AI Not Just Science Fiction Anymore. Should the Church Embrace It?
Artificial Intelligence or AI is seen by many to be a brave new frontier of technology, one that will make our day to day lives simpler, easier, and more efficient. Yet for all the benefits this technological revolution promises, there is a growing concern among tech experts, lawmakers, and faith leaders that if this technology falls into the wrong hands the results could be detrimental, dire, and quite possibly change the course of humanity forever.
Gloo Chief AI officer Steele Billings believes that while it is natural for people of faith to be a tad apprehensive about this brave new world of bits and bytes, it is his company’s mission to provide trusted AI tools for redemptive purposes as we move forward into the future. It is his mandate to come alongside ministries to assist them in implementing AI strategies to accomplish their mission.
I recently sat down with Billings to discuss the tangible benefits of using AI, some of the pitfalls associated with it, and how churches can benefit from a holistic approach to its associated technologies.
Before we jump into all potential pitfalls of artificial intelligence, let's talk about all the benefits that AI possesses. For example, I recently sat in a meeting and listened to our web developers share how we can use AI to effectively monitor our email boxes and be more efficient in our response time. Also, it would save my organization a lot of money in staffing and administrative costs. So, what are the benefits?
The benefits of AI are becoming more and more apparent by the day. You're seeing it show up in almost every single industry in the world already, whether it's healthcare, data analysis, etc … In the boardroom for example, it's helping board chairs make more strategic decisions. It's helping financial analysis move quicker. It’s in the ministry world. We're seeing it start to help with things like donor analysis, for example. We're seeing it show up in content creation. And we're seeing it start to help church leaders better understand audiences. One of the things that is so important in the ministry world is that we understand the personalization opportunity of AI. AI starts to get to know everything about everything. That’s one of the potential opportunities of artificial intelligence. We believe in the power of a decentralized AI or a democratized AI. So, it's not owned by any one entity or governing body, for example. But it's very democratized. It's an open technology that can be used and adapted in many different ways. And within the ministry context, that's something that we're really focused on, is how do we help every ministry adapt it in their own context and start to apply to the specific jobs to be done by that ministry.
I can’t help but roll back the clock 20 years and think of that Steven Spielberg movie, a film that really seemed like science fiction at the time and something we would never see in our lifetime. Now, as we are seeing, if it’s not here it is very close! Simply put, what are the dangers of artificial intelligence?
One of the dangers of artificial intelligence is actually addressed in one of our first principles that we've launched around our ethical framework for AI. And that is it could easily disintermediate human to human connection. You just mentioned the opportunity to not hire a person, but instead use AI for a role previously held by a human. And we get that, right? That's just an obvious opportunity to save time and money. But that is also dangerous, especially when we think about it in the ministry context. Our bias is that God did not create us to have a relationship with machines, but God created us to have relationships with one another and a relationship with Him. And so we constantly pursue what are God's purposes for AI? Something that we say a lot is that we have a moral responsibility to pursue God's purposes for artificial intelligence. And so, that means staying away from the dangers or the traps of simply looking at it from a secular worldview. A friend of ours says it increases our greatest sin, which is selfishness. That means that we're simply just looking at it from a perspective of, it's going to save us time, and it's going to save us money. No. How does it strengthen our relationship with other humans? How does it strengthen our relationship with God? That's one of the greatest questions we seek to answer with it.
I'm appreciative of Gloo because you guys are coming in and embracing this from a faith perspective. To me, that carries a lot of value, because a lot of companies don't even consider the ramifications of how God fits into all of this.
Totally. We're seeing open AI. For example, there is a company doing great work advancing AI, technologically. They're sort of leading the world when it comes to innovation in the AI space. And their AI tools are by the day getting better at sounding more humanistic. It's almost like interacting with a real human when you're talking to its voice. We see AI as sort of problematic. If I don't know that I'm talking to AI, then you know that that's a problem. We should always make sure that we bring transparency when we're interacting with AI. But we also see the opportunity to bring a Biblical lens to it. That's why we've launched the Kingdom aligned large language model, which means that we can now trust we have transparency and visibility into all the data that goes into our AI. This is so that we can be rest assured that it is Biblically aligned.
On the surface, I can see a lot of benefit for the Church to use artificial intelligence in some capacity. What does AI mean for the Church?
Gloo is a technology company that exists to connect the faith ecosystem. And when we say the faith ecosystem, we mean every local church, every parachurch ministry, the donor and generosity organizations, the technology companies that exist to serve the Church and build technology that helps connect people to others, and connect people to God. That's the faith ecosystem. It is big and it is broad, but it is mighty. And so, having the opportunity to serve and build technology for that ecosystem is something that we are highly focused on. It means that we need to think about the data that goes into it. We’ve got to orchestrate the data.
What is Gloo doing to optimize and best use this new technology?
Great question. Gloo is working to make trusted values-aligned AI accessible to the entire world. And to do that, we really have to think about the entire supply chain of AI. And the supply chain of AI starts at data orchestration. It starts at the right data going in. You've heard the adage of ‘garbage in, garbage out’. If you go to some of the more mainstream AI tools today, people ask questions like, who is God? So, we started a research project early in 2023 called Flourishing AI Research. We asked questions about leading AI models, hundreds of questions related to who is God, or, is Jesus the son of God? Where did the world come from? Who created the earth?
We asked all these big existential big life questions. And what we learned is ‘garbage in, garbage out '. A lot of general content came from the worldwide web, not a whole lot of faith-based values in what we were learning. And so, that led us to a moment where we said, okay, to get to a spot where ministries have trusted values aligned with AI, we have to go to the beginning. We have to go to the data collection. We have to go to the organizations that are creating trusted content. We have to use that content to train large language models so that those large language models could then produce powerful apps. Sort of like Christian versions of some of the more mainstream AI tools that are out there, like chat components. And so, we're launching one of those very soon called Gloo AI Chat. It is a Christian values aligned option for those that are looking for powerful AI tools that are just going to help them in day-to-day life, and help them answer those big life questions through a Biblical lens.
Do you ever see a day where artificial intelligence will control our everyday lives? This is a concept that has the faith community very concerned.
You have these movies that have been coming out over the last few decades about the takeover by machines. This is the idea of a robot army that's coming with these big giant brains. AI will take over what you're talking about. There is this idea of transhumanism or posthumanism. It's the belief that one day humans as part of just natural evolution, will pass intelligence off to the machines. And there are many organizations in the world that believe in that. Well, we are here to say that is very contrary to what the Bible declares. And the Bible is the ultimate source of truth. And so, we don't have to be fearful of the future of artificial intelligence, but we must be on the offensive right now. We must be playing offense and make sure that we are showing up and representing the future of AI. The faith ecosystem has an opportunity right now to still influence the AI models of tomorrow. We do that by showing up and making sure that faith-based Biblical content is present in these AI models.
What do the next three to five years look like for Artificial Intelligence and the Christian consumer?
In ministry, we need to do some education and some work. We're working to convene all the great minds on something called our Trust Advisory Group, which is a collection of some of the greatest minds that really have a Biblical conviction around legal privacy, theology, and other sectors like that to come together and set those ethical guidelines. That's something that Gloo is working on. We believe that we're entering into this era of prosperity for the next three years, but at the same time, we're going to be challenged with very hard questions and very tough decisions that collectively, the Church is going to need to make. And one of those might be around the idea of using AI generated content in ministry.
What about human generated content and the value of it and the value of spiritual discernment that comes with that? The other one that we're sort of watching is the emergence of robotics and specifically humanoid robotics in the world. Humanoid robotics are exactly what you think … robots with human qualities. Tesla is working on their Optimist Bot. They have very big plans for the rollout of that. They're aggressive. They hope to get into the hundreds of millions over the next several years. That means they become much more normalized in our households. You sort of have to be asking the question of when are we going to have that first conversation about humanoid robotics and their role in churches. We're not having that conversation today, but you're asking about the future. And I think that conversation happens over the next three to five years.
For more information on Gloo please visit their website at Gloo.com.
