March 20, 2024 Show with Ken Powers on “Artificial Intelligence: One Christian Software Engineer’s Perspective”

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This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this 20th day of March 2024.

I'm excited to have a first -time guest today, not only because he has a company that he founded that is truly fascinating that I intend to take advantage of and benefit from, but we're also going to be revisiting a topic that we've had at least twice, perhaps we've had it more times that I can't remember on this program, the topic of artificial intelligence, more commonly known as AI.

We've had Christian folks who are set against this technology, artificial intelligence, and believe that it is nothing but bad news, that we are to avoid it at all costs, we are to seek to bring an end to it if we at all possibly can, through any means that we are able to do such a thing.

And today's guest has a different spin on this topic, and I think it's wise to have members of the body of Christ who have different points of view on issues like this, especially that are non -salvific, be brought to light so that we can decide for ourselves when people who are very knowledgeable about a topic can disagree over it.

But today's guest is Ken Powers, a software engineer and founder of Letts Church, and his professional career in engineering over the last 11 years includes many projects such as Signal, the private messaging application, and who has experience in many technologies.

Today he's going to be addressing artificial intelligence, one Christian software engineer's perspective.

It's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Iron Sharpen's Iron Radio, Ken Powers.

Hi Chris, thank you for having me. Well, it's a joy to have you on the program, and tell us about Letts Church.

Yeah, Letts Church is a company I founded. You can think of it as like a

Christian alternative to YouTube, more or less, free of charge, and there are no pre -roll ads or anything like that.

But that's really only scratching the surface. Everything uploaded to the platform is transcribed into text, and all the transcripts of everything uploaded are fully searchable.

And so, say, for instance, all of Iron Sharpen's Iron is uploaded on Letts Church right now, so you can look for, uh, is that more on my brother?

For listeners who have no idea what that means, during one of my comedic introductions at one of the great debates on Long Island between Dr.

James R. White and Roman Catholic apologists, I think this one may have featured Robertson Jennis as Dr.

White's opponent, but I can't remember for certain. But I said that James White had written a sequel to his book,

Is the Mormon My Brother? And this book was titled, Is that Moron My Brother?

And it was about me. It's just so our listeners understand what that even meant.

Exactly, yeah. So if you actually go to Letts Church right now, it's at letts .church. You type in, is that moron my brother?

And it'll pull up that exact moment. So all the transcript results come up with timestamps, and you can click on the result, and it'll fast forward to exactly where that was said.

I'm also working on a church search and profiles feature right now.

And so people will be able to find biblically faithful churches in their area and listen to all their sermons and search topics they're interested in learning about all from the same interface, and eventually even be able to ask

AI questions like, hey, what does this church teach about total inability?

And it'll form an answer and give you all the timestamps and show you everywhere you need to go in each sermon to learn exactly what you're looking for.

Very cool. Now, do you have this church directory already up? It is not up right now.

The goal is to get it up by May. Okay. Well, I know I'm going to be making use of that, because even though I have very faithful and detailed lists of solid churches all over the world, churches that I would visit and even join if I lived in those areas, are on those lists, there are still churches that have not yet been added to these lists that are excellent churches, and sometimes they're the only churches that are believers in the doctrines of sovereign grace in the areas where my listeners live who are requesting church recommendations.

And sometimes when I can't find a faithful congregation on those lists,

I have to do some more searching, and sometimes I find churches that were listed nowhere.

And after some further investigation and calling the pastor and so on, I find out that these are wonderful congregations.

So I'm sure I'll be making use of the Let's Church directory.

Well, and Chris, I'll tell you this as well. It's being built with embedding in mind.

So I'm building it in cooperation with TruthScript, John Harris' organization, and the idea is that you will be able to embed it into your website and only list the churches in the overall directory that are pre -approved by you, for instance.

So you can have your own Iron Sharpens Iron church search built right into your website and have all the same features, including the transcript search and everything, but for your listeners in churches that you know are solid.

Great. And once again, that website is Let's .Church.

Let's .Church. Of course, there's no apostrophe in the URL for Let's .Church.

And we will repeat that, God willing, later on in the program. Well, we have a tradition here on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

Whenever we have a first -time guest, that guest gives a summary of their salvation testimony, which would include the religious atmosphere, if any, in which you were raised, and what kind of providential circumstances our

Sovereign Lord raised up in your life that drew you to himself and saved you. Yeah.

So my testimony is one that no doubt your listeners are familiar with in our day and age.

By God's providence, I was raised in a Christian home. In my college years, I was basically wayward.

I would have called myself a Christian, but looking back on it now, I recognize that I wasn't.

But after college and starting my professional career, I had a natural drawing.

I knew I wanted to go to church, and eventually I got a flyer in the mail for a church plant in my area, started going there, read through the

Bible cover to cover for the first time, and, you know, like the word says, faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the

Word of God ultimately decided, you know, if I'm going to call myself a Christian, I should start acting like it.

And ever since then, I've been looking for opportunities to apply my skill set and my faith more broadly.

Great. And when did you actually believe that—and how specifically did you believe that you were a person at enmity with God, that needed a new heart, that needed to be rescued from not only your enslavement to sin and the consequences of being in rebellion against God and so on?

Yeah, so all this would have been happening around 2013 -2014, around then.

Yes, and explain in detail what happened. I mean, yeah, it's a very boring story.

You know, it's hard to say, because it was over a very long period of time.

There was no single aha moment. But I can tell you that when I was saved, it was—and, you know, just deciding, you know, like, the outward manifestation of that is like, oh, well, you don't try to weasel out stuff anymore.

Like, you actually take responsibility for things you do. No more swearing. You know, the external conformities, and obviously recognizing that these things aren't just like rules just to get by in life, but that, yeah, like, this is—like you said, you're at enmity with God, and it's the outworking of faith that results in these good works that God ordained for us to walk in, and not the other way around.

I may have not heard you, because I was distracted. A listener question came in already.

Did you say what kind of religious atmosphere you were raised in? Yeah, I was in a broadly

Protestant Christian home. A broadly Protestant Christian home.

Would you mean by that a nominal— I would say more than nominal, but it wasn't like it wasn't

Reformed Baptist or anything like that. It was just like the Church itself would have said

Protestant, but more than nominal. Okay, and were you nurtured by your parents in the

Gospel, in the truths of Scripture? Did you view the Bible as an inerrant—the inerrant

Word of God, and so on? Oh, yeah, absolutely. And so, like, you know, growing up, the

Church would talk about apologetics. My dad would tell me, you know, like, hey, we're

Christians, so you don't do that, that kind of thing. I remember coming home, getting in trouble at school for something

I did, and my mom, you know, directed me, okay, like, let's pray about this, that kind of thing.

Okay, but obviously that kind of thing could take place in nominal homes that just have all -

Oh, sure. That have all -American, old -fashioned morality, and so on.

Like, I'm sure that if I wound up in the living room of Father Knows Best, if you even know what that is, it's a

TV show going back to the 50s and 60s. But that kind of wholesome, all -American kind of home could be as lost as the folks in a brothel, you know?

But they have an etiquette and a respect for God, a reverence towards God, and perhaps the

Bible, a Bible that they may never even read, but they have some kind of a respectful view of it, maybe have it on their coffee table or something.

But, so you believe that your parents were regenerate and born again, and so on?

Yes, I believe that, yes. Okay. Well, let's move on to our subject today.

Our subject today is artificial intelligence, and this is your perspective as a

Christian software engineer. And as you even said to me before we began the program, what is a working definition of artificial intelligence?

Because you have informed me that just like many things in this world, there are people who are totally misunderstanding what this even is or what it means, and they may be unnecessarily jumping to the wrong conclusions and becoming alarmists against it without really understanding what the design and intention of this is and what it actually is to begin with.

So if you could give us what you believe is a genuine definition of AI. Yeah, so the first thing to recognize is that AI is a broad term covering a number of technologies.

The uniting theme is that these are essentially computer programs made to imitate intelligence on the computer.

But what you have to remember is like, let's say you're talking to ChatGPT, one of these large language models out there.

People are impressed and tend to think like, oh, it feels like I'm talking to a sentient being.

But what you're actually talking to is a pile of linear algebra that is just calculating lots of statistics on the fly and coming up with what words and tokens syllables should come after these words in the sentence.

And so you're talking to a very clever mathematical waterfall, but it's not actually thinking.

And that's why I've never really been a fan of the term artificial intelligence, the intelligence part in particular, because there's a difference between knowledge and intelligence.

So a wall clock has knowledge of what time it is, but that wall clock would not be able to intuit or explain to you what that time actually means.

That's kind of what it is when you're talking to these AI chatbots. It has a lot of what we might call knowledge, but it's not actually sentient or thinking or anything along those lines.

It's just statistics on a ticker coming up with all the next words that should come up in the sentence.

So what is it that you are under the impression that the opponents of AI and perhaps especially

Christians who are opponents of AI, but even let's you know, we can include non -Christians because there are like even

Elon Musk is very concerned about the advancement of AI and there are other people that are completely out of a

Christian worldview. What are the things that people are misunderstanding?

Yeah. So what people are misunderstanding is well, there are many angles you could take about this.

Like, you know, people might think of like Skynet and have this like autonomous system that that's like taking over networks and that kind of thing and launching nukes and making sentient decisions.

But even the most state of the art stuff we have right now, you know, it'll like browse the web and quote unquote learn things and make decisions.

But what you have to remember is that all these capabilities are what we give it and what it is ultimately programmed to do.

So it's the threat model is nothing that we're not already familiar with.

And the other thing to remember is that AI can only go as far as the data that it's trained on.

Anything that looks clever or original is actually just random. And so random being the computer science definition of random, which is, you know, obviously we understand that God is sovereign and in control.

And so like random is a weird concept to talk about. But random just means unpredictably distributed across a set.

So I think of the chess match. I forget who it was, but IBM's Deep Blue chess machine.

And whoever was up against this machine, he was a chess grandmaster. He accused them of cheating because it made some deeply complex and clever moves that he didn't understand.

And they go back and look at the logs and it turns out, well, they weren't deep and complex and clever moves.

They were actually just random because they ran out of memory. And so that was the fallback behavior.

So the folks that are basically frightened about AI that I have heard in the media and even on my show, they seem to be more worried and frightened and dismayed about what this is going to lead to.

Now, do you envision that, you know, it may sound comical, but, you know, robots who are learning data and storing it and evolving and changing, you know, may become somehow entities unto themselves, for instance, and start wreaking havoc in our everyday lives and so on.

I mean, in all kinds of things. I mean, even the aforementioned launching of nuclear missiles, that would be more in the computer realm,

I assume, than a robot. But, you know, things like that. I mean, the thing what are you hearing that the people are alarmed about specifically?

Yeah. So I would not be alarmed about something like that, where you have these robots that are learning and becoming beings about themselves.

So you mean that it's not going to happen or you don't care if it does? No, I don't think that's going to happen, because ultimately, if you think about what information is right by the classic creationist definition of information, that it ultimately comes from a mind.

And so AI, like I said, can only go as far as it's trained on. And even if it is learning, it's going to be, you know, quote, learning.

It's going to be learning from A, what's already out there, but then B, what

AI is putting out there. And since AI is only capable of putting out essentially the mean of what humans have already produced, since, you know,

I laid out why it can't actually be clever or creative or do anything actually new, it might do things that are surprising.

But since it's not doing anything new, I think what's more likely is that these

AIs are going to taper off and the progress isn't going to be as exponential as people might expect.

And we've already seen this over the past year. You just look for the discussions online. People are complaining about like chat

GPT not being as smart as it once was. And that's part of what I'm describing right now. And also partly due to the open

AI trying to pull back the capabilities to make it safe in their own eyes.

Safe meaning like, you know, according to like, oh, we don't want it to come up with certain jokes about people that we don't want to make jokes about stuff like that.

So they're they're taming the AI, but also as more content out on the

Internet is generated by AI, it's just going to naturally level off and not grow anymore.

And even any growth that it does make is going to be ultimately contained by.

It's only going to be able to grow to the point of having the average human like output and then no farther.

OK, let's see here. We have a listener named

Burke in Washington, Pennsylvania. Burke says,

From what I understand, there are many people who have been in the limelight recently, are most fearful about the advances of AI because people could easily with this technology make a film, for instance.

It might even be pornographic involving completely innocent people who are not involved in this activity, and therefore they are being slandered in public, humiliated.

They may lose their jobs and all kinds of things in a similar vein where people's identities are being taken and used for evil purposes.

It could even be something as simple as somebody who never endorsed a company or product being used in advertisements where they are getting the benefit of a celebrity, for instance, who is endorsing a company or product when he never in reality did.

Aren't you concerned about this? You know, it's certainly a concern, but I think that's just a concern that we already have to deal with anyway.

It might be harder to detect today, but there are proposed solutions around that.

So being able to prove the source of a particular testimony, for instance.

So there are efforts right now to be able to prove that you created something. And then if something were to come out and claim to be you, then you could prove that you did not actually produce that.

Now, that's now, though, five years from now, 10 years from now.

I mean, I'm considering worst case scenarios here that just have come to my mind while hearing you.

Somebody who says they have a film of someone murdering someone and they create this thing through artificial intelligence.

Could there be, in your opinion as a software engineer, and of course, none of us are omniscient.

We don't know what the future may hold when it comes to advances in technology and how amazing it may become even far beyond our wildest dreams now.

But could there be a film used, a false film,

AI generated film of your next door neighbor murdering somebody? And there is no way technologically that it could be determined that it's a fake video.

There, yeah, there's certainly, you know, fabricated evidence is, I mean, fabricated evidence has been an issue for as long as we've been prosecuting crime.

Right. But but I mean, nothing to that extent. Nothing to that extent.

I mean, which may even lead to courts not even using evidence like that anymore.

Right. Exactly. And so, you know, which is not a good thing. Right. Yeah. Ultimately, we would need to fall back on needing multiple, multiple lines of evidence in order to convict people.

But, you know, you know, there are entire nonprofit organizations today, like I think what the

Innocence Project, they're dedicated to freeing wrongfully convicted, you know, wrongfully convicted felons, we'll say, or criminals based on new advances in DNA evidence.

And, you know, these are people that have spent 20, 30 years of their life in prison, but it turns out that they were innocent and that they shouldn't have been in prison.

So, yeah, that's an issue that we deal with today. And we will certainly need to come up with some, some solutions to these as this technology is advanced.

Okay. We do have a listener in Littleton, Colorado.

Angela in Littleton, Colorado, says, What technology is currently common to most of us that we don't even realize is being produced by artificial intelligence?

And I'm assuming that Angela is speaking about things that we may be witnessing in the media that is innocuous.

It's not something that's harming anybody, but we, I'm assuming that's what she means.

So that, in other words, it's become almost commonplace right now.

And we don't even realize AI is responsible for it. Is there any example of that? Yeah.

I mean, the very first thing that comes to mind is transcription. So everything on Let's Church is transcribed by AI now.

And this is AI that's running on hardware that I own and operate. So it's, you know, that as far as that's concerned.

And, you know, you talk to Siri, that's going to be AI. People are pretty comfortable with that.

You know, in the media, I mean, like, AI is largely statistics and mathematical waterfalls.

So even stuff like your pedometer, that used to be like a little bead that would bounce up and down, and it would count the bounces.

And then that would count the steps. Well, now we have much more sophisticated methods of finding signal in the noise, using

AI to be able to count your steps more accurately, things like that. Now, just out of curiosity, is this interview

I'm conducting with you right now being generated by artificial intelligence? This interview that you are conducting with me right now is, as far as my end is concerned, is generated by non -artificial intelligence.

You'll have to testify for yourself. And, of course, on my end, most of my listeners will attest to the fact of it being not involving intelligence at all.

But you just mentioned transcripts. Can you be detailed in layman's terms everything that you are doing through Lett's Church that is dependent upon or at least extremely benefited by artificial intelligence?

And please use layman terms. I am not a techie, and I'm sure there are many people, especially my age in my audience, that are not as well.

I'm always amazed when I meet people or correspond with people, interact with people who have less technological knowledge than I do because mine is pretty

Neanderthal style. So if you could, just go through some of these methods and ways that you're taking advantage or benefiting by artificial intelligence.

Yeah, so the extent of artificial intelligence on Lett's Church right now is when you upload something and it is transcribed into text.

Basically, how does that work? The first step is that the machine needs to filter out any noise that is not human voices.

And so then it'll essentially have a pure representation of someone talking.

Even if there's background music, you have to filter out that background music and get just the voice. And then using statistics, it'll look at individual words in the audio and essentially come up with candidates for what word could that be?

And sometimes it's ambiguous. And so it goes with the best word that it can come up with.

And then that's all assembled into a transcript. Then there's another

AI process that will insert punctuation and determine where sentences start and end and apply things like capitalization to names, that kind of thing.

Now, for some of the features I was talking about earlier, I'll be taking advantage of an

AI technology known as embeddings, where you can take sentences, basically words, and make a numeric representation of those sentences.

So you can imagine, what if you had a plot of words,

X and Y, where you could put the word goodbye in one corner, but then in the opposite corner would be the word hello.

So those words are far apart from each other on the chart because they're complete opposites.

And so we can think two -dimensionally. We can even think three -dimensionally. But this would be using over 3 ,000 dimensions for sentences.

And so that's going to enable things like semantic search. So it would allow you to search for, at a basic level, total inability.

I'm using an anthropomorphizing term here. It'll know that total inability can also be known as total depravity and find you those results as well.

And that's a really basic example. But you can type in really vague notions of an entire sentence that was said at one point and pinpoint exactly where that was in the transcripts across the entire database.

So the example I used, this is a demo I put together, was searching the Bible using

AI for they meant bad, but God meant good. That turns up Genesis 50, verse 20.

What you intended for evil, God intended for good, that many people would be saved alive to this day. None of the words are the same, but it still finds that verse of all the other verses because of the sentiment and meaning of what you were trying to search for.

And actually, I thought that comes to mind just talking about that.

The listener question was, what's an area of AI that we're all comfortable with, but we don't know about it?

Spam filtering. This is the premise of modern day spam filtering in your email.

Well, we have to go to our first commercial break. If anybody wants to join us on the air with a question of your own involving artificial intelligence or maybe you have some questions about the company founded by my guest, let's church.

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That's royaldiadem .com. We're now back with Ken Powers. We are talking about artificial intelligence, something that he is defending as a software engineer and a

Christian. And if you have a question of your own, whether you agree or disagree with Ken, or you're just not certain, send it to chrisarnson at gmail .com.

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence.

Now, are there any current search engines like Google, for instance, that are making use of AI?

I know that Google is horrible, at least many times in my own personal use of it, tracking down the origins of a quote by somebody where I'm typing in a phrase that is a crucial element of a quote by some person from history or whatever.

And most of the time, just typing in a phrase from a quote is not going to, it does sometimes, but it seems to me in my own use, at least half or even less amount of time, less number of times, will

I accurately be given the source of a quote and perhaps the full quote and the identity of the person who made the quote.

So this goes back to my question, is Google even using this yet? Yeah, Google's using it.

Bing is using it more publicly and forthrightly. Bing is directly integrating with GPT -4.

And there's another search engine that I use from time to time called Perplexity. So if you look for Perplexity AI, that's an

AI -powered search engine. And what that'll do is essentially use a large language model like ChatGPT to expand your search query and find results that are relevant and then form an answer from the content that it finds and link to its sources.

And it'll cite its sources in the answer. Well, why is it then that Google seems to be very horrible when it comes to what

I just said if they're using AI already? You know, I wouldn't be able to speak for Google.

Yeah, well, it just doesn't seem to make sense if this technology is so advanced and if Google is using it.

Like, for instance, they'll get things right like give me liberty and the whole quote, give me death.

And you'll be given the identity of the person when it was said. But, I mean, if you get more obscure about it, things that are not commonly known to your average person very often wind up drawing blanks when it comes to trying to make use of that search engine.

I will say it's a very complicated space to work in.

So, you know, in order to do this on Let's Church, I'm going to need to process everything through embeddings and make all those embeddings that I talked about for everything that's in the index.

Now, for me, that's going to be a much smaller database than what Google has, which is basically the entire world's information.

So with AI, there is a lot of pre -processing involved. And that's one of the differences between AI and actual intelligence is, like, it's statistics and it's pre -trained data.

It needs to be in the corpus already in order to be searched for.

If that makes sense. Yes. And as far—I know that a couple of pastors have mentioned their serious concern about AI generating false translations of the scripture.

I alerted him to the fact that there already are false translations of the scripture.

I mean, the New World Translation being one of them and some liberal attempts at providing modern translations that are not faithful to the

Greek or Hebrew. But what about those kinds of things where fabrications are being created by AI and deceiving people?

And it doesn't have to be what I just mentioned, but other scenarios. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's kind of like what you just said.

Fabrications are something that we deal with already. All throughout history, there have always been fabrications.

I think, really, technology will advance to being able to detect fabrications more quickly.

That's an optimistic view. I mean, that example you just talked about, like you said, there's already the

Queen James Bible. There's already the Book of Mormon. There's already the

Jehovah's Witness translation of the Bible. We don't need advanced technology to deceive people.

All right. We have to go to our midway break right now. If anybody has a question, please submit it to ChrisArnson at gmail .com.

ChrisArnson at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name, at least city and state and country of residence.

Please be patient with us. This is a longer break than normal in the show, as the middle break always is.

We'll be right back after these messages. I'm Dr.

Joseph Piper, President Emeritus and Professor of Systematic and Applied Theology at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

Every Christian who's serious about the Deformed Faith and the Westminster Standards should have and use the eight -volume commentary on the theology and ethics of the

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For details on Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia, visit heritagepresbyterianchurch .com,

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As always, give us your first name, at least your city and state of residence, and your country of residence, if you live outside of the

USA. We have Cyril in Raven, Nebraska, and Cyril says,

Are you opposed to any kind of advancement in technology, or should

Christians always just sit back and approve of and take advantage of and seek benefit from any and all technological developments and advancements?

Yeah, well, so you and I were talking about this right before the call, right? The obvious examples that come to mind of things that we can, that we oppose are things like implanting wombs in men, other genetic experiments, the current, what we currently see with, you know, surgeries to make people look a certain way, we'll say.

Oh, you mean like so -called transgender surgery? Yeah, yes.

And so you are, you're speaking though exclusively about biological and medical things.

I mean, that's just the first example that comes to mind. I would have to take it on a case -by -case basis. But yeah, biological experimentation is certainly an easy one to say, like, yeah, we shouldn't mess around there.

How about, I mean, this would definitely involve biological developments, medical developments.

Things like we have heard about for years, I mean, perhaps it's even being done now, and I'm not aware of it, but the proverbial computer chips being implanted in someone's brain.

Now, I could understand for certain reasons things like that, like even the late

Rush Limbaugh had something surgically implanted near his ear,

I believe it may have been in his brain, that enabled him to hear much more clearly after being nearly completely deaf, and, you know, things like that.

But what about other things that just are being done to, like, normal and healthy people that may be done in the future under the guise of improving their intelligence and making their brains more like computers and things like that?

Yeah, so the most present example today is

Elon Musk has a startup that's working on a brain chip, right? And their present use case is enabling paralytics to currently, like, the current iteration is like controlling a mouse on a computer, but their idea is to be able to control limbs eventually, right?

So I would say that would be a positive development.

A paralytic is the same as a paraplegic? I'm not familiar with the term.

Oh, sure. Yeah, that's what I meant to say. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, just someone who's paralyzed.

Right. Yeah, being able to move artificial limbs and stuff like that. As for, like, going, so that's a chip that's, like, reading your brainwaves and going in that direction.

As for the other direction, like, putting thoughts into your head and, like, interacting with a computer that way, I'm not familiar with any advancements or anything going in that direction.

My thought on something like that potentially happening would be more or less my thought on augmented reality, which is, you know, people might want to do it.

You know, you see people walking around with the Apple Vision headsets. I would say not so much for me.

I think I kind of want to be present in the world.

My view of, you know, you go to the Apple marketing page and you see, like, every picture is a person sitting alone on their couch with the

AR headset on. Well, what if you want to sit on the couch with other people? Are you all going to be sitting together with your

AR headset on? That, you know, kind of awkward. But I'm not aware of any advancements going in that direction for, like, brain chips, for instance.

When you say that you're not aware of any right now, could you, from your experience as a software engineer, can you see that it would be no shock that things like that are on the not -so -distant horizon?

I would personally be shocked if it was on the not -so -distant horizon. I could see it being a far -future thing.

But, yeah, I would be more in the shocked category for the near future on that.

Okay. We have Marion in Floyd, Kentucky.

And Marion says, can you spell out in clear, understandable language, what are the many benefits that advancement in this area of artificial intelligence have in store for not only the general population but specifically the church?

Yeah. So the general population, you know, uses of AI today.

We talked about some of them. Spam detection, fraud detection in banking, that kind of thing.

So, you know, we were covering, like, what if someone makes a video of me doing something nefarious?

Well, the other end of that is, like, there is AI finding someone using your bank account fraudulently and then shutting that down and then saying, hey, look, we caught someone trying to use your actual assets.

For benefiting the church, I would just point to my own company, Let's Church. It's providing searchable transcripts for everything that's uploaded to it, and the capabilities are going to be expanded as time goes on to help the body of Christ learn and help people find biblically faithful churches.

So just as you were mentioning before, you're talking about this directory that you're envisioning having.

Yes. Yeah, the directory that I'm working on. But even as Let's Church stands today where you can search the

AI -generated transcripts of everything that's uploaded. Okay.

We have Laverne in Wheatley Heights, Long Island, New York. And Laverne says, what are the things that your company currently uses that are specifically involving

AI? Well, you've already mentioned that. So this may be from an earlier point in the interview where Laverne sent it in before, or she perhaps you tuned in late.

But do you have anything to add? Yeah, I can be specific. I am using

OpenAI's Whisper model running on my own hardware. So OpenAI, the same company that made

ChatGBT, made an open -source model called Whisper, translated on something like 600 ,000 hours of audio to turn audio into text.

Thank you, Laverne. And by the way, if any of my listeners who have submitted questions today are first -time questioners, please let me know.

Because if you are, you have won a free New American Standard Bible, which will be shipped out to you by Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com.

cvbbs .com. I work on an honor system. And therefore, if you claim to be a first -time questioner,

I'm going to believe you and send you out the Bible. And we thank cvbbs .com

and also the publishers of the New American Standard Bible for their generosity in making these free

Bibles available to our listeners. And I was just about to ask you something, and it flew out of my head.

Well, I'm a guy that has arranged public moderated debates for decades, going back to 1996.

I love arranging debates. Some people hate debates. Some people love them. Some people could care less either way.

I happen to love them when they're done well. Can you imagine or envision yourself being in a debate or even more than one debate with opponents of AI?

And what challenges to your view on this do you expect may arise from?

And perhaps you could even include in the answer to that statement what you view as the worst scenario of misinformed opposition to AI.

So, yeah, I think that the toughest question is, you know, you mentioned it earlier.

The toughest issue to deal with is the fraud issue, like people fraudulently making things about you, saying something, doing something nefarious, stuff like that.

In fact, there's even a documentary right now. It does not show in the documentary any clear pornographic imagery.

The whole documentary is about a person,

I believe it was a college student, seeking revenge on girls that he knew by creating these false videos of pornography that had the women that he knew, their faces were put on other women's bodies.

And apparently from what the documentary was setting forth, they looked very realistic.

So that's just one example that something that's happening right now. Yeah. And so I would say the proper solution to handling something like that would be better counter technology to detect fakes and along those sort of lines rather than trying to disable

AI as an entire field. Especially understanding what AI is. You know, I use this term earlier, piled linear algebra, just a bunch of statistics like a whole lot of statistics.

It's really hard to ban math. People talk about this with encryption. We have to ban encryption.

Now, you mentioned at the start of the program, I used to work at Signal, the encrypted chat company that has its own uses, positive and negative as well.

But ultimately, it's impossible to ban things like encryption because you can't ban math.

So the proper solution is better countermeasures,

I'd say, rather than outright bans of an entire class of technology. Let's see.

We have Jeremy. And I know I'm going to mispronounce the city, North Dakota, Wapeton, W -A -H -P -E -T -O -N,

North Dakota. And Jeremy says, some friends have created very humorous recordings through an app that they have where their voices, when spoken into the microphone involving the app, are changed into the voices that are identical to celebrities.

Is there a way of detecting that this is a falsely created statement or recording of someone saying something that they never did?

And I'll give you an example of that. A pastor friend of mine, as a joke, he sent me a recording of Joe Biden endorsing

Iron Sharpens Iron radio. And it sounds exactly like Joe Biden.

Now, could you somehow run that recording through some kind of software and say, oh, this is fake?

I am not personally familiar with the countermeasures in that particular field.

But you know of its existence, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. Like I made an audio recording of my pastor saying that he likes pineapple on pizza.

Now, in that particular instance, there were some tells in the audio.

Like you could tell this sounds vaguely robotic. And I mean, that's the case with all these things right now is that they sound vaguely robotic on their own.

The tricky thing would be more like you take that AI generated voice and put it on top of like a crowd of people, like the sound of a crowd of people.

And so it sounds like you're recording someone in a crowd. Then that would make it harder to detect for sure.

So I'm not personally aware of the countermeasures, but I have no doubt that there are people working on that kind of thing.

And there's even like I said earlier, there's more from the artist perspective, like people not wanting their art to be ripped off.

Right. There are proofs or rather there are technologies in the works to be able to prove that something is original and from you rather than generated from AI trained on your work.

Like the image of an actual actor or actress appearing in something that they never appeared in and were never paid for.

And in fact, I just mentioned it earlier in the program, advertisements that I've even seen pop up on Facebook and so on, where you see celebrities endorsing something.

And you could tell by the lip movement that it's not quite in sync, almost like a bad

Godzilla movie. And you could tell that the person is not saying this.

In fact, I've seen a number of the – or at least several of the more well -known

Fox News hosts endorsing products that it seems patently obvious that the people themselves are not saying what they are being depicted as saying in these videos.

Honestly, I think if we're talking about product endorsements, the easy thing right now is that you can just ignore product endorsements from celebrities because you know they're being paid.

Right, that's true. So if it's fake or if it's real, my response is the same in any case.

But if you're the celebrity being ripped off, that's a different story. Yeah, absolutely.

So in that case, then you would be able to prove – you prove the positive case.

You prove this is something I put out rather than you prove that that's a fraud that someone else put out, right?

I'm not even sure what you meant by that. So there are ways to prove that you created something yourself using public key cryptography, which is the same way all encrypted communication works.

When your computer connects to your bank server, how does your computer know that that's your bank server rather than someone who set up a clever website that says, hey, yeah,

I'm the bank? And the answer is through public key cryptography.

So you're able to attest to the identity of something that you created this.

And then if someone were to make a fraudulent version of you saying something, then you would say – you wouldn't prove that you didn't make it, but you would say

I didn't make that and I didn't – I'm attesting that these things over here are what

I made and I'm not attesting to that. And we have

Bree, just like the cheese, Bree from Choctaw, Oklahoma.

And Bree says, can you provide a list, no matter how short it may be, of significant theological men who have endorsed

AI and are not apprehensive about the advancement in this technology?

No. I can name private individuals in my life.

I'm not sure if they would want me to put their name out there, but no, I don't have a list of theologically, et cetera, men to put out there, no.

Okay. That might be a good thing to work on. Yeah. Take a survey of the men that are involved in what you're doing with Let's Church.

I believe Alpha and Omega Ministries is involved in that as well, right? James White. Yes. Yeah.

So Alpha and Omega Ministries was the first channel up on Let's Church, and James White was my first demo for Let's Church before it was even incorporated.

And so I certainly owe a lot to him. So he is the first person that came to mind, but I did not want to speak for him on endorsing the entire category of AI technology.

Oh, and neither was I intending that by bringing him up. So I just want to make sure that was clear too.

Especially since AI is such a broad umbrella, right?

So does James White endorse the use of AI to transcribe all of his content going back to 1998 and make it searchable?

Well, yes, because he volunteered and he talks about it on his show all the time. Does he broadly endorse

AI? I wouldn't be able to speak for him. But right now,

Let's Church does have 48 channels, so I could say that all of those men certainly endorse

AI to the extent that it is currently used. But yeah, I don't have a comprehensive list for endorsing

AI as a broad umbrella of technology.

Okay, we have a listener in Grapevine, Texas.

Chuck wants to know, how did the term artificial intelligence come into vogue?

What exactly is meant by that? And I'm sorry if this was already asked earlier.

Yeah, you know, I don't know the history of how that term came into vogue.

I've never been a fan of the term myself. I've always had heavy emphasis on the

A for artificial, since it really is just a computer that's been programmed to mimic intelligence, right?

But I know some of the early work was on the artificial neuron.

So just speculating that this idea around the artificial neuron and really just the sci -fi fantasies of the past.

You know, you think the Jetsons and Rosie the Robot and stuff like that. You think of all the other fiction,

Skynet we talked about, Jarvis from Iron Man.

There has been this sort of impetus within us to create something that is like us, right?

So as for the technical origins of the term itself,

I wouldn't be able to say exactly. OK. We have

Lee in Bourbon, Mississippi. And Lee says, can you think of at least one argument against the advancements in artificial intelligence that you think is a credible argument?

Well, I certainly think there's credibility in the fraud argument that we've talked about.

I just don't think that the solution would be to, you know, to put it bluntly, ban math.

I think the solution would be to come up with adequate countermeasures. So basically you're saying that any of the nightmarish scenarios that you believe that could occur and rise up as a result of AI, we shouldn't be overly concerned about those, but we should be hoping that brilliant men and women develop ways to counteract against those things.

I might change the wording a little bit to, you know, maybe not use the word nightmare scenario versus just hope that people create and like not worry.

But there certainly are brilliant people, as you say, working on working on these countermeasures that we talk about.

OK, let's see. We have

Lacey in Copeg, Long Island, New York.

And Lacey says, what are the biggest hurdles that you see involving

AI that the church needs to overcome? I'm not 100 percent sure

I understand Lacey, but maybe you do. Yeah, the biggest hurdles.

I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is, you know, it's been the headlines like an

AI generated sermon or even like a service led by AI now.

So that latter example is of a very liberal church. Right. But I would say, you know,

I think the thing to avoid would be the temptation to be like, oh, well,

I'm just going to have this thing write my sermons for me and claim it as my own. And that actually can already happen, can't it?

Oh, yeah, yeah, that can happen. And so, like, you know, there's a whole spectrum here. Like, we would all probably agree that spellcheck is like an

A -OK technology to use in writing your sermons, right? By the way, just want to let you know that spellcheck or autocorrect 99 percent of the time ruins or falsely changes nearly everything

I'm trying to write, and especially in a text. Like, especially with autospell, it will write words that I never intended to write, just because of the first couple of letters that I'm typing.

Sure, yeah. I don't know. You might be intending to write some very interesting words that are very unpredictable.

No, just like the word the. But anyway. I don't know.

Sounds like you might need to turn it off and on again. That's a that's a classic solution there, right?

Or hit it with a hammer or something. Yeah. So, like, on the spectrum of, like, spellcheck in my sermons to AI has generated my entire sermon transcript for me.

There are other areas worth discussing, like I have this paragraph that I wrote and I just can't

I have like writer's block right now and I can't think of a way to make it flow better. Is AI a valid use there?

You know, stuff like that. Grammar correction would be another thing to consider there.

Let's see. We have. I was just looking at a question.

Oh, Arnie in Perry County, Pennsylvania. And Arnie asks, can you give in several minutes your best presentation on why we should not fear and make use of artificial intelligence?

Yeah, I'm assuming he meant two different things by that. Not that we should not make use of artificial intelligence, but that we should not fear.

And we should make use. OK. Right. Yes. That we should not fear artificial intelligence and that we should advance it.

So just keeping in mind that it is a tool like any other tool.

And so it comes down to how it is trained and how how we use it.

So the reason not to fear it. So if we're talking about the, you know, the large language models that are so popular and in vogue right now.

They I said this in other words earlier, but they can't actually do anything creative.

They can only do essentially what they've been trained on, the mean output of of humanity.

And as more and more AI generated content goes on the Internet, then new AIs are trained on what

AI has previously generated. And then it kind of just levels off and doesn't really do anything interesting anymore from from that point forward.

And so as for why we should advance it, being a tool, you can just use it to do the things you currently do, but do them more effectively.

Do things faster. I use large language models in my programming work to write boilerplate code makes it a lot easier to write out large blocks of code that, you know, you have to review it.

You have to. I remember the initial demo of an

AI called GitHub Copilot. Their initial demo had was introducing security vulnerabilities into code.

So, you know, you still need to be. You still need to understand what the

AI is doing and writing for you in terms of code, but it does make writing monotonous boilerplate code a lot easier.

And a lot faster. OK, we have

Raleigh in Adams, Tennessee, and Raleigh says, are there any instances of which you are aware where students, whether in high school or college, have used artificial intelligence to cheat on exams?

I am aware of instances where students use it to write their papers.

As for cheating on exams, I mean, well, that would be that would be related, obviously.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like cheating on exams, you know, like if you're talking about like people using their cell phones in the exam room,

I'm sure that thing kind of happens. I haven't seen anything in the, you know, in the headlines.

Well, on the opposite end of this is, you know, I have seen a story about a teacher putting a student's paper into ChatGPT and asking, did you write this?

And ChatGPT said, oh, yeah, I wrote that. Now, of course, ChatGPT doesn't have a memory.

And it was actually just hallucinating that answer. So it was that it was that it was that a correct answer, though?

No, it wasn't in that case. So, in other words, the student was being falsely accused, for lack of a better phrase, by artificial intelligence.

Yeah. And so, you know, that also leads to this interesting thing to to think about.

So I sent you that that Twitter thread before the show of of a certain individual trying to exegete

John Chapter six using AI. Right now, the initial prompt, the initial question that he asked,

AI was not given. But anyone who's used these technologies for long enough knows that you can kind of really, even without realizing it, you can kind of give hints and leading like leading in your questions.

You can ask leading questions and get the AI to answer kind of how you want it to. So that's certainly a danger to be aware of.

You know, you can't take what AI is putting out as gospel truth because all it's trying to do is say what words, syllables, punctuation, etc.

tokens it's called statistically should come next after this, like after this question as a part of this answer.

And so, you know, asking leading questions, it will hallucinate the answer that you are that you are looking for.

Yeah. When it comes to artificial intelligence involving the

Bible, do people have to be aware of the existence and I don't know if there is an existence of artificial intelligence software that is coming from a specific presupposition?

For instance, you ask artificial intelligence, is Jesus God from the

Bible? And you know, if it's if it's coming from an Aryan or a

Jehovah's Witness point of view, or even an Orthodox Jewish point of view, or what have you, the answer is no.

But obviously, if you're a theologically sound presupposition and being involved in the development of that particular artificial intelligence software would be yes and giving you examples of why.

But is that even a thing where there are there are artificial intelligence applications that are unique to certain theological perspectives?

Um, yeah, yeah. So if you sign up for a chat GPT plus or pro, not sure what their subscription plan is called.

But they have a feature called GPT is where you can essentially chat with these instances of chat

GPT that are referencing a, like a knowledge database. And there's one in there for monergism .com.

And so you can ask questions, and it will only reference the content from monergism .com.

As for like a generic, I'm just going to chat GPT, I'm not using any of these specific things, it is going to answer the question from the broad knowledge base.

And so that's really just going to depend on what it was trained on as a whole. You know, and it was certainly trained on, you know, content from all across the internet and not only one theological perspective.

Well, we have to go to our final break right now. And if anybody wants to join us, our email address is

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and I'll put Pastors Luncheon in the subject line. We're now back, and if you could, Ken, I want you to summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today in regard to this subject of AI.

Yeah, I would say AI is not something to be feedered, but it is a tool like any other and that used rightly and trained rightly and done with the right motivations can help you do the things you already do, but do them faster and more effectively and let you get more done.

All right, well, I want to make sure our listeners remember your website. It's lets .church,

L -E -T -S dot church. Thank you so much, Ken Powers, for being on the program today.

I look forward to what the future has in store for our involvement with one another and I'm thankful that you have opened up a new avenue for Iron Trip and Zion Radio to be introduced to the public worldwide.

So thank you very much for initiating that connection with Iron Trip and Zion Radio. Thank you,

Chris. And I want to thank everybody who listened today. I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater