Latest / Gospel Talks Podcast / #68 - Evangelism and AI

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#68 - Evangelism and AI · Gospel Talks Podcast

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Welcome everybody to Gospel Talks podcast where we help Christians all over the world become more effective in relational evangelism and discipleship.
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My name is George Benoka and with me today is none other than Jeff Musgrave, the founder and author of the Exchange Bible Study.
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And we're really excited to be with you guys again this week.
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We have an awesome topic, evangelism and AI.
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But before we delve into that, I want to talk to you guys a little bit about our webinar coming up November 11th.
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It is going to be 6 p.m.
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to 8 p.m.
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Mountain Standard Time.
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And so if you've gone through daylight savings and time changes, or if you're in a different time zone than us, you might just want to pay attention to what time that is for
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you.
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And if you go on the home page of the exchange website, exchangemessage.org, and you scroll just a half a page right underneath the main video that starts up on the website,
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you'll see some information there.
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There's a button where you can click.
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to register, it's only 10 bucks, you get $30 in free ebooks.
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And I think my thing that I think is the greatest value add is you get to sit down with Jeff, and I know this might be a little awkward with Jeff sitting across from me, for me
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to say this, but I don't mind saying it, I believe it.
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It's that Jeff has had 30 years in ministry, over 30 years in ministry, and over a decade training churches, hundreds of churches in evangelism, and so he's fielded all sorts of
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questions.
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He's talked with all sorts of people, trained all sorts of personalities, gift types, whatever.
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And we've seen that relational evangelism works for everybody.
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And so there is a greater need for relational evangelism, I believe, a more obvious need, I should say, now than there has ever been before in human history.
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And part of what this episode's topic is, think, addresses that.
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But Jeff, anything you want to add about what your burden is for this particular webinar?
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I'm I actually am excited to be able to use the format of the internet we we have observed over the years that as we began to use the internet to market what we do recognizing that
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the internet itself is a great place of ministry so I'm super excited about being able to have a seminar right on the internet and to be able to talk with people I I feel like the
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most important moments
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of our seminars with a live or in, I guess this would be live to and a webinar is the is the discussion times.
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And so I don't see it just as me answering questions.
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It's literally helping people to articulate what they're thinking about things.
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And I find that when we say things out loud, it's like, wow, that makes sense to me.
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We understand it for the first time, maybe sometimes when we're talking about it.
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So I love the discussion parts, looking forward to it.
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Yep, it's gonna be an awesome time, guys.
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You don't wanna miss it.
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it's Exchange Webinar and uh how to develop authentic relationships with unbelievers.
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Well, without further ado, let's get right into our topic today, evangelism and AI.
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I know this one kinda hits you out of left field a little bit, Jeff, and uh I know for me, AI is something that I'm kinda sinking my teeth into a little bit in terms of it has...
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changed a little bit the way I do ministry.
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Not necessarily what I'm doing, but go ahead and start us off.
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I mean, what are your thoughts about AI?
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mean, how would you even define the thing?
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Well, I think.
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I have to before I even start the conversation, say, this is clearly out of my ballpark.
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Relationships with people is my ballpark.
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I it's interesting.
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I you had mentioned 30 years of ministry, believe it or not, 45 years of ministry as well.
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This fall.
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It's okay.
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And when I first started ministry,
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the computer that I have in my pocket now that is my phone would have taken a full floor of the university that I went to it.
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mean, the world has changed so drastically.
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We originally began to realize how helpful computers could be just when we started trying to do large databases couldn't couldn't really keep up.
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with the amounts of people we need to keep up with apart from it.
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So we began to recognize it, I saw it as just a tremendous help to me in regard to sermon prep and study those tools.
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And so that's that's just computer in general, I feel like in my early days of ministry, I was kind of pushing the
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development of computers, I wanted it to do more, I wanted it to provide this service for me.
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Now I feel like I am running just to get out of its way.
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It's moving so fast.
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And I, there's so much I don't know.
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I do feel like I've tried to keep up.
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I feel like it's a ministry window and many ministry door for us.
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So m
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I'm saying all of that because the first few thoughts I have about AI are kind of negative by nature.
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My first thought about AI is that it's not really original.
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It's really a collective knowledge of all that's been recorded by humans.
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The wonderful thing about a computer and specifically the artificial intelligence that we can access through the computer.
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is that it has the ability to gather accumulated materials that there's no way a human could ever have time to be able to do that.
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Sometimes in just seconds, clearly just in minutes, at least the limited searches that I can do and things that I ask it to do.
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So I think that the computer has the ability to add analysis and conclusions.
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uh to the material that it can gather, but it really can't create information.
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mean, the information that we are accumulating from the artificial intelligence is is not original to the computer.
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It's it's coming from people somewhere, sometime, but praise the Lord, we have the ability to get centuries of material.
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in seconds.
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So I do think it's valuable.
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just think we have to recognize it's not genuinely original.
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Even the Bible says nothing is new under the sun, especially when it comes to theology and ideas.
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Nothing new.
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We're just utilizing it and sometimes makes life a lot easier rather than new and creative.
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Another thought and
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you may want to say something about that before I go on.
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So maybe I should just be still for a minute.
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No, no, keep going.
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Okay, I feel like evangelism itself.
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I mean, I feel like in some respects, the words evangelism and AI are kind of almost opposite of each other.
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Because evangelism itself is about a relationship.
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It's about a relationship with God.
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It's the information that we give needs to be aimed at the human heart.
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And so I personally believe that it must be communicated from a human heart in order to be able to reach a
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a human heart.
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I feel like
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All public speaking is getting information from one brain to another brain.
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You're not really done just because you said words you've done when that person understands what you were communicating.
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I feel like evangelism goes a step deeper in that I'm going from my human heart and speaking to that human heart.
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Of course, the way we do that is through the knowledge of the truth.
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So it's it's an information
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communication, but it goes deeper than that.
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And I don't think AI can actively communicate heart messages.
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Only a human can speak from the heart.
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And so I feel like we need to recognize the limitations that are there.
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Another limitation is that the gospel is a revealed message.
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It's not like we are discovering more new truths about this message.
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It's revealed from God to humans, and so it's not like you can gather more information out there.
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I do think that this truth about the gospel has been discovered over and over and over by humans down through the ages, but we can't discover anything new because it was conceived
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in the heart of God and it was revealed to humans.
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Therefore, I think that the limitation
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for AI is that there's a there's a very limited scope.
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There's only so much truth that needs to be communicated to a human heart.
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So those are just some thoughts about the limitations of AI.
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I think it's interesting what you're saying about AI because AI is basically a language learning model.
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When you ask it a question, it tries to tell you what it thinks you want to hear based on the words you used in that question.
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It indexes all the information on the internet, is its knowledge base, is the internet.
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And we know that not everything on the internet is accurate.
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think Abraham Lincoln once said that one time, you can't believe everything that you read on the internet.
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all that to kind of, know, tongue in cheek way of saying the knowledge base isn't, isn't not even the same category as scripture.
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You couldn't even say that the internet is truth.
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You could say there are
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parts of the internet, if we think of the internet like a theme park, there are parts that house the truth.
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But there is so much of the internet that is just information or lie or uninspired truth where humans stumble onto a reality that is God's reality, but it's not something you
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necessarily find.
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in the Bible like quantum physics or something like that, you know, obviously there's such a thing as quantum physics, God created it, but I mean, he doesn't talk about it in the
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Bible.
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So there are all sorts of categories of information on the internet.
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The other thing about AI that's really interesting is it's algorithmic.
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So somebody created it.
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They gave it a framework, a code to operate by.
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And we know the authors of scripture in terms of we know who they are, who scripture says they are.
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and what's recorded in Scripture about them.
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We know the ultimate person who's inspired, the big A author of Scripture is the Holy Spirit.
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We know him.
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We have a relationship with him.
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We know what he's like, his character.
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I don't know anything really about the people who code each of these AIs.
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And now there are several, right?
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And there are some that have a specific focus or a niche and there are others that are broad, very broad AIs.
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several these AIs can do various things.
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And so it is a very, very powerful technology.
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And I believe it has some advantages for us in a evangelistic discipleship setting, it can.
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But it's very different than like, say for instance, the Exchange Bible Study.
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You know the authors, if you're listening, you know the authors of the Exchange Bible Study, there's Jeff and Anna.
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He's sitting right here, you know what I mean?
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You can go to the website, exchangemessage.org, and find out what we believe about the Bible and how we interpret the Bible and what we believe about Jesus, which is the most
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important thing.
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I don't know...
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AI doesn't believe anything about Jesus.
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What AI does is index what the internet says about Jesus as it pertains to the question you asked based on the language learning model that it was created with.
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Which means AI is not a source of, really, truth.
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It's something that caters to you, whatever your worldview is.
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And so I think in that way, AI can be very dangerous.
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And so, for instance, if you're in a discipleship relationship and somebody asks you a question, you don't know the answer.
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And you're going through the Exchange Bible study and it's something kind of out of the scope of the Exchange Bible study.
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I'll say that very, very few things aren't answered by the study eventually.
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So I'd encourage you to stick with it.
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Let's say somebody asks you a question about something unrelated and you decide to use AI to give you a theological answer.
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And you put in a prompt like, how would Jeff Musgrave answer this question?
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And so it goes into the internet and pulls every single article on the exchange website and gets an idea of Jeff Musgrave's worldview and theology and how conservative or liberal
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he is or whatever, and spits out an answer that they think
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reflects Jeff Musgrave per the language learning model and answers the question in the way that you'll be pleased as the user on the other end.
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But that is very different from you actually opening the Bible yourself or going to your pastor or emailing Jeff and saying, hey, what about this?
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Because there's a sense in which the AI is guessing.
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Now it won't tell you it's guessing, but it's guessing.
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think sometimes when pastors and Jeff answers, we, tend to guess a little bit too.
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That's, that's a danger.
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I, yeah, I, I think that's really an interesting thought, George.
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do you really, do you think, and I'm, I'm, maybe I'm asking a leading question, which is somewhat what we do to AI, isn't it?
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do you think that the,
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immediate gratification mindset of our culture forces us sometimes to come up with answers faster than we really ought to that maybe taking a week and letting yourself think about
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it, and how to best frame the answer going.
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I think your pastor is your very best bet.
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Anytime you want to ask a question.
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But I actually wonder if sometimes God put us into this church family, because he he wants the church family to develop a culture in which we are working on answering questions for
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unbelievers.
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And I feel like there's a whole relational aspect for the believer to be able to help the unbeliever that we miss if we're just want that answer by typing in the uh
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the question and coming up with the answer.
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Yeah, I think you're right.
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The instant gratification also, let's just say what it is, right, laziness.
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And we kind of turn to AI as our guru and it just gives us the answer right away.
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We don't have to ask anybody else and we don't have to really think for ourselves.
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We don't have to pray about it.
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I think there's some real dangers there.
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When you're doing evangelism and discipleship with somebody, you're shaping how they think about God.
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If there's anything we ought to be careful about, if there's anything we need to be picky about who we consult with, it's that thing.
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It's this thing, evangelism and discipleship.
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so if I disciple somebody based on the answers I get from chat GPT,
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or Grok or whatever AI you use perplexity or whatever, you are letting this thing that is not a source of truth, that is telling you what you want to hear, what it thinks you want
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to hear, shape you as you shape somebody else.
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And I think we have to consider what are the things that AI is appropriate to be used for and what are the things that are inappropriate.
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for us to use it for.
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I like what John Piper said.
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said, know, AI can't worship.
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AI can't worship.
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And so if you decide to shape, to let AI shape your worship, and this is what we're seeing in ministry right now, we're seeing pastors using AI to write their entire sermon without
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study.
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I'm not talking about you go study and you write it and you create it and then you ask AI, how could I?
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how can I make this better or help me find some illustrations.
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That's I think a really great way to use AI.
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That's like having an editorial staff.
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And so that might be a positive view, which I'm hoping to get to here in a moment is a more, are the positives?
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But worship has to be, you have to have a soul to do it.
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You have to be created in the image of God.
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And so,
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If we're asking a soulless thing to worship on our behalf or help us lead others in worship, the final result I don't think is going to be what God wanted.
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I can't imagine it is.
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No, I think that, you know, we're we're discussing evangelism and AI and taking that concept of AI can't worship just a step deeper.
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AI cannot have a relationship with God.
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And how can we expect AI to help us communicate a relationship with God if AI can't even have a relationship with God?
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I feel like
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One of the things that is a warning, this, didn't write this down in the notes that I gave to you.
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I think that everything has a slant.
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Everything has a slant.
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Every human that you're talking to has a slant and AI has been developed by people who have slants and therefore when it answers, it's going to be answering with a slant.
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And we know that when it comes to studying God's word,
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slant is everything.
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We have to be very, very cautious of that.
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You can get into false teaching quickly without even really meaning to with just the wrong slant on something.
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And I think especially the younger a person is in their walk with God and in their knowledge of the scriptures, the more careful they have to be about trusting AI answers
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because of the slant.
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Well, and we know also AI is a people pleaser and you can't be a people pleaser in your evangelism and discipleship.
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You have to be a truth teller.
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We know that AI is also a liar at times because I've seen this.
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I've seen there was a guy who went to court and he had built a whole case on a case law that he had received from AI.
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And then he went to court and he cited the case law.
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And the judge said, there's no such thing as that.
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And he found out that AI made the case law up to answer his question.
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And obviously he lost.
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So that is one of the dangers of AI, is that we could buy it wholesale.
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Also, I think AI is being used by humans to deceive other humans at times.
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We've seen videos now and photos.
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that are AI generated that looks so real, so real, but are totally fake.
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And so um we have to be, we have to be careful that we are not being deceived.
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And so I see people watch videos on TikTok and get up in arms about this or that going on in our country.
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And when I go to say, Hey, like, did you ever verify like, is that video real or not?
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You know, and it's like, well, like,
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No, I never did, but I just assume and it looked really real and I assume it is and it's like, well, you can't assume that anymore in the internet.
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mean, AI and the internet and the tools of the internet are so powerful that they can fabricate a reality.
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I mean, that's crazy, right?
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That's end of time stuff.
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Yeah, it is.
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And it's real.
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don't know.
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I don't know if I should tell the story on myself, but my wife and I got into a puppy scam.
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We wanted to buy a puppy and we began to communicate with someone and they sent us AI pictures of this puppy we were buying.
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we...
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We drove all the way to Missouri to buy a puppy that didn't exist.
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Hmm.
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Yeah, that's and stuff like that angers me, you know, because it's like, I hate that people are using that that way.
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I mean, I'll tell you on the other side, I would have to work like 100 hours a week to do what I as much as I do now, because what AI has done in my administrative responsibilities
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is multiplied what I can do.
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Because I think of it like this, imagine I can now hire four employees for nothing.
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They never take breaks, they don't form unions.
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I don't have to pay salary and benefits.
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They don't complain, they don't file HR reports.
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They work for me all the time, immediately, 24-7.
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They're always awake, they're always on call.
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So that's how I've approached AI is, okay,
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Here's this monotonous task that has nothing to do with theology or uh sermon or worship.
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It's not, I'm the one that deals with people.
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I don't bring chat GPT with me to discipleship meetings.
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I don't bring chat GPT with me to evangelize.
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I just bring my Bible and an exchange Bible study.
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And so that's what I do.
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But there is an aspect of life in ministry that is administrative.
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where you can use this to be a force multiplier in your life.
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And so there's a sense in which, why would I go search the internet for five illustrations when AI can go search and bring them back to me and then I can click a dropdown link to
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see where did they source that information?
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Did they source it from a good place or a bad place?
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It's like Wikipedia.
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Wikipedia can be great as a start to your research, but you don't wanna actually source
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everything from Wikipedia directly.
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What you want to do is go to Wikipedia for the sources.
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And so you can think of, I think, AI in that way.
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There's a sense in which there's a layer underneath it where it gets the information that it can be a helpful bridge for you to find that information more quickly.
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But when you use it and you talk to it like a person, I've actually, there was an article on somebody who had actually started dating their AI and got into an emotional dating
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relationship with their AI.
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And then the what happens is when you create a chat that's too long on chat GPT Eventually just gets deleted because it's like there's too much space on the server They don't want
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you to take that much space at a certain point They cap the conversation that it just auto deletes and then his he was like my girlfriend died and so If you if you have a if you
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have a view of AI if you have a relationship with AI Like that that is not that's not what God has designed us to be
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I think part of our dominion mandate is to go out and subdue the earth and have dominion and create.
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mean, God is creator and he created us to work this creation and be people who come up with ideas and things like that.
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And so I can't let AI function for me in every area of my life.
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I think I can let AI work for me at times, like I would have somebody else work for me, but it can't replace me.
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And so I think that's the bottom line too.
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I think a good way to summarize what you just said is that let it be our servant.
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Don't become a servant to it.
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And I really do believe that that's, that is really important.
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Humans are very easily enslaved.
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We enslave ourselves.
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I mean, we get addicted to things and I really believe that we have to be very, very careful.
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Paul said it that, you know, I,
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I can do all things, but I will not be the servant of any.
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will not be the slave of any.
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And I just think that that's really an important mindset to carry into this conversation.
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Yeah.
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And Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, right?
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He said, you can't serve two masters.
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And so, you know, there's an aspect of which in that context, I think he was heading into a sermon, part of his sermon was on money.
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And so money's a great tool.
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Like AI is a great tool, but money's also a terrible taskmaster.
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And so, if AI becomes our taskmaster, if we look to AI and it replaces a sense of
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in our life, it replaces a sense of worship in our life, it replaces a sense of creativity in our life, we can no longer think and create and worship for ourselves, we don't go to
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the scripture itself, that's unhealthy.
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We know that's unhealthy because the Bible tells us that's unhealthy and God would never want you to relate to him in that way.
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And so that's not how he tells God has told us in the Bible how he wants us to do ministry, not just what he wants us to do.
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And so there's no substitute for praying.
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You need the Holy Spirit's help.
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AI is not sufficient to do what the Holy Spirit does.
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um And so...
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he cannot be replaced.
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The Holy Spirit is a person.
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It's not just information.
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It's not just influence.
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It's not just power.
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He the Holy Spirit cannot be replaced.
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Another thought about you know, we were making kind of a parallel there.
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AI can help us communicate the message, but we dare not allow AI to create our message for us.
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And I just think another
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dichotomy for us to be thinking through when it comes to AI.
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I think there's all kinds of ways you mentioned finding illustrations, I think, letting AI help edit our material, think, organize.
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I know a pastor who takes his message and ask AI to create a handout from the message and
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Again, he has to go back and check it just like you would anybody else's work.
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But, but he's, he's allowing AI to help him communicate, but not allowing AI to communicate or to create the message.
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Yeah, I think that's a great example.
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I've seen a lot of other good examples.
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There's a guy in our church that's created a blog for unbelievers to start gospel conversations with them.
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And he uses AI to give him the SEO information for the backend of the website that helps those articles rise to the top when somebody Googles certain keywords.
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And so there are great helps like that when it comes to AI.
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but I think you're exactly right.
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can't replace anything that God has directly to you.
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think also AI can lead to some laziness.
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It can lead to relegating part of our responsibility.
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And so we have to be careful that we're not sacrificing efficiency for excellence.
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There's no shortcut to excellence, meaning
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AIs only as, and I've seen this too, AIs only as good as the pans of the person it's in.
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And so if you're not great at describing and being specific and telling and coming up with good ideas, the prompts will only lead to mediocrity, you know, because yeah, it can shape
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and edit and hone the language of whatever you ask it to do to be great, but it's not going to come up
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with a better idea than what you give it.
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And so it's gonna go right based off what you give it, because it's a language learning model.
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And so if there's this idea of like, I can stop developing myself, I don't have to strive to grow in my relationship with God anymore, I don't have to think about this anymore, I
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can just coast now, that's not gonna end well.
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Paul said whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all for the glory of God.
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He tells us to strive for excellence.
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He's tell us to run the race and finish well and all those things and do hard things.
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And so if we let AI create spiritual ease or ease in our discipleship or evangelism when we seek to stop developing and learning, its answers for you aren't gonna get better if
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you're not getting better yourself.
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So I think that's important.
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that you use AI for?
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I use it for a number of things administratively.
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I'll use it as an editor.
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I'll use it as a designer, a graphics designer, because I'm not a graphics designer.
26:17
I'll use it to write code for website.
26:19
I'll use it for SEO information.
26:21
I'll use it to give me illustrations.
26:28
I'll use it to give me sources of research.
26:31
What I won't do...
26:33
especially when it comes to research, I won't accept the conclusions it gives me.
26:36
So very rarely do I ask it to make a conclusion.
26:39
I ask it to give me source information.
26:41
My favorite AIs for that are, I use the AIs differently.
26:44
So chat GPT is going to be your best writing model.
26:47
Grok and perplexity are going to be your better research models.
26:51
And so there are different strengths to different AIs.
26:54
Some are better at economics.
26:56
Some are better at
26:57
research, are better at writing, some are better at graphics.
27:00
It just depends what the focus of the company is.
27:03
Yeah.
27:05
All right.
27:06
George, we, said this may be a little shorter and we filled up a full podcast with just talking about AI.
27:12
There you go.
27:13
And if you guys have, you know, anything to share with us about AI or what you've discovered, love to see it in the comments below.
27:20
You can email me at george at Exchange Message and all exchangemessage.org.
27:25
I'll give you a shout out, you know, and, and things like that.
27:29
there's any other questions you guys want us to answer about this, let us know.
27:32
We know it's out there and people are using it.
27:34
And so just be careful, be prayerful, be biblical.
27:37
Always go back to the Bible.
27:38
So anyway, we love you guys and we pray with you as you pray with us to the Lord of the harvest that he would send forth laborers.
27:45
AI is never going to be able to do what the laborers need to do in our call to do.
27:49
And so we love you guys and we will see you next week.