Careful Study with AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful technology that is becoming part of our lives, including religion. At work, we are asking questions in ways we never could before and getting better and faster answers. AI works by searching vast amounts of text to predict the next likely word of an answer to generate human-like responses. However, it requires careful handling and supervision for reliable answers. Last year an AI’s religious “authority” was revoked by Catholics after it started giving members strange answers like Gatorade is suitable for baptism. When using AI, consider these points:

Input matters: Your requests are like a survey question; the answers will depend on your wording. You may want it to search scripture but small things like these could cause it to search through “church of Christ” writings instead: consistent use of scriptural naming, lower case use of “church”, questions requesting Biblical authority in the answer, avoiding denominational language, or separating the Biblical perspective from the denominational? Someone asking about similar topics with different wording may get pointed to different conclusions. People (even researchers) have been misled about the brilliance of these tools because of the surprising way it seems to understand questions and the person asking.

Human Biases are built-in: We were warned to pay attention to security issues because they are in the data. AI is trained on a large amount of human writings with a mix of both divine truth, irreligious material, religious fallacies and man-made assumptions. It can be difficult to determine exactly where it gets each part of the response. Scripture references may not come directly from searching the Bible. They might even be invented by AI.

Be more educated than the answer: Since AI can provide a variety of answers with a difficult to discern mix of scripture and tradition, you have to be able to critically evaluate if the results match the truth. We’ve found it can construct flawed arguments which can be difficult for even experts to identify. You shouldn’t lean on it as an inerrant biblical expert.

I used AI to help with this article; it saved time and provided useful information. However, I checked everything. Treat AI answers like a book or article from an unknown source: a learning tool, but not a substitute for personal study. 1 Jn 4:1 “Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.” You know that many false teachings are accepted in our culture and those are some of the things that AI is trained on. Compare all that you receive (from AI or not) to the word of God.

-Bryan Norris

#MaysvilleMessenger