Since ChatGPT launched last year, AI has dominated headlines, with its great benefits and real abuses being hotly debated worldwide. Without question, AI is poised to transform how governments, companies, ministries, and individuals manage information and engage in problem-solving. But how should Christians respond to this emerging technology? 

In this podcast, Scott Brown and Jason Dohm, joined by Church and Family Life Technical Lead Colton Neifert, explain how technology, at its core, is a means to do things more efficiently, which Christians should welcome, when used rightly, as a means for godly dominion. Though AI can be harnessed for evil, Colton explains the exciting new ways that Church & Family Life has employed AI to offer thousands of new online resources to build up Christians, as well as new innovative tools that churches on the FIC Network can use to encourage their congregations. 

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. We've got Colton Neifert with us today, longtime employee to talk about AI and how we're using it with our thousands of resources to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture. Hope you enjoy the discussion. Okay, so Colton, you handle all of our IT, our website, our AI. Yes.

Yes, sir. Hey, Colton, we've been working together for over a decade. Yep. You were, you were an intern here when you were a baby and you never left. That's right, I'm happy to stay.

Man, I'm so glad you stayed. Wow, especially now, you know, we're using AI. You're kind of leading the charge on that. Our view of technology is use it to take dominion. The tools allow tremendous efficiency.

You get 100 personal assistants out of technology, you're constantly working on efficient, making things more efficient in everything. There are things that we used to do that took a lot of time to check and now they just are done automatically. We have these little personal assistants that work 24 hours a day on the website. It's pretty neat. Yeah, I really enjoy it.

Super fun. So we're here to we're going to talk about AI. Okay, It's a fun conversation. And I think for the way that we're using AI, and we wanna talk about the way we're using AI, but I'd like you to explain it in a few minutes. But we believe we have a duty to maximize our time.

And so that's why we use the tools. And that's why we're so delighted with what you do for us. But there are two ways to use AI. One, you can use this vast data set in the world that AI pulls from, or you can isolate your data set. That's what we do.

We use AI internally from our own sermons, our own writings and things like that. So the data has integrity, at least it has as much integrity as we do. Right, right. And that's sort of the problem with all AI and that is that it's created by fallen creatures. Yep.

And so, you know, and sometimes stupid creatures, somebody called it, AI also stands for artificial stupidity. Yeah. Because it grabs from the zeitgeist and tells you well, that's not how we're using it. Right, right But anyway, let's just talk about it. What are What are some of the dangers of AI?

Yeah the dangers I mean just like anything there's plenty of potential, you know for for harm and You know Technology at its core always just enables you to do what you want to do more efficiently. There's plenty of destructive power there for sure. Like any technology, it has the power to change the way that you think and actually shape your soul. So it matters where you get your information. That's one of the great dangers.

Right. I think one of the things that we've talked about as far as dangers too is, just in our sphere, the things that we work in, it would be a real problem to have it kind of taking over some pastoral duties. It's easy to let it maybe write good portions of your sermons or things like this, you know, that it could do, you know, really well. Hey, how about this? How about this?

So we could put all my sermons together, right? And we could and we could just give AI to our people and say, what would Scott Brown say about this problem? You know, I'm mad at my husband. What would Scott Brown counsel me in a counseling session? Decades after you're gone, it can still be preaching, you know, expositionally every Sunday till we get to the end.

I can live forever, you're right. That would be bad actually. Oh my, so there are just remarkable things that you can do. I mean, AI is going to be used for evil. Absolutely.

Okay. And I mean, there are so many dangers, because you, to be shaped by the algorithm. Well, that's what's happening now. And when you Google, we're already being shaped by the algorithm, we're already being told what to think about things, even when we ask a question to Google and our computers and AI just magnifies that problem. So we're not pretending AI is the most wonderful thing in the world, but we're going to use it's whatever wonderfulness it has.

Absolutely. I mean, you think about, you know, governments using AI. Right now, the Chinese government has 500 million cameras doing facial recognition and is using them for their social credit system. So AI can be real, it could be, it's gonna backlash on us. Yeah, it's pretty scary to think about the things that are enabled by the existence of AI, but it's also really exciting to think about the opportunities that there are for us in our goal, which is to advance the kingdom of Christ, proclaim the gospel.

I think it enables us to do a lot of really amazing things, too. Yeah. On the other hand, I was reading the other day on a World Economic Forum website that it is the new frontier of human dependency depending on what not God for sure you know yeah so yeah there really are dangers. I mean, doctored videos, fake videos, nobody's going to be safe as machine learning continues to advance with video. You can already make a video of me saying anything you want.

It might be a little clunky, but it's not that clunky, you know. We've had, you know, I mean, you can have Johnny Cash preach your sermons. Yeah. We've tested that with some personalities that we won't name. Yeah, we can have Paul Washer preach my sermon.

Oh, yeah. And isn't that yeah, we should probably do. We might get a lot. We got might not get a lot more traffic. Oh, my.

Well, okay. So we let's talk about what how we're using AI. Yes, it's pretty neat. You created all this and we love it. And it's really fun.

So just walk us through how we're using it. Yeah, Well, we started kind of playing around with at the beginning of this year. It was kind of neat, you know, we did a few little things that we toyed around with. But then we got close to our conference in May, our national conference, and we've been for the last few years making coloring books for the kids, you know, an image to go with each sermon so they can, you know, they have something to do. And...

Who has the copyright on that art? We do. We do. This is the problem with AI-generated art, right? Who has the copyright?

Anyway, go ahead. Yeah, so, you know, both of our artists were out this year and unavailable to make these coloring images for us So I thought well, let's try mid-journey. So we We created our whole coloring book this year using AI. I've got some of the images up here. You know, and it's not perfect.

I had to remove some sixth fingers and things like that. And it was a lot of trial and error. And if you look really closely, you'll maybe see a couple things that are kind of weird, but it was able to create all these things, I mean this was a day, a day and a half worth of work on my part and it would have taken so long to generate, I mean this is like what, like 20 images or something? And cost a bunch of money. Yeah, yeah for sure, it cost us almost nothing.

Yeah, well your time, the day, whatever. Yeah, that was time is money. But anyway, yeah, that was so amazing. We had our coloring book, AI Generated. Yeah, and then- Do you have any conscience problems about that?

I don't. I don't either. Can we sell this art now? Yeah, we have the copyright. Yeah, that's something that recently OpenAI, who owns Chad GPT and everything, they announced that they will defend you in court if anything that you create is challenged on copyright.

Oh my, my Mona Lisa is on the way. Okay. But so then, so we have these, we have a spread for each message, you know, at our conference and on the right side we have the coloring book image, and on the left side we usually just have the description of the message that the speaker gave us plus some space for notes. But since we were already doing this, I thought, man, let's see what else we can do. And using AI, we generated, based on the description that the speaker gave us and the scripture text that they're preaching from, AI generated questions for the kids to answer and also generated word search based off of keywords that it would expect to be in this sermon.

So now of course, you know, we vetted these things, we didn't just blindly generate this and print it and say, hey, have your kids answer these questions. But as we looked through it, there was nothing we needed to change. You know, I have looked at dozens of these and I haven't changed any of them. It is nice to have a human look at the thing. So we do that.

But those kids' worksheets, the way AI generates them, are fantastic. We use them in our church. That's so cool. And some other churches are using, your church uses them in Texas. Yeah, I started using them for our kids every Sunday morning for one of these ops.

Yeah, but that crossword puzzle is so neat. But also, you created another page, a tracing page of the scripture, right? Yeah, yeah, and that's not so much AI, but just another neat thing for the kids to use. I thought that was AI generated. Okay, no.

Yeah. Yeah. But so, yeah, we'll just tell about it. It's, you know, it's for church, for preaching, and your pastor's preaching on this text. And so, you've created sort of a tracing for really little kids to trace the scripture and actually copy the scripture text by tracing the lines.

Yeah, so we have a page where you just go on and put in the passage and it will give you a page with the text and then the text to trace. Yeah. So that's neat. Okay, so you got a kids activity page. We did our coloring book for the conference, but that's not all we're doing.

Right, so since we made that tool to generate that activity page, we just built a little UI over it so that anybody can use it. And I'll just demo it here really quick if you give it the title of your sermon. And we say, alright, Scott Brown is preaching, the passage is John 1. And you can give it a description here or let AI generate the description. And then you tell it the date, and it will just take a few seconds here to look at what you've given it and generate this page.

There it is. There you go. So it came up with this quick little description. It gives these questions, these keywords, and you can go in here and edit this stuff too if you say, this question's weird, let's get rid of it, or add your own questions or whatever. But it makes it really quick and easy to generate a page that can help your kids engage with the sermon.

There you go. So what else? So we have the kids pages. We started doing transcription of all of our messages. It's amazing how well the AI does transcribing audio and video.

Yeah, so any, any, all of our messages that are on our website, thousands of them, instantly transcribed. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, these are rough numbers, but I mean, the accuracy is incredible. And we translated probably around 5,000 messages and it cost us around $200.

Yikes, yeah. So. And we've spent a lot of money on transcription before. This message is by Scott Anial. Yep.

A great message, but hey, you can go, Scott, Hey, so go check out your manuscript There it is right there. Just go to the website. So yeah, and it can generate summaries to you know, these these things were AI generated and then you know looked over and changed and you know by by humans yeah by guys that work with us but it gives a great starting point to just kind of give the form of it you know yeah yeah so for 200 bucks you get a total transcription we did yeah we did for thousands for thousands of resources yeah we got a transcription, we got a kids activity page, and a description of the message, but that's not all. Ten questions. Yeah.

Based on the sermon. Yep. Based on the data set of the sermon itself. Ten questions. And the cool thing with AI that, you know, wasn't really available before, you had to have actual human time to do this.

But with AI, you have these questions and They don't have to be multiple choice questions. So what is the Great Commission? Let me just put something in there. All right, so we'll say it's Christ's command to proclaim the gospel to the nations, and we'll see if I'm right or wrong. It's telling me if I'm right or wrong based on the transcription.

So it's not what does the AI think the Great Commission is. It's saying, what did Scott Eniel say the Great Commission is? Okay, what is the Great Commission? It's telling me I'm partially right here, so it's yellow. The Great Commission also includes baptizing new believers and teaching them to observe all things that Christ commanded.

And it gives me citations from the video. So I can click here and it'll start playing at that point in the video and say, based on this, this is why we're saying you're partially right. So it's pretty cool. It opens up a lot of possibilities. Wow, okay, but that's not all.

Right, so since we had the transcription and from the transcription we can do questions and kids activity pages and things. You can also do translation. So here's a sermon from our network. You got English, you can go over here to Chinese, and from the English transcription it generates the Chinese transcription and also gives you audio. Okay, so it's Chinese.

Colton, how do you know that's right? Well, stop. Colton knows it's right because Colton speaks fluent Chinese. And we've also had some other Chinese nationals check this out, it's Mandarin. But this was very special, because I know you've been speaking Chinese for almost a decade.

Yeah. Right? And Chinese people tell me that they can't tell, you know, that you're from Texas. Chinese people are very gracious. They're very great.

That's probably what it is. But anyway, so the Chinese is how good? It's very good. I'd say it's in the top 90s, 90% accurate. There's maybe a couple of minor mistakes here and there, But a lot of times it's things in the transcription.

It's more human errors where we might phrase something a certain way that technically means this but we understand it to mean something else. But some of those things are also lost just from going from audio to transcription, where you would understand by the inflection of their voice they meant this but in the transcription that's not clear Yeah, and you have untranslatable colloquial isms. Yep figures of speech that aren't universal You know other languages. So How many languages can you click on? Let's see.

Name the language. Let's see. English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian. Russian. Russian.

Hey, It's a bunch of languages. Yeah. You just click on it. Now, we have a disclaimer. It's not a perfect translation.

Right. But what we've heard from people who speak these languages, what they tell us is that you can always tell when it's an error. You can tell when there's just something funny about it. But the doctrine is going to, it's probably not going to affect the doctrine, but there might be some strange word that doesn't fit. And maybe there are, I mean there may be some doctrinal errors in it, but we've thought, well, maybe we'll learn that there are.

And also the machine learning will continue to improve it. The interesting thing is, yeah, okay, so we started messing with AI back in March and it's incredible where it's come, and now it's December, and just the, yeah, the improvements are unbelievable. We've seen major improvements in the translation just from March to December, so I can only imagine it's going to keep getting better. And some interesting things too is we could use AI to check itself and say, all right, you've given me this translation from a transcription. Now check this translation and see if there are any doctrinal errors as compared to the 1689 confession.

And it could flag those things. And then we could look at them and go, oh, okay, Yeah, let's see if it's that way in the English, if it's an accurate translation or not. Yeah, not the Westminster Pata Baptist one. No, no. Okay, no.

But yeah, no, it's exciting. So anyway, wow, we're just gonna keep on using the tools and hey, there's a lot more to do to make our operations more efficient. We're using AI to do lots of summaries of things that we used to write by hand and we check them and they're really, really good. AI is not going to replace our writing creativity and things like that. We think that a human being should do that.

But anyway we've got a whole laundry list of things to discuss about how to continue to improve. People are always saying that with AI, a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. Here's my question. What jobs that we need to be done that we can hire AI to do? Okay.

So there you go. Yeah, it's exciting. Thanks, Colton. Hey, all this to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ, to reform churches and families, to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture, the most helpful thing you can ever do with your life is to say, Lord, your word is sufficient for me. Absolutely.

And all of our resources say that in one way or another. And now you can hear them in a whole bunch of languages transcribed instantaneously and something for your kids to work on as well. Okay, good deal. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. Hope you can join us next time.

I hope this resource was a blessing to you. It's our desire to equip a generation to walk in the sufficiency of scripture for church and family life. All this is made possible by those who support us. Would you consider coming alongside and helping us proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture for church and family life?