Okay, Guthrie, you ready? Okay. Good morning, everybody. Come on, boy. My guys are awfully close here. I will swing a lot this week. Be careful.
Let’s start with a word of prayer.
Father, we just thank You, Lord, that we are part of Your family. Thank You, Lord, that You made the way for us to be part of Your family.
As I share this morning, Lord, I pray that the words I say would be Your words; Lord, that I would not misrepresent You and misrepresent Your work. I just pray this in Christ’s name.
The message I want to share this morning is a little more in the current-events space than what we usually have here. As Jerry mentioned, there are a lot of changes going on in the world, a lot of stuff happening, and I wanted to address some of these things and ask: How should we then live in this new world?
Yep, I just have all kinds of technology troubles. Okay, join. Here we go. Okay.
Here’s the agenda for today. We’re going to talk about artificial intelligence. You may think, “Oh, this doesn’t impact me because I’m not really online that much.” Well, this impacts everybody. You would have to really be a hermit living in a cave way up in the mountains for this not to affect you. The fact that you’re here today, it’s going to impact you.
I want to talk about what AI is, what the world is saying about it, and what God’s thoughts are on it. Believe it or not, He has already addressed the issue in Scripture. Then I have some questions that people have asked me, and I’ll answer those questions before we wrap up.
Why are we talking about AI today? Well, it is really shaking things up. This new AI started showing up about a year ago, and it has caused a lot of excitement and a lot of consternation, especially in the press and in the tech industry. The tech industry impacts most of the economy these days in this country, anyway.
People have been asking about it: How should we think about this? Believers are shaken up by it. What is this going to impact? What’s going to happen? What can we expect?
As a note, all the artwork in this presentation, except for one picture, was generated by artificial intelligence. So it’s up to you to guess which one it was. If you think you know which one it was, just raise your hand. You’ll get the prize for the day.
Why am I talking about this today? I’m just some old guy who happens to use a computer.
Well, I’m actually not a Luddite. As most of you know, my current job is to leverage this technology and exploit this technology to sell more of the product that my employer sells. In the past several months, I have really been diving deep into it, and I have been tangentially involved in it over the past year or so.
Hopefully, I come from a little more foundation of knowledge. I always shudder a little bit when people get up and start talking about science when they do not have the science facts right. Hopefully, I have the science facts right in talking about this.
What I want to do is level-set all of our understanding of what AI is—what this AI is—so that it demystifies it. It takes away some of the cloud and smoke from it, and we can see clearly what it is actually doing.
I’m going to boil it down to the very basics so that I can cover it in a few minutes, rather than diving deep into it, which would take a semester or two of data science and computer science work.
What is AI? First, I want to talk about the fact that, in most of our lifetimes, we have seen six technological innovations. Each one has brought major economic changes and gains, but it has also brought spiritual challenges.
The first was commercial mainframes, which really started being adopted in the 1960s and into the 1970s. Those brought great economic growth, but they also turned everybody into numbers. At that point, you went from knowing your doctor, your care provider, and your retailer to becoming a number—a punch card that went through the machine.
Then, in the early 1980s, came the PC revolution: personal computers and personal gaming stations, like Nintendo and some others. These brought, again, great economic growth, but they also brought the spiritual challenge of distraction. They took us away from more mindful things and brought us into a world of very interactive and immersive games in our homes.
The next one was the internet, which really hit the public in the mid-1990s. Again, it brought great economic growth, but it also brought the worst of everything right into our homes: porn and all kinds of bad stuff flowing into our homes twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
After that, on top of the internet, came social media, where all these bad things became more refined and started addressing some of the more insidious, sinful parts of our nature, like envy, lust, and covetousness.
I once read an article by a capitalist who said that whenever somebody came to him to pitch a new company idea for funding, he would always ask them, “What is your deadly sin?” What he meant by that was that if the idea did not address some deadly-sin portion of human nature, he would not fund it. The idea needed to address envy, covetousness, sloth, greed, or something like that. If it addressed one of those things, he knew there would be a better chance of it being a hit, so he would fund that idea.
So the internet and social media are really based on bringing the worst of mankind right into our homes.
The fifth one was mobile technology. Mobile started taking off in about 2008 and 2009 with iPhones. It took all this social media, all this internet, and all this gaming stuff, and now we have it with us twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No matter where we go, we have access to all this stuff. We do not have to be at our laptop or at a desk; we have it with us all the time.
Every one of these revolutions just keeps stepping down, stepping down, as far as quality and righteousness.
Now, the sixth one is artificial intelligence. It is yet to be seen how it combines all this stuff together, but it is going to combine all these things together, and it will further magnify the problems and sinfulness of mankind.
I want to level-set some of the terms I will be using.
Machine learning, or ML, is basically statistics at a large scale, where statistics are used to make predictions. We will talk about that in a minute.
Artificial general intelligence refers to machines that can think and create on their own. We will talk about that in a minute, too.
Then there is AI, which is a marketing term that covers everything—anything a marketer can dream up. They throw it under the umbrella of AI, and everybody thinks it is all AI.
Unfortunately, that is the term everybody uses, and that is the term I will use today to talk about large language models, which are an extension—or expansion—of machine learning, done at a truly tremendous scale.
In the spectrum of technology, on the far left we have basic statistics, which you probably learned in high school or college. I took a statistics class in college and did not do so well. Thankfully, I have somehow remained in the business despite not doing well with statistics.
Machine learning is statistics automated. Then there are large language models, which combine all kinds of statistics and automation together to make even more complex predictions.
Then there is a gap between large language models and artificial general intelligence. Nobody knows how wide that gap is. We do not have artificial general intelligence. We do not have machines that create things, think on their own, are self-motivated, or set their own goals.
I personally think we will never cross that gap, because God has reserved the power of creation to Himself—the creation of intelligence to Himself. This whole area is encompassed within the marketing term AI.
I have been shopping for hearing aids lately, and they have hearing aids with AI in them. It is like, “Ooh.” But it is really just machine learning that is predicting sounds and helping you understand the sounds by predicting what that sound should be.
How does machine learning work? I am going to boil it down as simply as I can.
It looks at past activity using various statistics. Using those statistics, it identifies patterns in that activity and develops an algorithm, or formula, that represents that pattern. Then you can use that formula to predict what is going to happen next based on what has happened in the past.
Does that make sense? Okay, great. All right, you are all data scientists.
A little historical tangent here: this was really all started by a believer, a man named Thomas Bayes, who lived in England in the 1700s. He was a very, very bright individual. He was a Presbyterian minister and a colleague of Sir Isaac Newton. He helped Isaac Newton defend calculus, so everybody who hates calculus can thank Thomas Bayes for the defense of calculus.
Thomas—Reverend Bayes, as he was called—tried to prove the existence of God using math. He wanted to look at the written Word of God, the Scriptures, and see patterns in it that transcended different authors, so that he could identify that there was a hidden hand behind all this writing.
He never finished that work. He developed many formulas, and one of his formulas was used in that prediction. Please take note: there will be a quiz at the end.
But he died before he was able to do that. One of his colleagues took up the work and examined the testimonies of the resurrection. From those testimonies in Scripture, he determined that mathematically there was a 97 percent probability that the resurrection occurred.
That is interesting from a mathematical perspective. We know in our hearts that it occurred because Christ lives in us. We do not need the 97 percent chance.
Large language models are what have risen on the scene recently. They are called generative pre-trained transformers. That is a really fancy name for basically taking a lot of statistics together and figuring out ways to look at words and determine what words or phrases are going to come next.
Then they take this process and train it on literally trillions of words. These models have been trained on much of the internet—they have crawled the internet, Wikipedia, and all these other places—and built up a very complete knowledge of the English language. From that, they can predict how we use words, what questions look like, and what answers follow those questions.
Again, it is trained on a truly massive amount of data. It cost over $10 million just to train a model, and that was just the cost of the electricity—not the engineers, not the computer time, just the electricity costs.
What is it really doing? Here is a quote from an expert on Twitter:
Large language models do not answer questions.
They create things that look like answers
to questions that look like your question.
That is a little mind twist there. You ask it a question; it looks and says, “Oh, this kind of looks like this, and in the past I have seen that before, and here is what follows that.” It does this on both a large scale and a small scale—with words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs—and then generates what looks like an answer from that.
It can be very compelling. It can really look like you are talking to a machine. It analyzes words and phrases, determines relationships between those words and phrases, and then, when you give it a question, it finds things that are similar and predicts what the output pattern would be.
It is all driven by statistics at a very, very deep level. As the Greeks used to say, “It’s turtles all the way down.” Well, it is statistics all the way down in this kind of pattern matching.
But one key thing to take away from this is that it has no idea what the words mean. It has been trained on a trillion words, but it does not know what cat means. It knows that cat is related to feline, canine, mouse, and all these other words, but it does not know what a cat really means.
It does not know what love means. It just knows how love relates to all these other words. If all you know is relations and you do not have a foundation, then you have an amorphous blob that is just floating around in knowledge space. It is not tied down to anything. It is just a bunch of relationships with no actual root or foundation in reality.
So it has been trained on all these words and all this stuff that people have said. It is all on the internet. It remixes it, blends it together, mushes it back and forth, and regurgitates it back to you.
What it is really doing is regurgitating man’s wisdom. It is regurgitating the wisdom of the world.
It is not creating anything new. It is not creating answers, and it is not creating poetry. It is just regurgitating remix poetry from someone else. It is an imitation engine. It imitates how we talk, how we answer questions, and how we write software.
You can actually have it write software for you, and it is imitating what it has learned from what it scraped off the internet about how to write software. The results are very, very convincing, but they are still just imitations.
We have talked about what AI is. I am done with the really technical part. What is the world saying about AI?
I am going to use the term AI from here out just to cover large language models and the whole industry. If it is artificial general intelligence, I will call that out specifically.
The world is in ecstatic panic. Everybody is very, very excited about the things that can be done with AI. It can solve crime, do all kinds of scientific stuff, write contracts, and replace lawyers—yes. It can do all these great things.
My current employer used it to write about 11,000 articles that describe our product, and it did it in a day. That would have taken a couple of years’ worth of time. I know someone who used it to write a birthday card for their mother. It can be used for all kinds of things.
Then there is the panic side of ecstatic panic. People are afraid that it actually might be able to do all these things. What is it going to do to the economy? What is it going to do to our jobs? Are we all going to get killed by Terminator robots?
Well, I think we all know how it ends. We are not exterminated by killer robots or imprisoned by AI. We do not need to worry about that panic.
What does God say about this? You have probably been wondering, “When is he going to get to the ministry part? We are twenty minutes in.” We are here now. We are through the math. Let’s talk about Scripture.
The last time Max spoke here, he mentioned AI. I forgot what you said about it, but it got my gears turning. Okay, how do we address this? What is our stance on this? How do we deal with this new thing coming along?
The next morning, I sat down for my quiet time and read Acts 17. Acts 17 had a pretty clear answer, I believe, to the question of how we live and what the impact of AI is on us. This is what I mean by saying that God already included this in Scripture.
In Acts 17, Paul was in Athens. He was wandering around Athens, and they had all these idols and all these philosophers. Athens was kind of like Silicon Valley. It was the center of culture.
If you think about our world today, Silicon Valley is really the center of culture. So much digital stuff is happening there. Social media is happening there. Movies are produced by people who live there. It is kind of the gravitational center of Western—actually, of world—culture now: not New York, Hollywood, Paris, or London, but this strange little place out in California.
Like Silicon Valley, Athens was where all these smart people gathered to talk about smart things, have smart conversations, realize how smart they were, and just be smart together.
When Paul was there, Luke apparently was with him, because Luke wrote Acts in a first-person tone of voice. He said that all the Athenians and the strangers visiting there spent their time in nothing other than telling or hearing something new.
Now all the Athenians and the strangers sojourning there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell or to hear some new thing.
—Acts 17:21
That sounds kind of like the internet. We are all walking around looking for new things. You have to ask: Why are they looking for something new? What was wrong with the old thing? It was because the old thing was not satisfying. They were not finding meaningful, satisfying purpose in that old thing.
In Athens at that time, there were two competing philosophies having arguments back and forth: the Epicureans and the Stoics. The Epicureans were looking for purpose, meaning, and pleasure.
I think we still use Epicurean for people who are really into food—fancy food—but they were looking for purpose and meaning in all kinds of physical pleasure. Then there were the Stoics, who were looking for purpose in a worldly, human-defined system of ethics.
The Stoics eschewed physical pleasure for some form of virtue, while the Epicureans sought after physical pleasure. They were both looking for meaning, both looking for a higher purpose, because what they had was not satisfying. Whenever something new came along, they were hopeful that the new thing, thought, or idea would provide purpose and meaning.
In this mix, Paul got up and gave his famous sermon on Mars Hill. He took a very evangelistic approach to dealing with these very smart people in Athens. He recognized their religiousness, proclaimed the true God, and pointed out what their real problem was.
Part of that is in Acts 17:28-29. He started by identifying the kernel of truth, saying that even their poets had said that we are His descendants.
For in Him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain even of your own poets have said,
For we are also His offspring.
Being then the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and device of man.
—Acts 17:28-29
They had that kernel of truth in their philosophy. Somehow, they knew that they were the children of a god. At another point, Paul addressed the statue to the unknown god that they had there.
Paul directed them to the truth: Since we are descendants of God, we ought not to think that the divine nature is like gold, silver, stone, or an image formed by human skill or thought. If we are the image of God, we cannot turn around and bang on a stone and make it into the god that created us. If we are the image of God, we cannot think an idea and have it be what created us.
What Paul was really pointing out was that what they were looking for was not an idol, but something that really satisfies them. What they were looking for was the divine nature. That is what they were missing from their lives. They were missing that divine nature.
That divine nature is not something that can be formed with human skill or human thought.
In A.D. 51, when Paul was in Athens, there was a divine dissatisfaction. They were not satisfied with their pursuit of pleasure. They were not satisfied with their pursuit of righteousness—a righteousness defined by themselves. They were not satisfied with their plethora of gods throughout the city.
They were not satisfied because they were looking for the divine nature. They knew in their hearts that they were missing something, and nothing they could create would satisfy that.
How does that relate to us today? Well, it is 2023, and there is still divine dissatisfaction. Everybody is looking for the right thing. How can we fix things? Everybody knows something is wrong, but how do we fix it?
We have conservatives thinking that we can fix it by individual liberty and individual freedom, so that everybody can pursue their own satisfaction. We have leftists thinking it is found in the pursuit of individual pleasure and liberty without ethics or any kind of balance.
We are all looking for satisfaction, some way to satisfy that holiness. It is not going to happen, because none of that has the divine nature in it. The world is still looking for that divine nature.
What did Jesus say?
I am the bread of life: he that cometh to Me shall not hunger, and he that believeth on Me shall never thirst.
—John 6:35
He is the source of that divine nature. If we come to Him and believe in Him, we will be satisfied and will not have that desire any longer for all these other ideas, things, and plethora of gods.
If there is only one thing you take away from this message today, take away that only Jesus is the source of our satisfaction.
What is divine nature? You probably all know what it is, but I would go ahead and level-set here. Divine nature is the character of God, the work of God, the Word of God, and the ways of God.
All these things are expressed in Jesus Christ. The true divine nature is conveyed to us through the life of Christ in us. Christ made the way for us to experience, know, and lay hold of that divine nature. There is no other way to experience divine nature.
What is the connection here? How do these things matter when we talk about AI, the Athenians, and divine nature?
Like I said, the world—and us, who are in the world though not of it—has this desire for the next new thing to satisfy. We are all looking for some divine nature in the new thing that happens: a new thought, a new philosophy, or a new technology. We are looking for answers.
You could be looking for answers for prosperity. How can we make things better? How can we solve world hunger? How can we have world peace? People are hopeful that AI can bring these things. They are hopeful that it will solve all these perplexing problems.
But our hope should be in the divine nature, not in the thoughts and works of man.
We may be afraid of catastrophe. It is going to kill us all. It is going to take all our jobs. It is going to cause economic collapse. It is going to take our freedom. We will not have privacy, and we will not be able to have freedom.
But our hope should be in the divine nature, not in the thoughts and works of man.
Does AI have divine nature? No. Okay, a simple slide here. No, it does not.
Instead of just giving the short answer of no, why does it not have divine nature? There are three reasons.
First, it is regurgitating man’s wisdom and thoughts. It is rephrasing and regurgitating what people have already said. It has no understanding of the meanings of the words it is regurgitating. It simply says, “Here is all this stuff. I am going to give an answer. Here it is, back to you.”
You might think, “Well, Jack, the machine has been trained on the Bible, too, as part of all this other stuff. It has been trained on great writings about the Bible and the Christian life. Won’t that give it the ability to reflect or regurgitate divine nature?”
Well, if you got a clean glass of water and poured it in the toilet, does that make the sewer clean? It is so diluted that you cannot trust what is in there, because there is so much other stuff mixed in with it.
Second, AI is controlled by man. These models have moderation rules around them that guide what they can and cannot answer. That is actually necessary. Without those moderation rules, they will reflect the nature of man, and it will be horrible.
A couple of years ago, Microsoft produced an AI bot and put it on Twitter to talk to people. Within a couple of hours, it was spewing Nazi anti-Semitic hate, simply because that was what it had been exposed to on Twitter.
So it is necessary to put bounds on what these things can say. But the bounds are set by people with biases. People always have biases. These tools have guidelines that they follow.
If you go talk to ChatGPT and ask certain questions, it will refuse to answer. Ask it for a recipe to make gunpowder, and it will say, “No, it’s dangerous. I’m not going to tell you how to make gunpowder.” You can go find that on the internet if you need to, but these bots will not do that. There are all kinds of questions they will not answer because they think they might be offensive.
Someone asked, “Does AI control us, or do we control it?” The answer is that humans control AI. The boundaries are very clearly put on the bot. But keep in mind that the people who set those bounds may want to control you. It is not the machine controlling you; it is the people who set the bounds and want to control you.
They may think their morality is better. Maybe they think what they are selling is better, and they want to sell you what they have. There are all kinds of reasons they put bounds on it, but they are trying to control you through those bounds.
Keep in mind that the people putting bounds on it are part of the world—Silicon Valley culture. It is the world. As Christ said in His high-priestly prayer, the world is going to hate you. The bounds are put on there by people who dislike Jesus and dislike followers of Jesus.
Why should we trust it when we are seeking the divine, if it is being filtered and controlled by people who do not like us?
Third, AI was created by man. Therefore, it cannot have divine nature. As Paul said in Acts, we ought not to think that we can make divine nature by the works, images, art, or thought of man.
For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he should instruct Him?
—1 Corinthians 2:16
Who knows God so well that they can make a machine to echo the character and ways of God?
Where can we find divine nature? If that is what satisfies us, where can we find it? There are three places: Scripture, the Holy Spirit, and nature.
In the Holy Scriptures, the Bible says:
Every scripture inspired of God is also profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction which is in righteousness:
that the man of God may be complete, furnished completely unto every good work.
—2 Timothy 3:16-17
It is obvious to say, but the Bible is a source of divine nature.
The Holy Spirit is also a source of divine nature: the Spirit of God living within us.
For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.
—Romans 8:14
We have His Spirit in us. We are His sons when we have His Spirit. If we are the sons of God, we will know the Father through His Spirit, and we will reflect that divine nature.
There are many verses we could cover concerning the Holy Spirit in us and the divine nature, but this one specifically calls it out:
Seeing that His divine power hath granted unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him that called us by His own glory and virtue;
whereby He hath granted unto us His precious and exceeding great promises; that through these ye may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world by lust.
—2 Peter 1:3-4
We can also experience divine nature in each other—in our brothers and sisters. We have the Holy Spirit, and we can admonish one another and show each other the divine nature.
The third way is through God’s creation.
For the invisible things of Him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even His everlasting power and divinity; that they may be without excuse.
—Romans 1:20
Anyone who approaches nature and science with an open mind, examines God’s creation with an open mind, and seeks God will see Him in God’s creation.
All three of these areas need to be taken in balance. What we hear from the Spirit in our hearts needs to agree with Scripture. In my case, a lot of times my own desires will overshadow or shout down what the Holy Spirit is saying.
What we hear from each other needs to agree with Scripture. What we hear from Scripture needs to agree with Scripture as a whole. We can read one thing and misinterpret it, but it does not agree with the whole of Scripture. What we see in nature needs to agree with Scripture.
The Lord wants to give us His divine nature without any kind of filter. He stands at the door and knocks.
He did not send a DoorDash guy to bring His divine nature. He came personally and says, “Here is My divine nature. Let Me come in. Let Me share this with you. Let Me eat with you, have fellowship, and share My divine nature with you right where you are.”
We need to be aware and alert of things that come between us and His divine nature—His true sources of divine nature—whether it be a commentary or a large language model. We need to be very, very aware of what is between us and the biases of those who have come between us and the Word of God and the Spirit of God.
What do we do with AI? AI is just a tool. Like any computer program, it is just a tool. AI is a tool for imitating human thoughts and wisdom.
Like any tool, you have to choose the right tool for the job. I remember in shop class, they said that if you choose the wrong tool for the job, it is going to make life harder. It is going to make life more dangerous if you are not using the right tool.
When is AI the wrong tool to use? It is the wrong tool if you need divine nature, because it does not have divine nature. If you are looking for divine nature, it is not going to be there. It may be an abstraction or an interpretation of it, but it is not there.
It is also the wrong tool if you need to reflect divine nature—in other words, if you need to be a testimony to the Lord. That is not the right tool to use for that.
Thus saith the Lord: Cursed is the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord.
—Jeremiah 17:5
If you are going to a large language model looking for an interpretation of Scripture, or looking for how to communicate the testimony of the Lord to somebody, it is not there. It needs to come from your spirit. It needs to come from the Word of God.
When is it the right tool? It is the right tool if you are just looking for the wisdom of man.
For example, if my employer wants to write 11,000 articles about the products we sell, it can chew it out and spit it out. Boom—we have the wisdom of man in 11,000 different articles.
But you should not use it if you are not smart enough to correct it. You cannot trust what the machine is telling you. You have to be able to go back, look at it, think critically about it, ask whether it is really true, and do research to determine whether the information is correct.
It is definitely not the right tool if you need divine nature.
It is like using a calculator. When you started learning math, you had to do it all by hand. Then, after you got to a certain point of proficiency, the teacher said, “Okay, now you can use a calculator,” because we had gotten past the simple stuff that we already knew and could do by rote.
Likewise, with these large language models that can write things for us, we need to be aware that they can cause mental atrophy. If we have them do all the writing for us, our brains become mushy and soft.
It is like always using GPS for navigation: you lose the ability to find your own way. These models can do that to your brain. They can cause writing skills to atrophy, until you forget how to write and forget how to think.
We need to be like the Bereans in Acts. When Paul taught them, they went back and studied the Scriptures to make sure what Paul said was right. They were thinking critically, examining critically, seeking the Word of God in Scripture, and considering what they had been taught, read, and heard to know whether it was true.
We need to keep our minds sharp and be able to think through problems and think through what people are saying. If we cannot think, it is a problem.
One of the questions that was asked was, “What about my job? What is it going to do? What should I do for a living? What is going to happen to all our jobs?”
Is AI going to affect our jobs? Undoubtedly. No one knows yet what impact it is going to have on employment. Some say it will open up more jobs. Some say that it will destroy 300 million jobs. We do not know.
But what we do know is that our purpose is not in our work. Our purpose is in our relationship with the Lord and in obeying the Lord.
Life is more than the food, and the body than the raiment.
—Luke 12:23
What we are doing here matters more than what we eat, how we provide for ourselves, and what we wear. The Lord will provide for us.
Another question: Is AI the Antichrist? Any guesses? Yes? No? It is the world.
Why is it not the Antichrist? First off, I asked it. I asked ChatGPT, “Are you the Antichrist?” It said no, it is not the Antichrist. But then I thought to myself, “That is exactly what the Antichrist would say.”
But it is not the Antichrist because it is inanimate. It is not a person. It is not goal-seeking on its own. It does not decide to go do something. It is answering questions. The people asking it questions are the ones setting its goals.
The people asking it to do bad things are the ones doing bad things. Again, the model is just a machine.
Will it be used by the Antichrist? Yes, undoubtedly. It will be used by the Antichrist because it is controlled by man. It is going to be controlled by people in power, and they will set the bounds on it. They will shape what it says and what it does, and it will reflect their biases.
So yes, I believe it will be part of the Antichrist’s tool set to sway people and deceive them into following him.
What do we do in that situation? We can expect more confusion caused by these tools.
We think 2020 was bad with all the confusion around vaccines—what to do, what not to do, and all this stuff. That is going to be nothing compared to the confusion that can be created by these tools.
We will not be able to trust our eyes or our ears, because it is so easy to create very, very convincing fakes and forgeries. You can imitate someone’s voice with only a few words that they have spoken. You can make movies of people doing things they have never done, add their voice, and create very convincing and cheap-to-produce fakes.
All this fakery and misinformation is going to be exhausting. It will be brother against brother. Somebody sees one thing, and somebody else sees something else and believes something else. There will be all kinds of contention, and it is going to be exhausting. It will wear us down because we will not know what is real.
We will be living in a completely relative world where we do not know what the truth is. Like this picture, which is an AI-generated fake of the pope wearing a puffer jacket. It was a very famous one because it stirred up controversy about how easy it was to produce these fakes.
What do we do? We need to cling to the Rock. He is our firm foundation.
He only is my rock and my salvation:
He is my high tower; I shall not be greatly moved.
—Psalm 62:2
My refuge is in God. In all this world and all this confusion that is going to be coming, we need to cling to the truth of the Lord. We need to know that He is loving, He is kind, and He is our Savior.
I think that is a good place to stop.
Before I close, since this is a current-events kind of talk and it is kind of new, I wanted to open up the floor to see if there were any questions that I would be able to answer.
Question: With word processing, it has gone beyond spell-check. Very often, you are typing and it predicts what you want to say, but it is not what you want. If you do not read carefully what you have, it will change all kinds of things—not just sometimes the spelling of someone’s name. I kind of do not like it anymore, since it is changing my words.
Response: The question is, what about word processing that suggests things to write? Again, is it the right tool or the wrong tool? If you are writing a letter to your insurance company, whatever—that may be one thing. But if you are writing something in which you want to share the divine nature or the testimony of the Lord, make sure it is the right thing.
Read, read, read. Spell-check it. Correct it. Is that what you really want to say?
Question: Legislatures are now considering regulation of AI. Do you think that is going to be a way to control it?
Response: The question was about regulation of AI. Will that be a way to control it? No, it will not. Again, it goes back to who is controlling the machine. It will be the same machines controlled by the same people.
Also, you cannot regulate math. It is just math that is going on. Any regulation you try to put on the use of it, people will find a way around it. There are all kinds of regulations about everything, and they do not stop people from doing bad things.
The cat is out of the bag. I do not know who put the cat in the bag the first time, but the cat is out of the bag. No question.
Question: What about devices some of us have in our homes that you can ask questions, such as Alexa? You can say, “Alexa, turn off all the lights.” Sometimes they say they do not have that information. Can they be taught that information?
Response: Yes, they can be taught that information. Future versions of Alexa, Google Home, and Siri will have access to large language models that can have a much more compelling conversation.
Question: Are they able to hear what you are saying and put that in their bank?
Response: There is evidence to show that they are not listening all the time, but there is nothing technically stopping them from doing that. Anyway, whether Alexa is listening or not is kind of outside the purview of the message.
Question: In China, people were trying to translate Brother Kong’s books. I told them, “Go ahead and translate one chapter, and I will take a look at that.” It came out, and I believe they used Google Translate. Is that AI too?
Response: Google Translate and these translation programs are AI-driven, yes.
Question: We found mistakes because many Chinese words can have the same sound and pronunciation but different meanings. That was one way we figured out that they were using automatic translation. So it is AI—artificial intelligence—but it is not great.
Response: Yep, it has issues. The question was about AI translation not working very well with Brother Kong’s books. That is true. The words we use here in our assembly are different from what mainline Christianity or the world uses, so it is going to have trouble with that. There is not as much information to train it on, so it is not as accurate.
If you have ever watched the live transcriptions on YouTube, it will transcribe for you, and it is hilarious how bad it can be. It gets all kinds of things wrong.
Let’s go ahead and wrap up there. Some things to remember: AI is just a regurgitation of man’s thoughts and wisdom.
We need to seek God through His Word, through His Holy Spirit, and through His creation. As the turmoil comes, caused by all this technological change and cultural change, we need to cling to the Rock of our salvation.
We need to remember that only He satisfies. These new things are not going to bring satisfaction. Only the Lord brings satisfaction.
Father, we just thank You, Lord, that You are our Rock and our salvation. We do not need any new invention, new statistics, or computer programs to make our lives complete, for You provide satisfaction for us.
We just pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.