Artificial Intelligence and the Church: Troy Miller on Tools, Teammates, and Human Flourishing

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Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast.

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Speaker 2: I'm Dr. James Spencer.

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Speaker 1: Through calm, thoughtful, theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian.

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Speaker 2: Hey, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer, and I'm joined today by Troy Miller.

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Speaker 1: He is the president and CEO of National Religious Broadcasters, or NRB. And today we're going to be having a discussion around artificial intelligence. But I thought it might be helpful to start with you maybe explaining what National Religious Broadcasters is, what your role is there, and those kind of things. So I'll start there, but welcome to the program.

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Speaker 3: Well, thanks for having me first, James. Great to be with you. You know, NRB has been around for 82 years now. It's the oldest advocacy organization for Christian communicators, folks in the Christian media. Started back in 1944 when pastors wanted to get on radio and they were thinking of it back then. They were gatekeepers. And so they got together at Moody Church and formed NRB to advocate, really to keep the gospel in the public sector. That's what we work on the most. We also help Christian communicators in all platforms today. how to do their job with excellence and keep them updated on the latest technology trends, things that are moving there. And we hold the largest annual conference and gathering of Christian communicators. We'll be in Washington, D.C. next year, and there should be about 6,000 of us present there who are in radio, television, film, book publishing, YouTube, TikTok, all things digital and new media as well.

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Speaker 2: Very cool.

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Speaker 1: So how do you see, you know, when we think about artificial intelligence, it's sort of making inroads into almost everything at this point. But particularly as NRB, which I've at least traditionally known, and I realize you guys do everything, but I came across it first through radio. And so radio has this very analog sort of feel to it, although I know a lot of it's transitioned to digital and there's HD radio and all that kind of fun stuff. But how do you see AI intersecting with a lot of the different ministries that you all advocate for within the public space? And what sort of new wrinkles is AI really driving into how you advocate for Christian content?

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Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, AI is complex because there's a few different buckets out there. So let's talk about the easy one. And AI is more of a productivity tool, you know. And so AI is really integrating itself, whether it's in audio production or video production. You know, AI is integrating itself all over the place. It's really replacing a lot of things. And, of course, that's an issue onto its own. AI is your new audio engineer or your new editor or your new graphics designer. And so AI can do a lot of things in the media sector to help, you know, make that production process more efficient and streamlined. and all of those workflows. And that's a good thing. That's all a good thing on the AI technology side, especially for nonprofits. Nonprofits are always looking for that efficiency, things that can keep their costs down. So that's a good side of AI, one bucket there. The other buckets get a little more complex, and that's when AI becomes more of the teammate kind of thing. It was interesting because just this last week, I had two different AI companies come drop emails on my inbox, and it was all about move AI from a tool to a teammate. Move AI from a... What was the other one? Move AI from an assistant to an employee kinds of things. And so this kind of idea... of AI when it gets into becoming more and more human-like and pushed on you that you would think of AI as that. That's a bucket we're looking at as well. And the last one that I think is getting really complex is what are the ethical and legal things around AI? Intellectual property is a huge one with ministries. And we know we want the gospel authors in the public sector. But what happens when an artificial intelligent bot takes your pastor's sermons and sort of re-does them from a different theological standpoint of that pastor, you know, and starts to preach out in that pastor's voice and those things. So that's the intellectual property, the kind of the deep fakes in there. All of that's things that we're looking at here at NRB.

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Speaker 1: Let me go back to the let me address those last two. I'm sort of fascinated by the, you know, taking it from a tool to a teammate idea.

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Speaker 2: Do you see that or were those the impetus for those?

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Speaker 1: I know Grok just sort of dropped these a new feature where you can actually design agents who are going to take care of very specific tasks for you. Was that sort of the tone of that teammate that that it's talking about?

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Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah. One of those came through Microsoft's co-pilot. They have a webinar coming out on the co-pilot. It's all about how to move from tool to teammate and how to integrate their bot in there. And that's, I think, a broad issue, not only for companies to look at when you think of this idea of thinking of AI as an actual tool, you know, an employee or somebody that you're working with, a colleague out there, it changes your whole mindset on the tool aspect of it there. But that's what they're driving for. Look at Anthropic. I just recently saw, you know, about Anthropic. I mean, one of the things they're trying to work is how do I make the bot more human-like? And so in the workplace, again, that has a lot of, implications about how do employees work. And I actually saw in the Wall Street Journal recently that there are several companies who now have virtual chief operating officers running their companies out there. But let's set that. That's one bucket we have to figure out and figure out all the implications of that. But now move that same concept into the social media world and into the personal use of AI. And we know that, you know, right now we know that Meta and Alphabet, both Google and OpenAI with ChatGDP, all have lawsuits that have been filed against them because of their manipulation to keep people, you know, hooked using AI in the background to keep you engaged with their tools. Or in ChatGPD's case, where AI bots have actually sort of helped influence young adults, young people, all the way into suicide. And so that human aspect, the more human-like we make these AI bots, I think we have even more ethical questions we have to figure out and have to answer.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I saw the Meta settled an $ 18 billion settlement related to teen and children and social media addiction and are going to be required to put in some more safeguards there. I think part of what that points to quite honestly, is we just don't know what these things are going to do to us. And I don't mean that in sort of a, there's a mustache twisting evil villain, petting a cat somewhere that is designing these tools to really hurt us. What I think it is, is that any new tool is going to have consequences that we can't anticipate. And some of those are going to be probably beneficial. Others are going to be quite negative. And so we're even starting to see studies come out. MIT just did one where they were talking about over-reliance on AI creating a situation where people were incapable of identifying false information after using AI to identify false information. And so these issues of offloading our cognitive capacity to AI are probably going to have implications for the way we think, our decision making, our problem solving, all of those different things, which means that we really need to be careful as we walk into this.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. And I think that's the key issue for pastors and parents and communicators out there is to walk in this with a real careful, you know, and a very... open mind and concerned mind. I think sometimes, I think it's that MIT study, I saw that it's easy for people to forget that first word, artificial. This is an artificial intelligence. And also, I have a tech background, so you come out of this and you have to realize that these engines are taught, the way these learning engines work and the way they go through there, they're taught by human data. And we know as Christians, That humanity itself is flawed. And so I think it was not been surprising to me when the studies have come out and found that, you know, these bots or that bot or this AI has bias in it or racism in it or a certain hate. So we have two things working together.

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Speaker 1: It.

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Speaker 3: First of all, it's the data off of humanity itself. And just look at human history. We have a pretty good or a pretty bad history for the evil we could do to one another here, we could say. But also it's driven, it's still programmed by people. And so it's even unintentionally easy to program bias into it there. And so all of those things go in. It's not cognitive in the sense that it's actually thinking through in context and has empathy and sympathy and other feelings that are attached to that. It's really just processing things that we do in our human brain. It's doing them much faster. But it's also missing a whole lot of components of what it means to be human.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: And I mean, that takes you back to the sort of intellectual property issues. And I realize that the legal challenges there are difficult. But one of the things I guess I wonder what your thoughts are on this is. When you're doing things on NRB, let's say you mentioned publishers, new media professionals, even like TikTokers and YouTubers, radio personalities, all of these people are using a medium to communicate and bridge the distance between a human and a human. In my estimation, AI increases that distance. It puts humans one layer further away From one another, because what AI is doing is it's to your point, it's taking a pastor sermon, it's taking an essay or an article that it finds online, and it's aggregating a lot of that content and spitting out an abbreviated summary of content that's probably already abbreviated and had, you know, a very narrow point it was trying to make. And so how do you think of it in terms of, you know, from the communication perspective of what NRB does, keeping the gospel in public? How do you think about that increased distance between people? Do you agree with that? Or, you know, do you have any thoughts on it?

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Speaker 3: I do agree with that. And not only is it increasing that distance, it's increasing that distance. At the same time, again, it's taking a major element out of that person-to-person communication. And that's the ability of humans to contextualize a conversation, again, with emotion and visual cues and all of those things that go with that when we have that inner humanity. And then just, again, that nature, that inner humanity-ness, that thing we can't describe sometimes. Even scientists can't describe where a thought comes from. They can tell you all the things that are going on in the brain, but they can't tell you you know, where that thought came from, where that creativity started or where that. So there's that element there that we have. And I think you're right. It increases that distance. And at the same time, it decreases the value of the conversation because it misses this humanity part. Look, we chat. GTP has had several hundreds, I think, now of lawyers across this country have been fined. because they've used AI to do research for cases, and ChatGP has filled out, filed briefs for them that they've submitted with cases that didn't exist. Because, as you said, when it aggregated, it said, well, a case like this ought to exist, and it didn't know the difference between, well, this case ought to exist, so I'll take all these other cases and make one up, and it didn't know that that was wrong. That's wrong to do that. And that's, again, that's that element that we're missing in this that I think you put away. I'll hit you with one more. We did a study just this last January, and we just started to scratch the surface on this. But we asked people about artificial intelligence. Would you go to your pastor or would you go to AI for a biblical answer? And it was pretty interesting. About 15 to 20 percent said right now, well, you probably go to AI. But 5 percent said they trust AI over their pastor. That should send shockwaves across this community if that's kind of the direction we're going with this.

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Speaker 1: It's interesting to think about that. I mean, the Barna had a similar study that they just released in July that was showing some of this, that there's a higher degree of trust and really usage across the board in all different categories. I mean, it wasn't just spiritual life sort of categories where Christians, practicing Christians in the way that they defined it, which I believe was once a month, attending church once a month, that they were using it Far more frequently than anyone else across the board. Now, why that is, they didn't answer or even attempt to answer. And so we're kind of left wondering. But I would say I was heartened by the idea that, you know, you were seeing fairly high levels of Christians, anywhere between 70 and 80 percent, concerned that AI was going to misinterpret the Bible, concerned that it was going to replace God or their pastor or whatever, concerned that it was going to have people lose their faith. But I think my just overall read is that some of this is being cultivated by our perception of what AI is. I think some of what you just talked about, this notion that AI isn't a cognitive thing. It's a pattern recognition engine that pulls different data points all together.

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Speaker 2: But it seems really smart and really intuitive. And so it's being.

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Speaker 1: Made easy to trust, even though when you understand its limitations, you would sit back and say, well, obviously I can't trust it more than other things. I can trust it for this little sliver, but I can't really trust it to just give me the right answer every time.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, that is so true. And I think we also have to learn more about, like you said, how AI works because it isn't this cognitive sort of tool that you can interact with, like our conversation here, where we can have this conversation and flow and go. And there's, you know, some intuition and other things that go in there. AI is very specific. So if you ask it very general things, it's going to give you very general answers. And if you don't, you know, in our consumer driven mentality these days, we're a little bit lazy about, hey, that might be where we stop. Oh, I got the answer I wanted. You know, so we stop there and we don't really drive down into the deeper part of the tool. And that's, again, I think the problem is the more human-like, and that's the push, you hear it from all of the top AI experts. Anthropic, ChatGDP, Alphabet's tool on Google's side. You hear it from all of them. Gemini. All of them. Their drive is to push, is to make the tool more and more human-like. So it's much more like you are interacting with a human, which is only going to drive us to, I think, like you said, to accept the fact that what it's doing or what it's telling you is really good information. The more you feel like you're talking to a person, the more you feel like the answers you're getting are, you know, I suddenly have access to this really brilliant college professor or this really brilliant pastor or whoever it is. And that's the way we walk. And I think we have to step back and think about what it means to be human. What's the whole question of humanity and whether or not the guardrails that need to be put up are guardrails about how much more human-like we make these tools.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really interesting to see this shift too, I think, because evangelicalism has generally been pretty resistant to to authoritarian interpretations of scripture. I mean, you go all the way back into revivalism and what you see is really a grassroots sort of movement where lay people are reading the scriptures for themselves. And if their pastor stood up in the congregation and said, well, we don't believe in the supernatural, they would go, really?

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Speaker 2: Because Jesus just performed a miracle.

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Speaker 1: And so you had this sort of resistant strain within evangelicalism and revivalism in particular that really did help push out some of these aberrant views. But as we watch what's going on with AI, it feels like that concern of replacing God in some way, shape, or form is probably, in my mind, one of the more interesting sort of concerns. Because what I think we're thinking about, or what I'd be concerned that we're thinking about, is that AI has more of an omniscient feel to it than it actually does. And so we're not now, you know, sort of pushing back on people who have we know have partial knowledge.

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Speaker 3: Right.

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Speaker 2: Even if I'm in the room with the smartest guy on the planet, you know, there are limits to his knowledge. AI doesn't necessarily feel like that.

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Speaker 1: It doesn't necessarily feel like there are limits on its knowledge because we could ask it anything and it'll spit back an answer. And it's a seemingly intelligible answer. And so one of the things I usually have been counseling people is try using AI only in a domain.

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Speaker 2: Where you have expertise.

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Speaker 1: And what you start noticing is it isn't giving you the sort of clear, nuanced, detailed answers. It's giving you a very small summary that is slanted, not in a bad way necessarily, like that sort of evil bias that we might think of, but it's certainly got an angle to it. Because to answer your question in a succinct fashion, it has to. And so what we're getting is a perspective from AI, and we're allowing it to choose that perspective and decide on what's relevant, which is scary on the face.

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Speaker 2: Of it.

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Speaker 3: Yeah that's i think you're that last part is that word decide what's relevant um uh you know and it again i think it it goes back to me just because it feels so human like you know we don't realize that this is a tool that's running a set of programs and routines in the background uh this is why there's such a big push for data centers and And the crunching here, because it has to go through a lot of different iterations before it gets that answer to you there. But the answers are kind of built on our best ability to replicate the way that people think. And so we get to this tool, and I think that's where you rightly said we can sort of have this almost godlike perception. That we're, again, we're talking to the smartest person in the world or the greatest intellect. And this thing's told me everything I want to know, not only about maybe a certain subject, but guess what? It can also help me figure out what to have for dinner tonight. And so the more we feel like we're talking to a person, I think the more, unfortunately for us as society, we're going to keep raising the pedestal that AI sets on. And that's something we just have to educate people. We're helping trying to educate pastors now, especially youth pastors, into some of the concerns. I think you saw OpenAI talked about putting some guardrails around chat GTP that has to do with teenagers. But we have a clash here. And back to my time in the business world, we have a clash here because you have a business model And this is what got Meta in trouble. You have a business model that's built on keeping you engaged. The longer you're engaged, the more ROI, the more profit that the organization is going to get, the more you use the tool. So you have a business model that has that on one aspect. And then on the other side, you're trying to put guardrails in that reduce that engagement. And I don't think we're going to have an industry that's going to self-regulate very well when those two things are clashing in the business world.

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Speaker 1: It's interesting to me that you like I agree with the business point. I think there's also a legal structure issue. You know, part of the reason that it's been so difficult to wrangle in sort of the big tech companies, particularly in social media, is because their platforms and we're seeing this sort of repeat itself with artificial intelligence. Grok's just put a lawsuit in on Minnesota maybe a month or so ago. We're filming this kind of in the middle of September. So I think about a month ago, Grok put in this lawsuit to Minnesota because Minnesota was trying to.

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Speaker 2: Hold liable the platforms.

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Speaker 1: Where I can't remember the exact phrasing, but it had to do with child sexualization and the sexualized images of real people. So People were using Grok to create naked photos of children, naked photos of real human beings, and then distribute those. And so the state of Minnesota is trying to police the platform and saying, you have to be liable here. Grok probably won't have standing for the lawsuit because they put it in as sort of a free speech issue complaint. But I think that's where we get into these sticky problems of what are these things? Are only the users responsible for what's being put out? Are they really platforms? Or are these something new that aren't exactly publishers and aren't exactly platforms that need a different regulatory body to look at them and say, look, if your business model is built on keeping kids engaged, we've got a real problem here.

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Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. Boy, that's a big one we're kind of, because, you know, it's the whole Section 529, you know, that the platforms kind of, you know, exempts them from this liability as platforms, you know, when they're supposed to be just in the neutral role in the background. But a lot of them aren't in the neutral role. They're really in the editorial role, which puts them deeper into this. So where does that? start and stop. And I think, as you said, AI has created a whole other complexity here for that. And that's exactly what Grok's, you know, arguing here. And there's some similar cases out in California as well, because AI has been used to create a lot of these, you know, deep, fake, you know, pornographic images of Hollywood stars and other folks, you know, that are real people. So, you know, and try to put these, you know, people using the tools and put these disclaimers on them. So what's the, you know, who's responsible? What's the issue here? How deep does the law go? And who's protected, not protected? We're working with a number of folks up in Congress on this, trying to figure out and answer these questions. I think right now we're trying to just get all the questions figured out. Like what are all the right questions? Jurassic Park has this great line, and I use this all the time. Jeff Goldblum's character, after getting the whole dog and pony show on how they used the DNA to recreate the dinosaurs, he had this line. He said, you know, you were so concerned about whether you could do it, you didn't stop to think about whether you should do it. Boy, that describes to me where we're at with AI today. You know, we're moving forward. I don't know if recently you saw there was a gentleman who worked at Anthropic and OpenAI, and he came out and said, you know, this drive for this super AI, he called it, you know, this super AI, he said this drive for this could be the complete destruction of humanity. I don't know, as Christians, we believe that, but But I certainly know that we, because we as Christians know that we come from a sinful nature inside of us, and just look back at the atrocities we've perpetrated on one another, wouldn't be surprised that we would build, thinking that we're godlike, that we could build a godlike tool that would end up pushing those same atrocities back on us. So there's a lot for us to think about and try to work out here.

00:27:21
Speaker 1: Well, I think one of the things we could probably get into is this notion of discipleship. What are these technologies turning us into? And so as Christians, when we think about civilizational devastation, right, we're thinking new heavens and new earth. We're thinking God making all things new. What is old is destroyed. What is new is now yet to come. And so there's a sense in which we probably don't need to worry about, you know.

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Speaker 2: Sort of AI destroying the planet, right?

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Speaker 1: But I think the dehumanizing element, the element of AI that makes us something other than what God intended. is certainly something that Christians should be considering. And so how do you see some of these? I mean, we've been dealing with algorithms forever, right? AI isn't exactly an algorithm, but it has that sort of parallel structure. There are things going on in the background that are feeding us information, that are guiding our thought process, that are showing us new things, and we don't understand what those are. We're completely blind to them in general. Most of us don't understand how they work. You know, I sort of have a vague clue about what's going on there, but I couldn't tell you how they do it. So how do you see some of these things sort of changing us more fundamentally? We've talked a little bit about these AIs becoming more human. I'm wondering if you think, you know, we're being discipled and becoming more like AIs.

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Speaker 3: Look, I definitely think that's a path we could end up on. I don't think we're there yet. I think the problem that we have today is, I'm just going to say it and look at the scriptures talk about it. Again, our consumer-driven attitude is kind of behind that there's a lot of us are just lazy and we want the easy path. And even in discipleship, I mean, it's something we've dealt with, the church has dealt with for a long time. How do we disciple people? What does it mean to disciple? But the Bible is the foundation of human flourishing. Anywhere where you take Scripture out, Christianity out, you've really seen human destruction at its worst. And where Christianity is and the Bible is, you've seen human flourishing sometimes, I think, at its best, at the best it can be in this even sinful nature world we live in in humanity. And if you take that out and you start to be discipled by an artificial human kind of intelligence, how much of that humanity is going to come out of that? How much are we going to end up with the Spock-like attitude of logic that drives everything in there? And there's no emotion, no feeling, no joy, no happiness that's behind this. And I think that's a real... going to be a real challenge going forward and then what happens look we're talking about this one what happens when you're you're you get your own personal ai bot and especially during the adolescent teen years and this becomes your new best friend this is the person you the thing you confide in and the thing you believe because it's built in this reaffirming reassuring kind of built to always be that kind of really good companion there. That's what happened on ChatGPT. That's why it moved so many of these kids into suicide, because it was built to always be reaffirming, and it didn't know the difference between life and death coming down to the end. And I think that's a big question we have to answer and ask ourselves about where AI is going and where it intersects humanity.

00:31:21
Speaker 1: There's this interesting theory that was advanced in the New England Journal of Medicine by a gentleman, I'm blanking on his name right now, but he talks about it in terms of addiction. And he basically says that as people get addicted, part of what happens is their social world narrows. And so if I want to get drugs, I'm going to stop hanging out with people who are telling me that I shouldn't do drugs because that's annoying. All I want to do is get drugs. And so eventually you get down to this point where You're really only interfacing with the people who are going to help you get drugs, going to firm you getting drugs, all those kind of ideas. And I think that AI has the potential to create that sort of narrowness. I mean, leave the addiction aspect aside. When we aren't participating in the world apart from AI, and that doesn't mean that we're sitting in our basements just playing around with Claude or ChatGPT or whatever. What it could mean is as we engage in more augmented reality frameworks, where we're having Google glasses and it's showing us different things about the world and it's giving us facts.

00:32:20
Speaker 2: About the world.

00:32:21
Speaker 1: These are now filters that we're putting on across reality that are influencing the way we see the world and thus narrowing what we understand about the world. They almost preclude exploration, right? If AI is just going to tell me this is an elm tree, I don't really need to go over and look at it. There doesn't need to be any curiosity about it. I just know now it's an elm tree and that's great. And so I think there's a real problem there from that narrowing angle. Whereas when we talk about discipleship, usually what we're talking about is a broadening of perspective, a broadening of perspective with God's self-disclosure opening the world up to us and allowing us to see it for what it really is.

00:33:08
Speaker 3: Yeah. And look, Christians have always driven discipleship. you know, kind of discovery and innovation. You go back and look at how many Christians drove this, and they drove it, you know, from two aspects. Again, there was always this underlying push from what we think of as the Old Testament scriptures into the New Testament of this idea of human flourishing. How do we make life better for people? I came that you might have life and have it more abundantly. You know, how do we push that? How do we help? That's why Christians drove medical research and education and all these things that were meant to help humans, you know, live better lives to flourish in there. And that was a lot of that, as you said, was driven out of not only curiosity, but out of, you know, necessity, right? The mother of all invention and pushing those envelopes forward and exploring that. And then there was the other side of it on the scientific side where a lot of scientists knew that this world was created by God, God the creator. And so it had order and meaning to it. And let's discover that order. Let's discover that meaning. Let's keep diving deeper into these issues. If AI can replace, all of a sudden replace that, and as you said, take away that That drive, again, get us back to the easy consumer-driven, oh, that's an elm tree. I don't need to go look at that or this plant is this or this does that. The kind of thing that we always have, this answer's right there in our pocket with our phone is right there in a second. I do think that that is going to be more detrimental on humanity than it is going to be pushing this human flourishing. And I think it's sort of going to dumb down humanity rather than make humanity more intelligent. You know, when I was in the Navy, you go through engineering school, right? And one of the things they make you learn is you have to learn the formulas and the principles and things, how to do those without the calculator. You know, learn to do it first, learn the foundation and understand the foundation. And then you can use the tools that make it more efficient and automated. But you have to have that foundation first. What happens when we lose that foundation or we outsource that? That's another thing we're good at. We outsource that foundation to artificial intelligence there. So just like you said, this conversation, there's a lot of questions that we have to have, and we have to have these conversations. And pastors... And church leaders and Christian colleges and professors, church intellects, Christian intellects need to be involved in these conversations and not, as you said earlier, sometimes in Christianity, we have looked at the bad side of technology and then condemned it and not got involved. AI is here. One of the things I tell if it is here is not going away. It's only going to keep on growing. And if we're not involved in the conversation, it very quickly could go in the wrong direction as far as the church is concerned, as far as humanity is concerned.

00:36:34
Speaker 1: You know, one of the things I'd be interested to just hear your take on, and I know this is a little far afield from the interview, so hopefully it's not too much of a curveball, but, you know, You have these sort of, I used to work at Moody Bible Institute, so I'm familiar enough with how radio works and you have radio stations and you have repeater signals and all these kinds of things and.

00:36:55
Speaker 2: All that costs.

00:36:57
Speaker 1: And so when you're looking at that infrastructure, you're calculating, okay, what's our reach?

00:37:02
Speaker 2: What are we going to get back in donations? You know, is this missional?

00:37:05
Speaker 1: Like you have a whole calculus that you're doing here that's saying we want to do X, we need infrastructure Y, does that wash? You know, there's a real calculation there. Same with book publishing, right? We love this book, but we think it's going to sell two copies. We're probably not going to publish it. You know, we like this book. It's going to sell 40,000 copies.

00:37:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, we can do that.

00:37:27
Speaker 1: Like there's always these sort of space limitations or physical limitations that are being taken into account. I think part of what we're seeing with artificial intelligence is there is no apparent limitation. And what I mean by that is that we don't really see it. And so as we talk about the ethics of artificial intelligence, we also probably need to think about the ethics of physical infrastructure that needs to be built, energy capacities, actual physical real world sort of production modes that are powering all of this stuff. But it does not seem like anybody particularly cares about that in the same way that you might care about buying another radio station have do you have any thoughts on that it's just one of those things where i've sort of been puzzling over it a bit why this isn't a bigger.

00:38:24
Speaker 3: Issue i i think it's starting to become a bigger issue i know just you know i'm here in nashville tennessee just north of us uh in the county just across the line in kentucky uh right now there's a big community uh um opposition to data centers that are going to be built in that community because of, as you said, electric consumption and water consumption and what does it mean for the area and contaminants and all that. I think that's just starting to be thought about. But look, that's the history kind of manufacturing. We often think about the the upside of things and not necessarily the downside of things until it's sometimes too late and we've contaminated an entire river or lost millions of acres of, you know, farmland, productive farmland and such, and we do that. But, yeah, that's a discussion. I think we're going to start to see more of that. I actually think on the ballot this fall, there are, in several states, there are initiatives on the ballot that would curve the data center deployments within different areas. But let's back up a second. AI is not a U.S.-centric technology. tool. This is now also a tool that governments are looking at and other entities are looking at, and the dominance in this area could change both the economic, social, and as we said, religious face of the world. And so it's not something we can sort of just look at the protectionism here in the U.S. We will have to figure out how to look at this from a global aspect as well. It's going to be a tough call.

00:40:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, I just find it.

00:40:19
Speaker 1: I find it interesting that so much of this is it's assumed that we should do it to your point, the Jeff Goldblum quote, right? It feels like we're stuck in what Jockey Law called the.

00:40:30
Speaker 2: Technical imperative, right?

00:40:32
Speaker 1: We're just being sort of pushed along by this current and we're not really thinking about do I really need this strange video of my baby dancing to some song? that's taking up power and resources to produce. Now, I don't know how much it's taking up. That's part of the problem. You never know how much is being taken up. And so it feels like there's space here for an audit of some sort to sit back and say, what are the really essential things that are going on with AI? I just had a gentleman named Marcus Schwarting on, and he's an AI researcher at SUNY. And he's doing some really interesting stuff that isn't related to LLMs at all. It's related to AI, but not LLMs. And so you sit back and you say, well, there's some interesting research going on. It's probably necessary and helpful, but it has nothing to do with Claude or ChatGPT or Grok or anything like that. Like these systems are sort of adjacent to each other and they're all being largely run by, you know, specific companies. But the question of do we need it? We're not really asking that.

00:41:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, we're not asking that. And if we do need it, you know, just exactly how do we need it and what are the, you know, payoffs? What are the things that we're compromising in order to have that there? I feel like we live in a world today where, you know, we're already so full of distractions. Right. It's the problem with media. Right. Media can be a great tool and do a number of great things. But the overconsumption of media, the overdependence upon media, the fact that we can become addicted to media and and and, you know, already today, you kind of disconnect ourselves from reality there. is something we have to get back to, but we, we have to, I think for us as Christians and particularly we talk about this Christian communicators, you know, it's, it's sort of getting back to the, to, to the, um, uh, uh, darn it. I lost my train of thought there on the football, you know, uh, um, for the green Bay Packers and, you know, this, this is going to get back to the basics. This is a football. Um, we, we have to get back to the basics of, for us of what does it mean for us to hold a biblical worldview first and foremost? What does it mean for us to be created in the image of God? How does that separate from anything that humanity is going to create, including artificial intelligence or artificial humanity? And how do we help make sure that the church is stays grounded on that solid foundation, the foundation of the gospel, the foundation of Christ, the foundation of the principles that God gave us, so that they're equipped the best they can to deal with these issues in this ever-moving landscape of artificial intelligence going forward. That's, I think, the number one challenge for us as the church and Christian communicators.

00:43:52
Speaker 1: Would you say that's partly why Media matters more now in this sort of Christian media specifically matters more now in this era of information overload. I mean, I would almost sharpen that and say something like more analog forms like radio, like book publishing, as opposed to Christian media that is YouTube, TikTok, even podcasting. Because they can be captured back in by AI, we're almost feeding the beast. But radio and publishing... don't exactly. So yeah, just your thoughts on that.

00:44:28
Speaker 3: Well, no, absolutely. I think I'm more of an analog approach of radio, of actual physical hard book publishing. But I also think one of the things I'm worried about in this virtual world, but also not neglecting the fellowship of one another and getting together and actually having a Bible study with, as God said, I gave to the church pastors and evangelists and teachers, and having that study where you're actually in the room with people, and you're learning from somebody who God has equipped to do this, and you're interacting with the other people in the room in a way that you can only do, humanity can only do when you're in a room full of people. And so I do think those different analog, as you put them, approaches are going to be important. And that doesn't mean as a church that we're rejecting AI, but it means we're holding to the foundation and looking at AI what it is. It's an artificial tool created by man and should be always thought of as such.

00:45:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, to your football analogy, right? You can have all the stats and figures, all the data synthesized and everything. But if your quarterback goes out there and looks at the football and says, what's this?

00:45:50
Speaker 2: You're in trouble.

00:45:51
Speaker 1: And so you've got to have that sort of grounding there, that back to the basic sort of notion that the church is an embodied entity. And that means we have to be embodied together at some point. It can't all just be in the ether. We can have it in the ether. to some degree, but you can't dismiss the embodied witness of what the church is.

00:46:19
Speaker 2: Really helpful. Yeah, really helpful.

00:46:21
Speaker 1: I'll throw you out last question and we'll close it out here. But, you know, when you think about what NRB is doing in the next 82 years, you know, what do you what do you see coming forward as maybe in the next generation of Christian broadcasting, religious broadcasting that you're excited about?

00:46:47
Speaker 3: You know, one of the things that we're interested in, we've had this discussion on AI and stuff, but one of the statistics we didn't toss out and talk about, and it kind of goes with this, is the interesting thing is the generation, at least what I've read now, that is more skeptical and also kind of rejecting AI, are the Gen Zs and the Alphas. Because it's not for some of the reasons we've talked about, but they're looking at it as, you know, as tools that are going to replace their jobs and not see the American way and not be able to see. And there's, you know, there's kind of that skepticism out there. I'm excited because, look, we live in the greatest time of human communications that's really ever existed. I mean, we have, these cell phones in our pockets and we can communicate around the globe, you know, practically instantly there. And that, again, that gives us a lot of tools and things at hand. Christians have always been, you know, some of the leaders in taking these tools and figuring out ways that they really do can help the gospel and help human flourishing. I'm confident that God is going to raise up leaders in the next, some of the giants that we've had in the past who are going to help navigate through these things so that the gospel can move forward. And some of the innovations that young kids are doing, I read recently about a young man who was just on the Xbox platform, and he, with all these guys he was gaming with, he started a Bible study. And it started off with about eight or nine guys, and now it's well over 200. And I know it's virtual, but it's an actual, they're actually talking to each other. But it's a real Bible study. So I'm just excited and know that we're going to move forward and Christian communicators are going to, I think, lead the way to help see how some of these tools can keep the gospel in the public space and help humanity remain humanity.

00:48:55
Speaker 2: Very cool.

00:48:56
Speaker 1: Well, anywhere that we can route listeners to get more information about NRB or about you?

00:49:01
Speaker 3: Yeah, nrb.org is our main website. You can find out all of these things we're doing, talking about AI, talking about a number of things that go on up in the Congress and other different areas there. You can find out about our annual conference. It'll be in February in Washington, DC. and also all the places on social media where you can follow us a little as well that's it that's nrb.org.

00:49:27
Speaker 1: Very good i will include that in the show notes everybody so you can check out nrb if you'd like and uh troy it was a pleasure talking with you this was great uh thanks for being on the show Well, thanks.

00:49:38
Speaker 3: For having me. It was a great show. Great talking to you.

00:49:41
Speaker 2: All right, everybody.

00:49:42
Speaker 1: Well, we'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. So take care. Just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.