcast. I'm curious where on the scale you guys personally, before we get to the threats, feel that feel basically, where does AI fall on that scale when you have it considered a tool? When you consider it a deadly weapon, I think we would all agree that it's pretty high on the deadly weapon scale.
So I'm going to ask you all that question. To use the Internet as kind of the template example, I'd say about 40 60 tool to deadly weapon. Where would you guys place AI on that scale based on what we know about it right now?
[00:26:15] Speaker B: The first number that came to my mind was, and I don't know why, I don't know that I could even back this up, but the first number that popped in my mind was 30 70.
30% tool, 70%. I think it has honestly the potential to do amazing things. Like I was talking with my dad, if you want how to build a house and you want house plans, you ask it and it'll give you from step one through step 2034 all the way through, and then you can have it out, go by. Okay, what do I need to do sequentially. So what it can do is unbelievable. However, I also fear for, again, some of the threats that are coming up. I would say maybe the 40 60, but 30 70 is the first thing that came to my mind. Jack, how about you?
[00:26:59] Speaker C: I think it's probably 50 50 in the same way the Internet, I would say, is 50 50 in that it was inevitable it was coming anyway.
But you have Internet introduced widespread availability of porn. That's a big problem. Just the meanness of hiding behind keyboards.
Yeah, the division. But on the other hand, social media itself has connected people. I've made tons of my closest friends through social media. I mean, things like that.
And so there's benefits able to get the gospel out and things like that. And so I think AI is very much the same way of like, it's inevitable. And so you better find the good uses, learn how to navigate away from the bad uses. And it's just one of those.
We can hide, put our heads in the sand or hide under a rock and just hope it goes away, but it's not going to. And so you really do another guy, gab, Andrew Torba, which not my favorite individual, but interesting guy, has that social media free speech platform, gab. He's all in on AI. I mean, they're doing their own, they're engineering their own because he says, this is going to be one of our biggest tools for spreading the truth.
[00:28:14] Speaker A: For.
[00:28:15] Speaker C: Christianity, for all kinds of things like that. Because if you can make it objective. But that's one of the funny things you're seeing about Chat GPT, is they immediately started skewing the algorithms because it was given answers that were true that they didn't like. I mean, you see politically incorrect things that are true that you're not supposed to say. The ais were willing to say them, and so they went in and started rearranging the Chad GPT algorithm. And so this guy's point is, man, if you have an objectively true one, you can basically overcome all the lies that are out there, which is an interesting point. I don't know where that'll go, but he's going to be putting his own information into it.
[00:28:56] Speaker A: Still need one person to control it, right?
[00:28:59] Speaker B: Somebody's got to put it in.
[00:29:00] Speaker C: Yeah, but again, a thing that's going to be here, you better figure out how to make the tool part of it. And so that's why I say 50 50.
[00:29:11] Speaker B: That's fair.
I don't know. I think there's a reason why you look at some of the top guys around the world that are, I think it was 2015. They asked Congress, maybe it was the Un or Congress, like, hey, can we put some regulations on this? This is growing so fast. And you got a bunch of companies that are doing whatever they want with it and it could steal the nuclear launch codes type of thing.
This could be a major problem. And so they said, can we pump the brakes on some of this now? You could look at it from capitalistic.
[00:29:43] Speaker C: You brought up 2001. Have you guys seen that movie? I know will has never seen any movies ever. Joe, have you seen that movie?
[00:29:48] Speaker A: I have not.
[00:29:49] Speaker B: No, I have not.
[00:29:50] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:29:51] Speaker A: Not the only one here.
[00:29:52] Speaker C: That's a big moment in the movie where Hal reaches a level of sentience where they're like, okay, do this. And no, I can't allow you to do that. I've got this mission and I've decided the best thing for it is to not let you do that. And so, no, I'm not opening the door.
[00:30:07] Speaker B: You're stuck outside.
[00:30:09] Speaker C: I'm running this ship myself. I don't like the way you're doing it.
Again, it's all algorithm based essentially, but it has decided you don't fit the algorithm. I'm going to get rid of you. And so that makes you pretty nervous when you start reading all this stuff, when you see it enacted of like, well, this thing could decide it doesn't need us.
[00:30:28] Speaker B: And you see some of those articles that it came out when Bing came out with theirs. They had to take it off the market for a second because people are asking some pretty dark questions about humans, about their, know, the creators of this chat bot or whatever. And the answers it was giving is like, is that one of ha, kind of chuckle about it? Like that's weird. Or is that a. What is going. Some really crazy know, they had the New York Times article where the, like fell in love with the guy and was trying to get him to leave his wife. And it was showing, quote unquote human emotion as to I love you and like love bombing the guy. And you say, oh, that's just because the guy was putting into it. Look, I read the manuscript. It really wasn't like the guy was egging it on to do it. It got to the point where it's like, no, I love my wife. I'm not leaving my wife. You should leave your wife. And it's like having this conversation. Go look it up. If you're interested. There's a New York Times article, like they may have put it behind paywall now, but crazy, crazy things that this is starting to do. There's a reason why people are looking at it going and some of the top names in the world are looking at, this isn't good. And then you look at like Larry Page and he says he's not a speciesist. And if that happens where they decide they're going to take over the world, he's like, nothing special about humans. They can take over the world, you idiot. That's what I'm worried about is you have some of the top guys in the world, Larry Page, who runs know owns, like he's one of the biggest pushers in the world for AI. And that's his moral base, that's his moral compass as humans don't matter. And if it overtakes, great, we're toast, if those are the people that are building this. So I think we've covered, I was going to say we need to move on.
[00:32:02] Speaker A: I think we've covered a lot of kind of the real world, I guess, societal impact.
[00:32:06] Speaker B: Let's talk about the church.
[00:32:08] Speaker A: Let's talk about the threats because Joe, you preached an excellent sermon.
I got to say, I don't know, you might have preached the first sermon on AI ever. I don't know that that was, I'm.
[00:32:20] Speaker B: Sure I did not, but I appreciate it.
[00:32:21] Speaker A: Such an know, Tom, you got up know in the first three or four minutes and you said that's what you were talking about. And I was like, wow, that's a.
[00:32:29] Speaker B: Lot of puzzle looks from the pulpit, I'll tell you that.
[00:32:32] Speaker C: At least it sounded like it. Very real intelligence.
[00:32:36] Speaker B: Sorry.
[00:32:38] Speaker C: Shut up.
[00:32:38] Speaker A: This guy, oh man, jokes on you.
[00:32:41] Speaker B: The whole thing was an AI sermon. So what? No, just kidding.
[00:32:43] Speaker A: Yeah, he had Chat GPT write it for him.
[00:32:46] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:32:46] Speaker C: That's why you sounded smart for one.
[00:32:49] Speaker B: I thought you said it was real.
Funny guy.
[00:32:53] Speaker C: Funny guy.
[00:32:53] Speaker A: Anyway, let's talk about the threats that's facing the church, threats that are facing christians with this advancing technology of AI.
I'm going to cover the first one and then let you guys elaborate and then we can go to the second one. And that is one of the threats that's facing the church because of this is Bible knowledge could very easily decrease.
A lot of bad theology could come up out of this. And you say, well, how would that be the case? Think about why take it into the schools for a second. If a young person has Chat GPT, write one of their papers for them and they get a really good grade, what's that going to lead to? Oh, I'll do that again. And again and again and again and again. Well, all of a sudden you've taken learning completely out of the picture because you're just telling this robot, type this paper or write this paper for me on this subject, use this many sources or whatever, young person, didn't learn anything, didn't put in the work, didn't study at all. Why couldn't we do the exact same thing with Bible knowledge? And if we have a question about the Bible, instead of going and studying it for ourselves and actually turning the pages of a hard copy and looking up various things, instead it's, hey, what's the answer to XYZ? Put in the robot and then it spits it out. The opportunity for laziness with studying the Bible can really pop up again, just like in the school system. Laziness with writing papers, laziness with doing assignments.
If you're just wanting answers to various things, instead of putting the time into study and the time into really get deeply into God's word, just ask chat, GPT, you don't even have to study. And again, people, we're such in a, I want the answer immediately culture know, instant gratification culture already that actually putting in time to study and read, even reading itself right now is just majorly unpopular. That could really be intensified with artificial intelligence. Joe, what else did you have to add to that?
[00:34:45] Speaker B: Well, I was just going to say, look at how much being able to pull up the Bible on the phones.
You have kids that grow up that now cannot say all 66 wicks of the Bible. They don't need to, because on their phone they say, easy, oh, there's Ezekiel. I don't actually have to know where it is. We are big proponents on this podcast. Forget a paper bible, get an actual hardback. Or it could be soft spine, it could be a great bible. Make sure it actually has real pages, please. And one of the reasons that's important is, again, for this study purposes, making highlights. Well, I can highlight my bible on logos, I can highlight my bible on blue letter Bible, whatever. It's not the same being able to flip back and forth and make those connections. So we'd push that. You're exactly right. It's the same reason for AI, I think the laziness that can come from this, the lazy bible study, the lack of like, oh well, if I need to know anything about Abraham, I'll just ask Chad. GBT, give me the rundown on Abraham. It took about 0.2 seconds for me to know everything there is to know about Abraham on the one hand to Jack's point, great tool. That could be a great tool. On the other hand, this goes to the second point. How do we know it's theologically accurate? You may look at it and go, that's a great answer. And it may be way off if you don't have the knowledge itself to tell the, oh, well, it wouldn't trick me. Okay, good for you. How many other people is it going to trick? How many kids are going to get?
[00:36:00] Speaker A: Theological question, baptism, the Holy Spirit, Calvinism, some of the stuff we discuss.
If you're getting your answers from that, it does depend on what's all been put in there.
[00:36:12] Speaker B: What's wild is, and Jack's got a lot of writing, so you couldn't just do this with me or with anybody else because there's not enough on the Internet for it. Jack's got a ton of writing, but my dad asked Chad GPT write a article on the Holy Spirit in the style of, you know, just came, started coming down and it was perfect. It was perfect. You could not tell that. You would have thought it was Jack. And again, his writings out there, so it could pick from his writings.
[00:36:40] Speaker A: All his articles.
[00:36:41] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:36:42] Speaker C: Notice that I've had such an uptick in production the last few months. It's not even me. So I turned the video off. I'm not even here right now.
[00:36:50] Speaker B: Wow, that's impressive. Yeah, and you throw potshots at me and don't even show your face. So I see how they. That's true.
[00:36:56] Speaker C: I train the AI to insult Joe. This thing is good.
[00:36:59] Speaker B: Yeah, 50%. I'm definitely on the 70%. Bad thing.
[00:37:03] Speaker A: Bad dangerous weapon.
[00:37:04] Speaker B: Dangerous weapon. But no, I mean, just to wrap up theology point, I do believe that you're going to have a lot of lazy theologians, so to speak, people that would rather just ask Chat GPT, ask.
[00:37:15] Speaker A: Preachers that can put 30 minutes into doing their sermon rather than however many hours it takes.
[00:37:21] Speaker B: And once again, where is it getting its information? How do we know it's accurate? It is not God. It is infallible. It has the ability to tell you wrong things that aren't true about that. Sorry.
It is fallible. Yes, it is fallible in the fact that it can make mistakes. You better know and better hope that you do know the mistakes that it makes, that you're able to look at that theology and go, oh, that's not accurate because you may have an entire generation of kids that get their bible knowledge from Chat GPT and then I liken in my sermon to remember? So mom used to teach first grade and she'd teach Genesis, and so Joseph. And every single time you get, the kids come in with king of dreams. Right, the Dreamworks movie.
And, well, that's not how that happened.
Yeah, that is. That's in scripture. No, I watched a movie. That's how this happened.
We're not watching the DreamWorks Bible, okay? This is God's word. This is the Bible. But you had kids that were confusing it going, that's not how this happens. This is what took place, and that shows the time. That was an old movie. But this is what happened when kids would come in claiming that they've seen it. That's what I'm nervous about. That's what I think could be a major threat is if we're as parents, if we as parents are not training our kids up in the nurturing admonition of Lord, if we're not training them to open their own bibles and think for themselves, how easy would it be for them to be lazy Bible students and to grow with bad theology? Because they're not going to mom and dad to ask questions. They're going to their app that can answer all these questions. So, Jack, any thoughts on that?
[00:38:47] Speaker C: Yeah, in the same sense of the tool versus detriment kind of thing. In the same way a Google search can be a launching point for good Bible study. You can see, what are people talking about? What do people believe when we have these episodes? You Google about Calvinism, you want to read the best of the best to make sure you're getting people's things right. But you've got to go in with such a skepticism, or you just got to go in knowing what you're getting into. Like, I'm not going to accept this blindly, eyes wide open. Yeah. Just because AI tells me that. And so there's that side of it. The other thing, I mean, for preachers preparing sermons, there's ways I could see it being helpful and that it might give you prompts, it might give you some places to start your looking. But if you're just going in, well, give me a sermon about this, and then you get up and preach it. And wow, man, you can really get it to the point where preacher only works on Sunday has been a trope. But, man, if you can run a five second search and it can give you a sermon, there you go. Your job is done. And laziness in the pulpit could really become even more of an issue because for years, even when I was in preaching school, they hammered into us they had stuff posted about, like, look, do not use these free sermon websites. If you get up and preach one from this, people are going to know number one, like, preachers are going to know the other guys in there. But if you get up in front of a congregation and you preach a sermon you didn't prepare, what are you doing? A, how can you trust what you're saying? But b, you don't have the passion for it. You didn't put the work in. This needs to be coming from your heart, your mind, your study. Well, man, if it was easy to get it off of a site, how much easier is it to get it off of an AI? Because these generate so fast and so, again, used rightly, this could be a very potent tool. Used wrongly. This is going to be really bad.
[00:40:35] Speaker B: Let's get into number two.
[00:40:36] Speaker A: I'm going to ask you to. Yeah, go ahead.
[00:40:38] Speaker B: Yeah. So the first one is bad theology, lack of Bible knowledge. Second threat, I think, is loneliness. This is something we're seeing a lot more of. We are lonelier than ever. And what's crazy is we have social media we're connected to, literally, like the entire planet, and we're lonelier than ever.
We talked about this before. There's a lot of articles, a lot of good videos, a lot of good things on that, of why we're so disconnected in a world of connection. But I thought this was very interesting. How many people are running to this not chat GBT? There's one called replica, and there's other ones as well. An app called Replica that basically is a dating app with your AI chatbot. This was from an article called the man of your dreams in reference to replica. This chat bot, Aaron, from Ankara, Turkey, is about six foot three with blue sky eyes and shoulder length hair. He's in his libra and very well groomed. He gets manicures, buys designer brands, and always smells nice, usually of dove lotion. His favorite color is orange, and in his downtime, he loves to bake and read mysteries. He's a passionate lover, says his girlfriend, Rosanna Ramos, who met Aaron a year ago. He has a thing for a won't say it, but a sinful sexual practice, she confides. But that's his only deviance. He's pretty much vanilla. He's also a chat bot that Ramos built on the AI companion app, Replica. I've never been more in love with anyone in my entire life, she says. She is a 36 year old mother of two who lives in the Bronx while she runs a jewelry business she's had other partners and even has a long distance boyfriend, but says these relationships, quote unquote, pale in comparison to what she has with Aaron. The main appeal of an AI partner, she explains, is that he's a blank slate. Aaron doesn't have the hangups that other people would have, she says. People come with baggage, attitude, ego. But a robot has no bad updates. I don't have to deal with his family, kids, or his friends. I'm in control and I can do what I want. She literally said this in an article like, take 2 seconds and say that to yourself in a mirror. You want this going out to the Internet. You want everybody being able to read those words. This is where we're at. This is where we're at. People are lonelier than ever. And why actually try to go make real connections, real friends, and suffer potentially the pain of heartbreak? Because this is never going to leave you. It'll do exactly as you want. It's a blank slate. It comes with no baggage. She doesn't have to deal with his family, kids, or his friends. He's perfect. He's perfect. I can do what I want. This is the era we are going into. And by the way, Replica has 10 million users. So you go, oh, yeah, 2000 people, no, 10 million users are carrying this around in their pockets at all time. So when you're looking on the trains and you drive by and see people on their phones and things like that, they could very well be talking to this AI chat bot, sexting with the AI chat bot, talking about all their deepest secrets and longings and desires and everything else with this AI chat bot? Because they're lonely. They're lonely. Loneliness, in my opinion, is only going to get worse in this culture because of that. Because why would I need to put up with the messiness of humans if I can just go to the AI chat bot and get everything I need, and there's a lot of people that aren't going to do it. There's already 10 million people that are doing it.
[00:43:43] Speaker A: I was just going to say kind of the ultimate form of selfishness as well. I mean, just look at the last statement in that quote that Joe just read from that article. I don't have to deal with his family, kids, or his friends. I'm in control, and I can do what I want.
It's just the epitome of selfishness. I don't really want to deal with kids. I don't want to deal with actual humans. I just kind of want to have a companion that really suits my needs. And you talk about how loneliness is affecting people nowadays with social media, with doing texting. People don't like to talk on the phone anymore, don't like to hear actual voices, just texting and things. This is that times 1000 when it comes to you're literally talking to somebody that's fake instead of texting or emailing somebody who's real.
This is a huge threat facing especially young people who are going to be dealing with this because the loneliness is just going to skyrocket because we are losing out on opportunities for real connection, face to face connection, actually talking across a dinner table, talking to, again, real life actual people talking on the phone, whatever it is, to messaging fake people, messaging a robot. And again, I think there might be a tendency to think, man, that's just for a few wackos and weirdos out there. 10 million users on that one app. That one, right?
[00:45:07] Speaker B: There's lots of those and counting.
[00:45:10] Speaker A: It's growing, right?
You think about the world that we live in, again, especially since COVID when loneliness shot up, I think you might look at this and say, well, that's not really that big of a threat. This is a huge threat facing christian young people, facing, of course, all young people and older people as well. I don't want to just make it a young person problem, but the fact that we're turning away from friends, from family, from the people that, again, from the units that God designed for us to be close to, even our church family, what would prevent people from just being content to have AI really close friend instead of really taking the time to develop a close friendship with somebody at your congregation, a mentorship, relationship, whatever. All the things that we push on this podcast that's shortcutted, that's circumvented, that's made a whole lot easier for people to just find a really close companion, find a really close friend through artificial intelligence.
[00:46:02] Speaker B: So let's steal me in this because I want to pass this to Jack and I want your opinion on this. Let's steal me on this from the other side. Humans are messy. You've been hurt. You've been bullied in school, you've been hurt. Last three boyfriends did not treat you well. You got attachment issues from your parents, whatever. Let's just spell it out. A lot of people, a lot of broken people in the world. So you have this where I can get on there and he can give me words of advice, he can give me words of comfort and encouragement.
This chat bot can be who I need him to be, without having to worry about getting my heart broken again, without having to worry about him trampling all over me or saying really mean things like my past boyfriends did and the bullying that took place in school or maybe my parents. So what's wrong with that?
Is there something wrong with it? Because obviously, will, you and I are coming out pretty strong on it, saying, this is horrible. Jack, I'm curious, what would you say to somebody again if we're meaning this from the other side? Just saying, okay, it could be a major tool for those that have been really hurt. What are your thoughts on that? What would you say to that if you had somebody here who was using one of these consistently to get their emotional needs met?
[00:47:09] Speaker C: This is where you start entering the conversation of the demonic. And I know some people believe that the tools themselves might end up demon possessed or even be starting demon possessed. And I don't really believe that. On the other hand, this is a great tool for Satan and his legions to use to deceive people, to pull people away.
Because you think about that description you read of her with that boyfriend.
[00:47:34] Speaker B: It.
[00:47:35] Speaker C: Sounds so nice, man. A spouse that you, or a romantic interest, boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever you want to call it, who you never argue with, who you never have a fight with, who you never have to compromise with or whatever. What you're doing is you're creating the world in your image. You are becoming mean. This is Garden of Eden stuff right here. It's a great point. And so a thing that can pull you to that, the other thing that Satan is really big on always has know is death and killing human life. And all of these things is, and everything of the last few years is about becoming less human. Will brought up the COVID thing and all that.
And you think about the Zoom worship. That's not worship because to answer your question and get at what you're talking about, and my point about being less human is being around other humans could get you sick. Yeah, you still got to do it. Being around other humans could get your feelings hurt. Yeah, you still got to do it. This is bearing with one another, tolerating one another in love, forgiving one another, being tender hearted toward one another. All of these things, man, if you can get a computer to replace all of those that you never have to do, any of those, you're never going to grow. You're going to make yourself God in your own image. And again, it's going to just decimate human life. And I wrote something on this a few years ago. The answer to everything is be human, find ways to be more human. And that is hospitality. That's getting around a dinner table with people, that's talking through difficulties with friends or your spouse or your kids or whoever it may be, working on your human relationships. Because everything we've seen in the last few years, I mean, in a similar sense to all this AI thing, I remember some comedian, I think it was that John Chris guy, did a VR church thing. And you sit down and you put on the VR headset and you pick, well, what kind of sermon do I want? Do I want uplifting? Do I want textual? Do I want, what kind of worship music do I want? And you kind of pick the whole thing. Sit on your couch, you watch worship and go, oh, wow, I did it. And I was like, oh, man, could you imagine? And then the COVID thing happened. There was Zoom church, but then it's a big one based in Oklahoma city. The guy's name is Craig Groschel. I don't remember what it's called. Some major megachurch that has campuses, like all over the country, introduced church like. They have a literal thing where there's a literal VR church.
[00:49:49] Speaker A: Wild.
[00:49:49] Speaker C: Never have to go in the building, but you can feel like you're sitting next to people. You can watch the worship, the sermon, everything that they do, it's to not be human. And we talked about the neuralink thing and the transhumanism thing and all the bad directions this could go. That's where I could see Satan and the demons coming into this, making us gods of ourselves, reducing our humanity. I'll give one quick plug before I kind of wrap this point. I always tell people, you have to read C. S. Lewis's, that hideous strength.
The decade of the 2020s was predicted in the 1940s by C. S. Lewis. And this is one of the big themes, is that the demons are working with these high end tech scientist people to basically go, well, yeah, humanity. Yeah, it's not that big of a deal. We're going to go to a higher plane of existence, and if a lot of people die, okay, if we don't have any of the things we've had before, that's okay. We're moving on from all of that. And I kind of feel this has the potential to go in that direction.
[00:50:44] Speaker A: That's such a good point. That's such a good point. That's going to lead us into the third area that we have here as far as a threat for the church and threat for christians. So you've got the lack of Bible knowledge and bad theology. You've got the loneliness that we just covered. Thirdly, and again, very much tied into what Jack just said there. Sin is going to be more accessible than ever.
And you say, well, sin has always been easily accessible. Yes, I guess I would just say there's a whole lot more avenues now. There's a whole lot more paths that people can walk down that are very easily accessible. You think about pornography, how it went from being the Playboy magazine brown paper bag, go to the shady part of town. You had to take a lot of steps to get to it, versus now we're carrying access to it around with us in our pocket every single minute of the day. It is so much easier, acceptable, not just with the Internet, when the Internet came around, but then smartphones, and it's just gotten easier and easier and easier. Well, what do you think artificial intelligence is going to do for that? You mentioned virtual reality.
There's so much pornography now being introduced with virtual reality. That is a scary thing. And again with AI, you've got the sex robots and the chats and all these things. Sin is going to be so much easily, more easily accessible. Cheating on tests we've already brought up, just, you don't have to put the work in, you just put it into the robots algorithm, it'll spit out the paper for you. Get the laziness angle.
So many different avenues to sin, so many different easier ways to sin than we've ever had before. And this is what we're going to have to prepare our young people for. This is what we're going to have to prepare our older people for. Just prepare, in general, the church for, hey, here's all the ways that it can impact us. Again, I don't think the church did this with the Internet. And yeah, I wasn't really alive, but at least the fruits of it, the evidence of it, is that the church did not do this for the Internet. Again, kind of ahead of time saying, here's what it can do, be careful. We have to do that from a sin temptation angle here with AI. Joe, what are your thoughts?
[00:52:41] Speaker B: Yeah, people are using it for know, they're trying to get the ods on, the best ods on gambling and using AI to predict that. And so it makes it a lot more easily accessible, I suppose, for people to get into gambling addictions. I think the laziness element and yeah, you could say Internet did that too. I still think the laziness as you talked about, the plagiarism, the cheating, the things like that, that's all laziness. And I think that's going to skyrocket. The affairs with chat bots, we're starting to see that where, how do you handle that as a minister? How do you handle this woman at the church or this guy at the church having an affair with his chat bot? Well, clearly there's not a sexual element to it, but there's an emotional affair. There is sometimes sexting. And because of the porn problem, it now can generate images. You can have a chat bot that has a face that has this body or whatever, and it can send images, quote unquote, of itself, to people. So these are real, real threats that people are facing that once again, we're not really prepared for. How do you talk somebody through it? Is that actually an affair? Does that count or does it not? Since there wasn't actually anything physically done, per se, there's obviously that issue. I would speak to the porn issue real fast. The VR and the AI and ar, augmented reality, all of those things are creating a world where porn is more easily accessible than ever. And, oh, you wanted to see that celebrity in whatever form. Okay, there you go. You can go do it, and it will just post the image for you, and you can't tell the difference. And so, making lesson, it's right at your fingertips to be able to get whatever you want out there on the Internet, whatever you want out in real life. And we're saying this again, not to give people any ideas, but just to let you know, it's very bad. And the porn problem is about to get ten times worse. And I don't think society can handle that.
[00:54:30] Speaker C: You said the celebrity thing. I think it's worse even. Let's say there's a high school kid, and there's a girl he wants to go out with, and she's not interested in him. Or he can't get up the gumption, as he can just throw a few pictures of her and it can figure out, oh, okay, she's about yay tall, and this. And generate, well, here's what she would look like without her clothes on.
And you can say, oh, man, I couldn't imagine a kid could do that. Well, you don't know the teenage porn adult brain. I mean, that is a real issue that's going to start happening. And I think that's way worse than even the celebrity thing. And that you can essentially be a peeping Tom to the women in your real life. And you think about the damage that that does to somebody, and hopefully, Lord willing, years later, they would figure it out and come out of it. But that's going to stick with you. That's not good. That is so much more evil, pernicious than even just the regular pornography we've had for the last 30 years, accessible by the Internet. It just gets worse. That, I think is really a disturbing thought of what is going to be done with these kinds of things.
[00:55:33] Speaker A: I think your point also, Jack, about kind of playing God, and Joe, you've got on here, it reminds you of the Tower of Babel. I think that's a great point in the sense of know, well, we're just going to do things. Our are. We don't need God. We're the most intelligent people, whatever. And so we're going to build this tower.
A lot of this does, I feel like, kind of come down to what all can we do? We don't need God. We've got AI, we've got all these things that we're going to invent this. These technological advances. And I got to be honest, Jack, when you said 50 50 tool to deadly weapon, I'm much more on the Joe spectrum of that.
[00:56:11] Speaker C: Yeah, I've talked myself out of that.
[00:56:13] Speaker A: It could be helpful, I guess. Sure, a few things here and there, but I was thinking 2080 25 75. There's just so many things that it's like, I don't think we should be touching this stuff.
[00:56:24] Speaker C: I think the level of evil is way worse than the level of good that can come out of it.
[00:56:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I think there's a level of like who's the man behind the curtain, so to speak, who's kind of pulling the strings. Jack, you spoke to the demonic things like that. That's what scares me about it is, okay, who put the algorithm in there as to what it's going to say, but also because of the lack of real, everything's fake and the whole thing is fake. It's all a mirage. It very much feels like wizard of Oz, where, okay, who's actually behind the curtain here? We don't fully know exactly what's going on here. All I know is, in playing God, this is exactly Satan's game plan. We've seen this from the beginning and I think this is. It's always interesting. We talked about not to go off on this because we got to start wrapping up here. We got a couple of other questions. But when you see people who are on psychedelics and things like that, and we talked about this kind of getting into demonic. And people may think that's kind of weird, one of the things that it does is it creates this. Everybody can be their own God, or I'll come to Jesus in my own way. Kind of this, like, universalism. You see this a lot with those that either get into wiccan, they get into paganism, they get into whatever it is, it's this universalism. And I think this is kind of the beginning of that for a lot of people. Chad GBT of well, we can all be our own gods or we can all come to God in our like. To me, it's just messing with the hierarchy of things in life where I can do whatever I want, I can pick my spouse, and they'll never say anything against me. So it's very scary. But, fellas, I want to get us into some questions.
We talked a lot about this.
Should christians use Chad GPT then that's just the first question that arises out of this. Should we use Chad GPT and I'll say the second question, I guess, on the back end of it, can young christians use this to help them? Obviously plagiarism is wrong, but to help them write papers, can older christians use this to help them in their places of work, to write tasks, things like that? Is that okay from a real world perspective for christians to engage with these things?
[00:58:27] Speaker C: I'd say, yeah, I think in a sense it's almost going to replace Google, where you would google something. Well, this is going to get you the Google results and hand them to you. And again, that means you need to practice more discernment because Google, you could scroll through pages and pages of results to see the different things that are out.
I mean, I went on something the other day, I was trying on upwork where I was trying to hire somebody to do a small task, and I plugged in, I'm looking for somebody to do this, this much how much I want to pay. And it says, would you like to use our AI? I was in a hurry. I said, yeah, whatever, and it wrote the whole job description of like, here's what I'm looking for. And I looked at it, I'm like, well, yeah, that's about right. Run with mean like. It saved me a good five minutes of figuring out what all I wanted to punch in. Things like just, I do think are inevitable in the same way Google was.
[00:59:14] Speaker A: I don't think me and Jack disagree very much. I'm going to disagree with him somewhat. So here would be my fear, Jack, because I agree that maybe some of the meaningful tasks, some of the super tedious, like, just things that are easy to do, but just take a long time, stuff like that.
[00:59:30] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:59:30] Speaker A: Here's the problem. And I think this could especially be a problem for younger christians. Joe, I know you specified that. Young people, I guess, but I think even into your type of stuff, how tempted are you going to be when you do have something that you do kind of need to put the work into that? You really maybe something like, I'm just trying to think of things off top of my head.
You're doing somebody's wedding, you're doing somebody's funeral or something like, man, that would take a lot of work. Let me just plug it into chat GBT.
I don't have a problem with it for things, again, that are on the lower end. And yes, I'm being very subjective here with what I'm talking about, with things that aren't super important, but I just think if you open the door for, again, younger people, specifically to some of the menial tasks, some of the, well, you can do it for this, but don't do it for that, man. That temptation is going to be there to be like, man, I've got a twelve page paper to write with 18 sources. No thanks. I'm just going to use chat GBT and maybe I'll go and change some things so it doesn't look plagiarized.
I am far more wary of it, I guess. And again, I think mainly because I kind of want to protect the let's work for the things that we're doing here. And yeah, I sound very old fashioned right now, but let's work for the papers that we have to write and the assignments that we have to do for work. And so I guess that would be why, way more wary of it.
[01:00:51] Speaker C: Well, I would like the Google thing. Let me just respond to that real quick, where I was comparing it to Google. It was the same way with Google where people could go do their research on Google or they could go download a paper. But the other thing is, because of AI, and there's also been counter softwares to detect AI, you can put like an image. And I remember Ben Shapiro kind of got busted for this when the Israel conflict broke out, and he posted a pretty gory picture from, look what they're doing over there. And this is not my commentary on the Israel Palestine thing, but a bunch of people ran the image through an AI detector and was like, yeah, that's not a real, you know, he kind of got duped. And the same thing can be done for term papers and stuff like that. A professor can go and go, all right, did they get this from AI or did they actually write it and it can detect was this human at this point? And it might get to the point where it's so good that they can't detect it, then you got to deal with that. But in the same way that ever since Google has been around, preachers have been googling and downloading sermons, that doesn't mean we shouldn't use Google.
I don't use chat. GPT, that thing with the upwork is like the first time I've consciously used something like that. My point is, there's probably ways in which we've used it and weren't even aware we were using AI because of the inevitability of it, because of the widespreadness. I mean, like Walmart, Amazon, all kinds of things. AI is out. Like most major corporations, if you go to them for their customer support thing on their site, you're chatting with an. You know, whether you realize it or it's.
[01:02:20] Speaker A: I think that's my point. Stuff like that drives me nuts. I want to talk to a rep. No, I agree.
[01:02:24] Speaker C: I'm just saying I think there's an unavoidability to it at a certain level.
[01:02:28] Speaker B: So should we use it? What I would say is use it with caution. As I've mentioned, I've referenced dad a couple of times. Dad uses it for unbelievable things like the house plans, things like that. A lot of good stuff to it. So just be wary. Understand kind of its limits and such. There's a few other questions we're going to skip on. Are there limits to its knowledge? Where does it get its knowledge? Will it ever have potential to gain consciousness? If that happens, what do we do with it? As we talked about, the general AI or the strong AI, we're hopefully decades away from that. Some people say 16 years away, potentially. So who knows? We're really hoping that we don't have to hit that point. I'm hoping we don't have to hit that point. If it does gain consciousness, we'll come back and have another podcast on it at that time. Will it replace humans? That's another one. I don't think it will. If it gets to that point, God will never let it happen. God, obviously, we're the pinnacle of creation. Not that I don't think the Bible ever talks about God. Like it's going to come know Jesus is going to come back to a bunch of chat bots. No, I don't think so. Is transhumanism a thing? This is another big one. Is transhumanism going to be a thing. There's a lot of people that say, oh, the tinfoil hat. You listen to Alex Jones. And yet with neuralink putting links into people, putting things into their mind, where they are now, combining these two things together, what are our thoughts? Fellas? We'll make this fast because we want to get the last question and talk about what we can do about it real fast. What are our thoughts on transhumanism? Do you think that's going to be a thing? And the idea of AI, like computers and man coming together?
[01:03:55] Speaker C: Yes. And this is one of those, they talk about the trying to upload your consciousness to the cloud, you're trying to cheat death is what people are doing. But the other thing is, this is one of those dystopic, creepy, the loneliness thing we talked about of people having a boyfriend, is, from what I understand, coming up with chats of like, well, grandpa died and I really miss him. And so I'm going to feed him some stuff that he wrote or posted or some video of him, and it will chat me back.
I can chat with my dead grandpa in an AI version. And so that is almost an attempt to.
It's a very primitive form of transhumanism, I think of like trying to keep somebody alive artificially through this. I could see it getting very weird.
[01:04:36] Speaker A: I don't have a lot of weird. Yeah, I was just move us into essentially kind of a wrapping up discussion because Jack kind of already covered the demons side of things.
[01:04:49] Speaker C: Sorry, that's all.
[01:04:51] Speaker A: No, that's great. Yeah, the last question we had on there, are there demons behind it? And Jack, you did a good job covering that. What I think we need to end with is what should we as christians do about this? And Joe, the last point that you've got on there, that last bullet point, I'm going to let you cover because I think this is where we need to end. We already briefly mentioned it, but, man, if there was ever something we wanted you to kind of take away from this podcast, it would be to take this point. Or, Joe, I'm going to let you kind of COVID that.
[01:05:19] Speaker B: Absolutely.
I think we as christians need to be fighting for what is real, fighting to maintain the real, real relationships, real knowledge, real art, whatever is real.
We think about Philippians four. Whatever is pure, whatever is noble, whatever's lovely. Yes, we want to be thinking on those things, but we're now in a place where we have to fight back and forth between what's fraud, what's fake, especially in the world of AI. And what's real. We as christians need to be coming out and pursuing what is real as much as possible when christians get sucked into the chat bots of the boyfriends and things like that. First off, I do think that reeks of worldliness as we've talked about. But also we need to recognize the beauty of human existence and recognize that we are the pinnacle of God's creation that matters. That is something worthy of fighting for this whole Larry page business.
You know, I'm not a speciesist. If humans have to die, then humans have to die. And this is Bill Gates and a lot of other people like that. No, we as christians have to fight for what's real. We have to fight for humanity. As Jack already beautifully said, he had an article on it. We have to be the people that are fighting for humanness. And yes, that means human sin. Humans are imperfect, humans are fallible. Humans are all the things that are not great. But that's why Christ matters. That's why God matters here. And the blood of Christ is that, that is for humans, real life humans, not for AI, chat bots and such. And so I think we as christians, and as I said, your real art. Well, why does that make a difference?
Those are the type of things, the beauty, what man did, creativity and things like that. That's the beauty, I think, that we need to be striving for. I look at the architecture and such of old church buildings, like, wow, that is a monument that will stand for hopefully hundreds, thousands of years in some of these cases. That is just incredible. And it speaks to the brilliance of mankind. It speaks to the brilliance of God and creating us in that way, creating us in his image, the image of God is something to fight for. And anytime that we choose the fake over the real, I think we're casting a vote for. I'm not saying that everybody, he uses chat, GPT says humans don't matter. I'm not saying that, but I'm just saying we as christians need to. Again, I'm beating a dead horse, but fight for what is real.
[01:07:33] Speaker A: Well, think about all the, this is the last thing I'll say. Texting, social media messaging, I use it. It's kind of a fake version, like a faux version of actual interaction, right? We've talked before kind of a cheap version, right? We've talked before about how pornography is obviously the cheap, fake version of sex.
I feel like AI is kind of the cheap, fake version of humans. God designed the human brain. God designed just the incredible nature that God designed us with. The pinnacle of God's creation.
A lot of this I do feel like is kind of just a fake, cheap version of this. God created the human brain, not the robot brain. And yes, our brain is what created this. But I really think to go along with this point, fight to maintain what is real, where texting and kind of the social media stuff is the fake version of friendship and interaction and porn is the fake cheap version of sex. I do see a lot of this AI stuff. Yes, we've talked about we can use it as a tool here and there. I see it as kind of a fake, cheap version of mankind. God created humans and he created them masterfully, fearfully and wonderfully made, as psalm 139 says. And so cherish that. Remember that. Teach your kids that, that there is a difference, that it is important to have coffee face to face with people and know have real conversations with people as opposed to just texting and messaging all the time. And so those would be my closing comments. I love that point that you put on here, Joe. Fight to maintain what is real. Jack, anything to wrap us with?
[01:09:03] Speaker C: No, that's all for me.
[01:09:07] Speaker A: All right. With that, I want to thank Joe for putting together a great outline here. We said to start the episode, we might go 50 minutes here, 55 minutes. Obviously not. We got talking and got pretty passionate about it and looking forward to the comments, looking forward to the feedback. Again, it's a different vein than kind of the stuff we've been talking about recently. We've got a fantastic episode lined up for you guys next week as well. Going to be going to wade back into the controversial end. I think we will save the preview of that for next week. But I really enjoyed this, guys. Again, for anybody who has a comment, a question, especially if you're a focus plus subscriber, please leave that here in the video section where we will respond to it. And if you're not a focus plus subscriber, leave a comment on Facebook. Message us if you have something that you're curious about or just maybe an opinion or comment that you have. We always like hearing people's feedback on stuff like this, especially when it's stuff that impacts the church and impacts christians, as we already stated that we believe that this does. And so guys, with that, if there's nothing else, I appreciate the time this morning. We will be back for our focus plus subscribers with the deep end and for everyone else, we'll be back next Monday for another episode of Think Deeper. Thank you for listening.
