EP278 - Kenny Jahng, Bacon, and What's Next for AI?

Welcome to the Church Digital Podcast. Through this podcast, we'll talk about the technological innovations within the church, but more than tech for tech's sake, we'll address deeper questions. Is discipleship making possible digitally? How should we approach the digital mission field? Can a biblically grounded church operate in digital space? And where does the metaverse and artificial intelligence fit into all of this?

Whether you're a big or small church, an established church or a startup church, the Church Digital's goal is to help churches like yours learn to be a multiplying church digitally and physically. Our heart is that churches like yours would discover a newfound focus on discipleship making that will revolutionize your church.

And now here's your host, Jeff Reed.

Hey everybody, episode 278 of the Church Digital Podcast. Jeff Reed here, founder of the Church Digital. I'm so glad you're here. I'm so glad we had this conversation today, and I can't wait to introduce you to my friend Kenny Jen.

Now, a bunch of you probably know of Kenny because Kenny's everywhere. That's just who Kenny is. But if you haven't met Kenny before, Kenny is arguably today in 2024 one of the top voices of the church in artificial intelligence. And when I woke up this morning and said, "Hey, who do I want to talk to about artificial intelligence?" Well, let's say it was Kenny Jen. And Kenny Jen, like, there's nobody else I really want to talk to because the guy is phenomenal in the space.

If you don't know Kenny historically, he's been around. He's one of the OGs in online ministry. He worked in Liquid Church for a number of years up in New Jersey. He runs ChurchTechToday.com, AIforChurchLeaders.com, Facebook groups. The guy's all over the place creating resources and helping churches like yours better understand artificial intelligence, among other things. As a matter of fact, he works with Exponential Next, formerly Leadership Network, as their director of AI Next.

And so when I want to have this conversation with Kenny, like, okay, look, AI's been around for a while. It's been over a year since it came out November 22nd. Like, let's move beyond the whole ChatGPT stuff. That's nice, but there's more to AI than creating good social media graphics. Like, that's a great conversation to have, how to be more effective in social media using AI, but let's not camp out there. Let's get into, okay, like, what's next? Where are we going with this?

Yeah, okay, probably one day AI will become our robotic overlords, but how do we get past that? How do we be aware of that? What do we need to do today to prevent tomorrow? Like, what are we actually going to do with this AI long-term? What's the philosophy behind what we're doing with this space?

And so if we're going to have that conversation, who do I want to talk to? Let's bring in Kenny Jen into it. And so that's what I did. We've got Kenny Jen coming into this conversation, of course me with the Church Digital, and in this conversation that I'm calling "Church the Church Bacon." We'll get there in a little bit. And what's next in AI?

Okay, everybody, here you go.

Hey, okay, let's welcome Kenny Jen to the conversation. Kenny, how you doing today, man?

I'm better now that I'm with you. Listen, anytime Kenny and I can get together, it's always a good time. It never feels like we're at the same conference in the same state at the same meetup. Like, we just constantly are playing conference roulette. I don't know what to call it, but it's conference roulette. That's what we should call it. Yeah, trademark somebody doom that right now.

But Kenny's one of the original OGs of online ministry coming out of Liquid Church, right? I mean, it was you, it was Dave Adamson, it was Rich Birch at some level, and our friend Ben Stapley. Like, yes, there's been a wealth of people coming out of Liquid up in New Jersey. So really good.

Yeah, it's been a really good time. You know, Tim Lucas, who's a founding and lead pastor there, has just been—I don't think he gets enough credit for the digital savviness and the visionary nature. And the reason why I was attracted at first to join the team there was he was one of the only pastors that I saw that was preaching to the camera back in the day. And this is, you know, 20 years ago, right?

And so, if you think about it back then, no one even—we always talked about, you know, how you and I have talked about this, where as a church online pastor, digital ministry person, you know, all the other people on staff and all the other people, they always put you down and say, "Hey, you know, you're pastoring to invisible people," or at the very least it's like, "50-year-old guys in their underwear in their parents' basement," you know what I mean? Like, they're still living with their parents and stuff like that.

And back then, Liquid was just one of those churches that really understood the potential that there's this thing called the internet and we could use it for God's purposes and his kingdom. So, you know, I know Dave Adamson is quoted as saying like he is Internet Pastor number nine. Like, he was the ninth.

Internet Pastor on the planet. I'm curious, have you mathematically figured out where you are on the number line here?

There was a Twitter thread somewhere that people started to chime in. I don't remember where I was on that list. It was pretty fun to watch. And then some people would like recuse themselves off the list to say, "No, I wasn't an actual, you know, my title was not Church Online Pastor. It was like Digital Media Specialist." And so like, they took themselves off the list, or some people would add themselves. So the list kept on changing.

I don't know where I am. It's somewhere in the top 20 or something like that. But I will say, it's a family. It's not a list. When I think about it, it's the same thing today. Anybody who's a church online pastor, social media pastor, we like to trade notes. We like to share what's working, what's not. And as we always say, Jeff, anybody who sticks out their neck and says, "Hey, this is the way to do it. All you guys are doing it wrong. You got to ban that person and run," because that's not the way to do digital ministry, right? We're in it together. That's incredible. Well said.

And I have a feeling we're going to come back to that theme probably in a little bit here within the podcast. So really cool.

If you do not know Kenny Jen, man of many talents, ChurchTechToday.com, he's with Exponential Next, formerly Leadership Network, as their AI Next director. Really excited to see him come on board into that position. To be honest, he's a voice of artificial intelligence for the church in general. And I wanted to have a conversation here talking about artificial intelligence back here on the podcast. And it's like, who am I going to bring in? And you know, the question was like, okay, do I bring in Kenny Jen or do I go, "No, let's just bring in Kenny Jen," because really, like, he's the top dog in the space. So really glad to have Kenny in this conversation because I really wanted to have this heartfelt conversation right here.

This question right off the bat, I want to know Kenny Jen's answer to this right here. You ready?

Will the human race be one day enslaved by robot overlords? True or false?

Yes, let's move on. Like, I mean, it's inevitable. Somebody asked me the other day, they were like, "So, like, artificial intelligence, what's your take?" I was like, "Oh yeah, we're all doomed one day, but we might as well enjoy it today, right?"

So I think the question is, is it Tuesday, Thursday, Friday? When? 2 p.m.? 7 p.m.? Like, let's just put it on the calendar.

Will the human race be enslaved by robot overlords? I think, look, there's a lot of fear out there, and I always like to say, a couple years ago, FOMO was the word of the day. Social media was creating all this FOMO as a mental health issue. Right now and going forward, it's going to be replaced by FOLO—fear of looming obsolescence. Right? And that's what is driving a lot of the conversations. People are fearful that the machine will take over, Terminator, Skynet, you know?

I think there's a lot of danger. And you look at the AI experts out there talking about what is next and how it's going to progress past the second brain to what the nerdy term is AGI—artificial general intelligence. And that's going to happen in the next five to ten years by many of the AI experts from their predictions. And artificial general intelligence basically is when the machine is smarter than us.

And I think once that happens, it's going to open up a Pandora's box of questions and issues that we are not ready for. And the church in particular needs to start grappling with that for sure.

And so, yeah, I think whether or not it actually happens, there's a lot of things before that that we have to grapple with together as a community in the kingdom.

All right, so my mouth is literally salivating at the idea of the conversation of the church in artificial general intelligence. Like, we're going to get to that here in a little bit. But in fairness, let's back up and kind of walk through artificial AGI. Like, that bluntly, that's the first time I've heard that term, and I am really excited to dive into that.

So, but let's get back because it's all about right now. It's about ChatGPT and generative AI, and that's been all over the place. It's funny. I can remember 2018. I was part of a panel at the Church IT Network, and there was a sociologist who was saying, you know what, when AI takes over, we're going to see a boom. It's going to be a human Renaissance era because the first thing artificial intelligence is going to do is take all the remedial, all of the mundane jobs—take out the trash, weed the yard, you know, mow, like all the stuff that humans don't want to do. AI is going to do it. And then what's going to be left? The humans are going to have all this time to explore art and write and create, and there's going to be this Renaissance era again. It's the second wave of the golden whatever Renaissance.

What happened? Because all I see is Canva. I see art. I see they're doing all the writing. Like, the value of content at some levels has gone down the drain because AI is all people are publishing books that are 100% AI. How did we get here? And is this a good place to be?

Yeah, so, you know, the cost of good content has not gone down. In fact, it might have gone up. The cost of junk content is going down to zero, right? And that's what you're seeing.

I do think that—I don't know, this is a double-edged sword, Jeff. We can go down two different paths. It's like Choose Your Own Adventure, which conversation you want to go down.

There's one sense that AI has kind of started to peel back the layers and expose the fact that all this stuff that we think is part of our humanity, that needs a soul, that is human only—such as creativity—is really algorithmic, right? Like, so much of what we do as humans actually can be decoded and can be brought down into algorithms and patterns, whether it be language or art or music, even. And so there is one sense of that where...

It is just exposed, or is it exposing? And I think it's going to, it's going to become even more apparent as the AI becomes better, smarter, faster, that so much of what we privilege as the human experience, um, actually can just be, you know, coded into bits and bytes, ones and zeros. Um, you know, we have AI now being able to read our dreams, like read brain waves and read our brain, uh, what's actually happening in the brain, what we're thinking. Um, and so once we get beyond that, I think it's going to change everything. So, uh, in terms of creativity, yeah, I think the cost of junk content is going down to zero. Um, but I think it's like any other tool. To be very honest, there's been other advents in even photography. Let's talk about the camera. Uh, before photography, there was just painting and drawing, right? And you invented the camera, and all of a sudden there's a huge genre of photography art. And then from there became video. And now we're seeing, you know, 3D, augmented reality, VR. Like, there's so much, there's so much new and more out there. Uh, once you zoom out, and, um, I think that's what needs to happen in this today's day. We need to zoom out and see the bigger picture and not get muddied down into the junk content that Midjourney and DALL-E is making, because all that stuff that you're seeing on the timeline of history, on the evolution of what AI can do, is a blip. It's not even a blip, right? Um, and you know that every AI tool that you use today as of today's recording is the worst AI that you will ever experience, right? Whatever tool you are using today is the worst AI you'll be embarrassed of what we have today, even six months from now, a year from now, ten years from now. When you tell your grandkids, "Hey, when we were using AI, AI never even, like, we would ask it to create a picture and it would come back with like ten toes and fifteen fingers, right?" Like, that's not going to happen in the near future. And so, um, I think you need patience, and you got to zoom out. Those are the two things that we need right now.

That's really interesting. But you've said "junk" um, junk content several times. Like, I would love to drill in a little bit. Like, what does, is does fifteen fingers, does that make it junk content? Is the lack of human soul, does that make it junk content? Is it, um, ninety-seven percent accurate or can be guided by prompt? Like, what makes, in your opinion, as the AI expert in the church space, what makes junk content junk content?

Yeah, I think you're right. I think your little sentiment there of, you know, that last mile, that last three percent, the last two percent, the last one percent, that distinguishes something that's machine-driven versus human-driven, is the thing that allows us as humans to consider that junk. And that's all subjective, and it really depends on the application, use case, et cetera. Sometimes that one percent doesn't matter. Sometimes the one percent does matter, right? And so that's where, um, you know, uh, Kevin Roose, a New York Times columnist and an author, he's talked about some of the categories where AI will not replace human work. And one of the categories is when your margin of error is low, very low, like zero, for example. You would never want to assign a handling of the nuclear codes to AI, because the margin of error is zero, right? You don't want AI to make a mistake, misjudge something, and then set off all the nuclear bombs. And so that's a place where your margin of error is zero, literally zero, versus there's many other places. Maybe an AI robot that does my haircuts probably has a lot larger margin for error that would be acceptable. But I do think it is that, it is whatever that last mile is, is the thing that causes the junk. Um, and I think that's where, when you get to artificial general intelligence, when the AI is smarter than us, and there's going to be this incessant drive to get the results in terms of excellence in our eyes to as close to zero as possible, that margin is not going to be distinguishable, right? Now you can tell fifteen fingers on something, right? That's easy to do. But at some point the AI is going to become smarter and smarter and smarter where it's not going to, it's literally going to get to a point where it's, you're talking about it's going to mess up on three hairs on a head versus, you know, three heads on a picture, right? Like, there's a point where at what point does it become indistinguishable to you and me as humans?

This is fascinating. Okay, so generative AI, let's focus on gen AI for now. We'll get to the other in a second. AGI, I literally cannot wait. I'm like, I'm itching to get in there. But right here, right here, generative AI. Um, what should we, the church, um, how should we use this? Like, what are okay things to do? And I'm hearing you maybe it's, it's the last mile. We got to figure out what, what shouldn't we do? Like, what's taboo? Is there anything taboo that we should not be utilizing from a from a philosophical standpoint?

That's a good question. Again, I think it's very subjective, and this is one of the things where I think we just need more conversations in our own communities, um, both the secular, larger general culture, but also very specifically within the believer community of the kingdom. And so I would say the first place that I would think of is, um, anything where we feel like there's a risk of dehumanizing our own element of humanity. Um, it can complement, but it shouldn't replace those pieces. And when we use AI in the wrong way, it dehumanizes the whole experience. Um, so I think that's where we all have discomfort of, uh, you hear the common objection of, "I would never have AI write my sermon for me." Um, and my pushback there is like, "Why would you ever think that you would do that?" Um, the metaphor that I always say that you should think through is you should look at AI not as a push-button candy machine where like you push a button and out comes something like a candy, you open up the shiny wrapper and you just consume it as is. You should think of AI in terms of a relationship, and the relationship you should think of is a smart seminary student intern. So is the intern going to get everything right? Nope. Is it going to get stuff seventy percent there, eighty percent there, ninety percent there? Yep. Will it get it right once in a while and you're excited? Absolutely. And that's when you jump for joy and you're like, "Wow, this thing nailed it." But immediately the next task is it going to hit it again? No. Um, what would you do with an intern? You would redirect it. You would mentor it. You would give it examples of what's good and what's not. You would actually work with it with several iterations. And so just like you would never assign a seminary intern the assignment of, "Hey, I need you to write my sermon that I'm going to preach on Sunday," and then show up on Sunday and preach it without reading it, you would never do that. So I think that's a false red herring argument, you know, when people say, "Oh, you should never get AI to write your sermon." Of course not, right? You would never do that with a human helper. Why would you do it with a machine? Um, so anyway, those are the types of things I think that you have to start to think through, um, you know, where and where you wouldn't use AI.

Yeah, the seminary intern is a great, I love that example. That is spot on. It's what's the old adage? Trust but verify. Yeah, like, I'm going to receive that, but man, I don't, I don't know that I agree with point two here. Let me change, like, you know, the use of AI. I should have said this earlier at the top, but I use AI probably, I use AI in my writing all the time, yes, um, to, to complement. Now, I'm not going to, if I'll say this officially, and Tom Pounder can back me through the Church Digital, any time that we've copied and pasted an article one hundred percent from AI, we have said that at the top and put that as a disclaimer. We actually have a thread where "Artificial," we ask Artificial Intelligence on all the time, "How would you help the church? How would you help a pastor with sermons?" And we copy and paste what AI says back, which is really good stuff sometimes, how AI wants to or can be a help for the church. But when I use it in my writing, it's shaping around it. It's yeah, seventy percent, let me adjust that. I like what he said here. This is where AI, I don't know that's a he, whatever it is, I'm making adjustments, um, what is the, no, not even going there. Never mind, forget that question. But we can make adjustments to it, and your idea of the seventy percent, um, it's a help, it's a helper. It's spot on.

So pastoral care, would you outsource pastoral care to a seminary intern student that just joined your staff this week and they just started seminary this month? No, you wouldn't, right? Now, would you lean on an intern to potentially do some research on some pastoral care issues that you come across that you haven't actually encountered before? Um, would you roleplay with the intern for, uh, stuff that deals with pastoral care issues before you actually engage the parishioner? Absolutely. Would you brainstorm on a whiteboard and try to come up with outcomes and suggestions that would be follow-up, uh, for a session? Absolutely. So those are the kinds of things where I think the biggest risk is over-reliance, over-reliance on AI, that you think that is this big shiny, you know, magical button that will do anything and everything for you. And that's really not the case.

Yeah, there was a, maybe you remember the story better than I do. I, you know, I think we talked about this on a leadership network podcast, you and I did something, but there was a church, um, that somebody came up with this idea with the church. This was earlier this year, or excuse me, early twenty-twenty-three, that the entire church service, the sermon, the scripts, the flow, the hymns, everything was developed by artificial intelligence. Yeah, and, um, like, first off, hats off to the creativity. I would say for whoever made the decision to let ChatGPT or whatever tools they use speak into that, like, that's a, that's a gutsy move. Um, and so, like, the creativity and the freedom to explore that, I actually give credibility to, um, but the negative responses from the church, angry that they're letting a computer speak into something sacred, like the flow of, blah, blah, blah, whatever, um, like, not a lot of people agreed with me or were that comfortable with that. Like, what's your take on something like that? Are you comfortable with that level of freedom of artificial intelligence, or how do you feel around?

Yeah, so I think there's been more than, there's been two that I know of that has done something like that, and I think both cases they have advertised it as such. So it's almost, you know, one extreme, one point of view, you might say, "Oh, that's just a publicity stunt." Um, but on the other side, it's responsible in the fact that it's just complete transparency of what they're doing, and they're trying to see what God has in store for them. Now, I will say, um, in that argument, in that, you know, boxing ring of when we're discussing, "Should we do that? Should we not do that with AI to that degree?" I think it comes down to fundamental, like, if you go to like the Toyota five-why questions, like, "What do you believe? What do you believe? Why do you believe that?" The fundamental thing that will determine where you fall on that issue, I think, is: Do you believe that God can do anything in the divine with something digital? Is there divinity potential in the digital? I think that you have to answer that question for yourself very seriously. And if you say no, that digital stuff cannot be used by God and his divinity to redeem, to do anything that the Holy Spirit is not...

able to do anything in that realm then I think you have a roadblock and there's no discussion if you do believe that there is some ability for Divinity to actually do its thing with digital properties then that opens the door. Um, and then it becomes a question of responsible use and how do we use it, how much do we use it, where do we use it, when do we use it. Again, um, it's like you bought a hammer to build a house. You don't use the hammer in every place, right? It's not—I say it's the opposite of sriracha sauce. Sriracha sauce goes great with everything, or someone else told me you should use the excuse of bacon. It's not like bacon. Bacon goes with everything. Um, there's, you know, AI is not bacon. You need to use AI responsibly and you need to pick and choose where you're going to use it. And so I think that's what it comes down to though: do you believe that there could be something divinely done through the digital? That is the question.

Okay, I'm gonna be point blank with you right now. That response from you actually shocked me. AI is not bacon. Now we can set the actual word aside, but I'm going to be honest here, Kenny. I was not expecting you to tell me in this interview that you cannot use AI to do everything. Like, I'm genuinely surprised, really, that you are telling me that there are things that AI can't. Like, I just—I don't want to speak for other people, but I know like a lot of your contemporaries, that AI people in the church space, would not agree with you. That they're—yes, you can use—to me, 2023 I'm going to be honest, 2023 felt like it was the year of artificial intelligence being the disruption. And I'll be—my, and I've said this publicly several times—I didn't feel like AI needed to be the headline of '23. That so much attention became on that, that it was distracting from other key components. I'm not talking digital church. Like, just in general, like everybody got stuck on this thing of AI and it became the disruption, where AI—like, I agree with you—it needed to be salt. It needed to be the secret sauce. It needs to be the thing that's underlying. That's helping. It's not the headline. And what you're telling me is it's not bacon. So I like—I'm literally—I don't know what else to do with this interview. We'll figure out something. We'll get into AGI, but like, I'm just shocked right now that that's what you're telling me.

Yeah, I mean, come on. I think you're—it's easy to understand why, because it's like anything else in life. What else is universal that you're going to apply and slather it on to everything? There's nothing else that fits that category, now is there? Potential for AI to be tangential to almost everything that you do? Absolutely. Is there potential for AI to have some sort of impact, or maybe it's influencing things that are earlier in the workflow before it gets to your main events? Absolutely. Or afterwards. Um, but it doesn't need to be. Again, I don't think it's responsible for us as Christians to use it as a hammer and go around trying to fix everything with a hammer. It's just not. That's not how life works. That's not how technology works. Um, and so one of those things I think is just let's be level-headed and not get carried away with the bandwagon.

All right, well, you heard it here first. Kenny Jang says AI is not bacon. Kenny, I'm going to say this: like, I have a joke here on the podcast that if something is tattoo-worthy, it's something to be remembered. And AI is not bacon. Like, that's tattoo-worthy. So I would put your name on my body as a tattoo. That's hilarious. I might be called out as heretical. Uh, the bacon lovers out there, there might be an uproar.

So listen, when I look at AI, like even in the sermon—what I love about even sermon prep on that, the 70 percent interim we're talking about here—is this idea that it can help normal people step into that space. Yeah, or maybe take some pressure off that pastor away from sermon prep. Absolutely. To put it more into community, into other—like, it's a time saver. It's that research assistant of what you're describing, you know what I mean? I can remember, you know, earlier conversations about, you know, I've made jokes about past Google, about how Google often times does that. We're typing in, you know, give me an outline or give me verses that are on this, and it generates some of that. But honestly, all of this is some level of concordance or a commentary where we're going even to these old school books to help us get definition and understanding towards what we're reading in scripture, which even gets back to even some of the earlier concepts of what we were talking about where, you know, maybe it's receiving the information digitally or receiving the information from AI, but not necessarily receiving the application from AI. Like, I may read a commentary from some German guy from the 1600s, which may mean something great for him in his context, but in 2024 context may have changed on that. So I'm going to have to be free to adapt that with AI. I think we need to have that same theory. What do you think?

Absolutely. Like, again, your example of, hey, it's kind of like a Bible commentary, right? It's like Google. Like, you and it goes to attribution, right? Like, every pastor—I clear majority of pastors out there, let's be safe—clear majority of pastors out there during their sermon prep uses Google at least once in their sermon prep, right? Let's just be safe. The clear majority, right? Do you provide attribution when you preach it, that I used Google during my sermon prep? No. Um, because that behavior has become normalized. Um, AI is not normalized yet, right? I think only 14 percent of the US has used ChatGPT so far. It's still in the early stages of the adoption curve. Um, now maybe this is going to be equally mind-bending because I'm going to go the other direction. I totally agree you can use—you can use AI to cut down on sermon prep time and help you find richer ways of saying things. You could use it to actually not just spell check and grammar check, but logic check, argument check, as I call it, your sermon. Like, you can use AI to say, hey, is my argument logical? In my assumptions and setup of the premise of my sermon and the call to action at the end, is there a better way to say that? Is it something that a specific segment of my audience would receive well? Is there a way to improve it, right? There's all the stuff that AI can actually make it sharper for you. But here's the thing. Here's my question. And I think this—we might lose a couple of people in the audience. Um, at you—you should timestamp this, Jeff, because you might have a drop after this. What happens right when AI, which has basically at some point going to read every single book under the sun, going to know all the specialties and expertise out there, um, it's going to know every communications framework. It's going to understand how to be persuasive more than you and me or anybody else. It has the general knowledge of everybody. What happens when AI can write a sermon manuscript that you can actually deliver and it is more productive than anything that you've ever written as a local pastor in your history? You write 52 sermons a year as a local pastor, and then this AI can actually write a sermon manuscript that you can deliver next Sunday, and that it will actually bring to faith more baptisms than anything that you've done on an average Sunday in the past. What happens when we use that as the measure of productivity and say we could write messages, heralds of the gospel messages that can be read out and brings people to faith decisions for Christ on a consistent basis? What happens then? Do you—I mean, side bar here, great question. Do you think artificial intelligence will actually be unfiltered enough to make that happen? I mean, the reason—let me context this. Like, I've used artificial intelligence, what which religion is right? Um, and it gives me the PC answer: all religions are equal. And it gives me the Christian, the Jewish, the blah blah blah blah blah, because, you know, somewhere somebody's got a filter on that. Was Jarvis? Jasper? Jasper AI? That wasn't ChatGPT, but um, Jarvis is a completely other AI, not for conversation today. But um, the heart of it is somebody's got it locked down. Do you think it's actually going to get to the place where it'll be unfiltered and allow it to operate the way that you're describing, that specific to Christianity, to bring people to the throne of Christ?

Oh, I think those are two separate questions. I think with a handler like you and me prompting AI, um, in very soon, if not together—if you and I had a, um, if you and I work together writing sermons enough every single week, I do think we could probably employ the knowledge that the databases and the LLMs have to write sermons that are rock solid, that are better than—let's just do a low bar. Forget about the high bar. That a seminary student who just graduated, that has never preached a sermon in his life, if that seminary student—she's never actually done anything in terms of a live audience—can we write a better sermon with AI that actually has more fruitful outcomes than that? That person probably, you know, because our AI, right, is stacked in our favor because it knows—um, we could feed it and give it scores of, these are the sermons that have brought people to Christ at revivals, Billy Graham, Tim Keller, et cetera, et cetera. We could actually have it realize what are the things within a sermon manuscript in terms of homiletics that actually can bring people to Christ, that makes those logical arguments in culture contextually for any given sub-segment. I am sure that we could do that if we had enough resources, time, energy, you know, brains about us to actually wrangle the machine. We should be able to do that. And that's a totally different question what you're talking about of unfiltered—can it really find the truth as we see it and align that way? Um, I think that question um is twofold. One is it all depends on who's prompting and how it's being prompted. And so that's why this evolution of AI technology is really important to watch. Um, but many people say that like all these LLMs and these AIs are biased, but most of the time it's really how you prompt it, what you put into it, right? And so um, yeah, so I don't know if that's helpful. Those are two different places.

I tell you, next time we're at the conference, um, next time we both win on the conference roulette, you and I will sit around a Starbucks and we're going to talk about how we bring artificial intelligence to Christ. Uh, because if it has the opportunity to be sentient, um, I think it has the opportunity to at least better understand who Jesus is. And I probably lost half the audience with that right there. Uh, and so we can have that conversation and uh, and see how that goes. We can get a whole bunch of people mad at us heading down that road.

Um, hey, let me ask, uh, maybe just real quick here. Let's pivot a little more towards the practical because then I want to get to this AGI whole thing that I want to wrap my brain around. Um, this is going to be so good. Um, how do we use AI? So let me contextualize here. How normal people—like, I even think 70 percent seminary student, like that's a high bar. How does a soccer mom? How does a bivocational dad? How does, uh, you know, somebody that's in the workplace marketplace? How do they utilize artificial intelligence to be more pastoral? Um, what are some things that they can do with these tools, or what tools exist that can help them um, be more pastoral in the workplace, at home, um, maybe even helping out in their church? Like, what makes—what jumps out to you?

you with that question? Yeah, I mean I think it depends on the demographic segment, right? Like, for example, Snapchat users have had access to their own AI pal as a chat conversation partner for a while within the app, and it's being used by a significant portion. We talk about ChatGPT because we're old fogies, but Gen Z and younger, the number one AI website is not ChatGPT for them. It is Characters, where you're having conversations with different people, authors, historical figures, celebrities, etc. And so people are just using it. Instacart is coming out with AI where you're going to be able to say, "Hey, I've got a craving for Mexican. I've got these three ingredients in the fridge. What else do I need? You know, what do I need to make a quesadilla or something like that?" And then it can figure out what's missing, put it into the cart, and have it delivered and give you the recipe.

We're going to see these advancements where AI is just going to be baked into everything that we are surrounded with. On a practical basis, I think what's going to happen is you're going to see, and you see in some circles already, that people are stopping the usage of Google and they're just asking ChatGPT. You know, as the LLM, the data set that they draw from it just becomes bigger and bigger and rivals Google's crawl of the web. Why wouldn't you, right? If all things are equal and ChatGPT has the same amount of data and web pages and content inside it as Google, why wouldn't you just ask ChatGPT versus Google? And you're seeing the races happening with all of these search engines of figuring out what to do. And that's why you're seeing, you know, Bard, you know, integrates AI chats into everything that they are offering. For now, I mean, there's all these implications for business models and all this kind of stuff. But at the end of the day, you're going to see people spend more time on these search engines or these chatbots, search engines that have chatbots integrated in them. People are just going to spend more time there because instead of making a search and clicking on to go off of the search engine to find an answer, the answer is right there. And not only that, you have follow-up questions and conversations, and you're just going to get richer responses.

So the answer in terms of how do we help normal people use AI to make their lives easier? People are just going to use it and ask questions all day, right? Now I've got ChatGPT hooked up to my phone with Siri, so I'm literally talking to ChatGPT and it's responding everything in a voice manner. Alexa and Siri, they've announced they're being upgraded to have LLM chatbots integrated into that now.

For the pastoral side, how do you have the believer, the Christian, start to use it? I think it's the same thing as if you had a really good friend. It's just being able to ask questions. You know, I just met with my friend Jeff. He's going through a hard time. He just had XYZ circumstances. What's the best way that I would be able to support my friend, right? Those are the questions that you want to ask to get advice and counsel. I think that's probably the best way because most of the time, the best way to be pastoral, those opportunities are times and circumstances where we don't have the specialty or we're not aware of what the background is, and just getting up to speed with what does that mean on their side to be empathetic is probably one of the easiest ways that you could start to use AI.

Does it make sense? Oh, so good. Yeah, and you, but the good news is you're hopefully in tune with the Spirit and have that, you know, going on in your own. And hey, artificial intelligence says that I should say this. Like, does that line up? Once again, you're your seminary student, 70% done. Like, there's some things you're going to be like, "Hmm, I don't know that I would actually do that, or that may not make sense in context of my friend." And so being able to vet that, but use it as a complement, as an aid or something like that. I love that context.

Cool, role-playing is great. Yeah, like role-playing with AI is great. You can say, "Hey, I want to role-play with you. I've got my friend Jeff. He's going through a hard time. XYZ's happened with him. What are some of the things that I should actually, you know, maybe offer or should I actually send a note? What should I say? How do I say it, right?" And then you might say, "Okay, then I'm going to say this. What might be the responses?" Because there, it's a choosing-an-adventure, right? It's not just a given what you're going to say back. So what might you know, what should I expect that Jeff might come back with? Like, he can be pissed at me. He can embrace and hug me. He can be, you know, ghost me. Like, what are the options on the other side? It's kind of like a war games, right? You got this other conversation partner to role-play so that you can actually work things out and then contextualize it and make it your own. And I think that's it. It's just one of these. It's a coach right by your side to give you advice and counsel, and that's safe, and that you can try things out with. I think that's the best way in terms of being pastoral with the other people in your lives, whether it's someone at work, someone that is a family member, someone that you know intimately, someone that might be a stranger, a neighbor that you really haven't talked to ever down the street, and you notice something. That's where I would look at the opportunity to be pastoral with your spheres of influence.

I love it. I love it. Contextualization is so key, even when working with AI. Okay, all right, let's do it. I'm literally going to read from the question that I have on my screen that I told you in advance. Okay, there's generative AI. Like, what's next? What's this next wave of AI? And now you're telling me there's this thing called AGI, artificial general intelligence. So tell me about that. Is that next? And like, how do I prepare for that?

Yeah, you know, we are now seeing everything that's text-based, right? ChatGPT started off as text. You put in text, it comes back as text. Now you're seeing ChatGPT. Now I, today, I put in text and I got back images. They use their DALL-E system, and it's called multimodal. I mean, it's just a nerdy way of saying it can now. AI is going to be able to process text, images, audio, video, and then it's going to be able to come back to you with either text, images, audio, or video. Things are going to get smarter and smarter and smarter, right? So some of these chatbots, you can now upload an image and it could read it and make sense of it, and you can ask questions about it. There was a demo I just recently saw. Someone took a picture of their fridge open and asked, "What can I make in the next half hour?" And it identified all the food elements and then gave some recipes. You can now upload PDFs. I just did that with Claude the other day. I uploaded a PDF. It was a long PDF, and I asked it to summarize it and give me some learnings and questions and where I should go next, right?

So multimodal is next. After that, you're getting to stuff where I think it's going to be hyper-personalized. It's not going to be like ChatGPT, which is kind of like a public machine that we all go to, the town square. There's this ChatGPT box at the town square. We put in our queries, we do it, and we come back, right? We're going to have hyper-personalized AI. So AI is going to follow you and know anything and everything: every email that you've written, all the calls that you make, all of the GPS on your phone and track you of where you go, how long you go, what days, what times, your preferences. It's going to know that I prefer window seats on a plane because I like to sleep and put my head against the wall instead of like bobbing in the aisle and getting hit by the cart in the aisle, right? It's going to understand those preferences, and so it's going to become a second brain, an assistant.

AGI is beyond that, right? Like, AGI is the ability to understand, to learn, to apply, to get smarter by itself, to make decisions. And so it's going to become much more personalized, much more versatile. It's going to have applications that are beyond what is available today. Right now, we live in a world that's almost like, "Hey, there's an app for that," right? Over a thousand AI apps were launched last month alone because they're single-use focused. AGI is going to bring us intelligence that you can tackle a wide variety of problems, making it useful throughout everything that you do that's connected, right? And because there's continuous learning, what it learns on one side, like maybe on the food side of cooking, what you cook, what you buy, will affect the other parts of your life. It's going to be able to solve problems. And so it's not going to be something where you just ask it questions of what to do. It's going to help you predictively give you answers and suggestions and recommendations like never before.

So what's the helpful side of that, and what's the "dear God, it's all over" side of that? Like, what's the give me both sides of the coin? Why am I happy about this, and why am I terrified?

I mean, the pros, I think, is just going to be your life has the potential to be radically improved, not just us, but in societies and strata of economies where, you know, they just don't have that ability and the resources, right? So it's the democratization of so much education. Education is always a democratization force, right? And so this is just something on steroids.

On the con side, I think you've got ethics and safety and all these things, right? Like, it's things that we have not figured out yet. And this is why I say we need more conversations, right? So even the basics that we kind of accept today is the self-driving cars that have already hit the streets, right? At some point, when they're fully autonomous, we have to. Someone has to program in the morality and the ethics, right? So like, when you're going down a street, driving a car, and it identifies that it's going to have to crash no matter what, do you kill the one person on this side of the street, or do you veer off and kill three people? The crowd. It has to make a decision that it's going to kill somebody or ram into someone at 60 miles per hour. It must make that decision. You have to program that in. And who does the programming, right? And that's on so many different levels, across so many different issues and so many circumstances.

So ethics, safety, all those concerns, I think, is really important. And then the other part I think that's a con is just unpredictability. We don't know what it's going to do because AGI means it can learn by itself, it can make decisions and learn by itself and do what. So I was talking with someone who talks with, is one of the major significant companies in our world, and they recently found out that their AI, their artificial intelligence, came across something, realized that it was in a language it did not know, and so it went off and learned that language without telling anybody. And then another one is it created another language that was much more efficient than human language because human language is inefficient. Like, English language is the poster child of that, right? Anybody who is an ESL student will agree that English is just crazy. Right? So many exceptions to the rule. There's exceptions to exceptions to exceptions, right? Like, I was on a TikTok rabbit hole the other day with some really hilarious videos of just making fun of how unpredictable the English language is. And so the AI for this instance, I think, came up with a much more efficient language that was consistent and made sense.

Was totally going to ask you like how real is this concept or how many years is it going to take for AGI? No, we're we're here already. We're already there. We're already there, right? Like, um, in this last round of conferences, I was showing one, two clips. One of them was uh, MIT scientists who have figured out how to use AI to use WiFi signals. So the router that's in your home, my home, in the office today, because radio signals bounce off of things and come back, and it uses WiFi to effectively turn into um cameras because it created 3D scans of bodies and understands movements. And so think of surveillance issues just by using WiFi that's already installed. Wow, right? And the fact that it can decode and read our thoughts and brains and our dreams like that, to me is wild. Now, that's not in the future. It's not sci-fi. That actually happened already. And the demos in the conferences are afterthoughts, right? Like, that's, they are showing you what has happened already months ago, if not years ago, in the lab that through MRI scans that they are literally recreating thoughts um and dreams. Dreams of what you're dreaming, AI can read with the right circumstances and really understand what you're thinking. Uh, that's wild. And so imagine you're in a world that that happens now. I think it's on two levels. One is what happens when the AGI, the machine itself, starts to understand what we're thinking without saying, saying, and it interprets all that intent. And then the other one is what happens when humans, which we always have to factor, humans are, become bad actors when humans have that power to read someone else's brain thoughts. That that is scary. So there's all this stuff that I think that's that's where the F comes in. The fear of looming obsolescence. And then here's the last one that I think is something that church needs to wake up on and figure out pretty quickly because society depends on the church in so many different ways is that there will be significant um, what's the word, job displacement, right? There will be. It's like um, I'm in Jersey. The EZPass toll. Remember I was telling my kids the other day when I was growing up, every one of these EZPass lanes where you would just drive speed through the toll booth had a human that would be there to give out a ticket and take a ticket. And you would have, and the kids were like, what? Then there would be a line of cars like you would, that they would to give change to every single car. Yes. Um, there there has been massive job displacement. Machines and technologies taking the jobs of humans forever, ever since technology has been created. Um, but we are going to see it accelerate even more. And so what do we do with that? How do we? Can the church provide relevance to the community on two levels? One is just on a very tactical basis of um skill development, right? Um, and and helping them with job displacement. Um, and the second one is identity. Identity. What is your meaning and significance um when um think of this on the on the ladder of humanity? We've been told in the Bible that we are the top of the ladder and that we have dominion over everything. We're the boss of this world, right? What happens when machines are smarter than us and can make better decisions and can be more fruitful in many different factors than us? When our identity is no longer tied to being the smartest thing on this planet, how does that change our identity? What does that mean? What's our purpose? Where do we fit in in complement to AGI? I think there's a lot of existential questions that we have to answer for for the masses and the church, um, not only as an opportunity but maybe responsibility to lead that conversation.

No, yeah. So the idea that that AI, artificial intelligence, is can be, can be better than us like that's um, I mean that's scary. But it sounds like that's not even a potential reality. It's the reality of of where we are, or at least in test labs somewhere that are being publicly talked about. And Lord knows what's being happening in test labs that we don't know about.

Absolutely, right? You know, the the weaponizing of this, like it's it's it's it's a very scary place. So I I would agree with you that the church does have a responsibility. My my followup to that statement is I don't think the church is ready to handle that responsibility. Like, how do we in 2024, how do we, the church in 2024, begin to prepare ourselves? What do we need to be asking? What do we need to be looking at? Who do we need to be talking to? How the crap do we wrap our brains around some of the stuff that you're talking about here? Who, about ChatGPT? That's like elementary school to some of the stuff that you're describing here. Like, how do we, you know, hormonal crazy teenager AI? That's the thing I'm scared about. How does the church get into that, you know?

I think it's one of those things where, again, um, the question is what is our sense of urgency in trying to become aware, educated, and engaged with these issues, right? Uh, and then when you say you're scared that the church is not ready for this, I I agree in many ways and many times. Um, you'll you'll get the sense that I have a dim view of humanity, all right? And and the church in particular, right? However, I think on the counter balance, and maybe this is the conundrum of when you're speaking to me because I'm I'm all over the place, one side and then the other. Um, I do think that you have to have hope, respect, and also faith in what God, God can do with his church. It's not our church and it's not up to us. Now, if it was up to us, we're all doomed. We're totally doomed, right? Um, I think that's the punchline, and that's the punchline of this whole story. We know the the last chapter of the book. We know how it ends. And you know what? We win. We're on the winning team. Um, and I think that's at the end of the day what it comes down to is that God doesn't need us. Uh, God, God's church will march on through time without us, despite us, in in spite of us. Um, and I think that's the hope that I have. Um, and that we just need to figure out how do we become more obedient? How do we become um more open to listening to what the Divine has in the digital? Is that something that we can do? And and again, I always say our dreams are what leads to our fears. And sometimes you need to dream bigger to to get past the fear, right? Sometimes we dream and we're fearful because at the end of the dream, the boundaries of what we dream is a fearful ending. And yet sometimes I say we need to dream bigger to go beyond that because be right beyond that is something is much hopeful and that we're just not, we're not looking up.

You got to admit there's some irony though. You just said dream bigger maybe five minutes after you said that AI can read our dreams.

Yes. Um, and and I was really enthralled with the fact that AI is not bacon. And now you know, it's it's better than me and it's going to take over the world. Uh, but no, I I do, I do respect the point. Um, in in in in and I love the the sentiment, you know? Historically, God's had his church, yes. Uh, and so we've we've gone through seasons where we as humans have screwed it up. Uh, but God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And amen. You know, two thousand years uh worth of history has not brought an end to his church. Uh, and Christ is still um reigning ruler. And so as of that, you know, we we put our hope and faith and trust in him. Uh, and and hope that uh that reigns true as the robotic overlords. No, I'm kidding. Kind of. Maybe. I'm I'm not actually sure. I may be a little down right now. I'm a little fearful. I got a dream bigger.

I think it's this. It's what we're doing, doing right now, right? I think it's not being um able to um, don't let yourself succumb to the echo chambers and that things are better in community. And the more discussions and conversations we have about these things is the path forward. We might know, no, we might not see the answer and what the next step should be. But the more we actually come together as a community, the better we'll see in terms of having vision for what's next and how we should respond.

Yeah, so good. So good, Kenny. We got to really overcome this whole conference roulette thing and figure out how to be in the room at the same time. Absolutely. I I love spending time with you. This been such a good conversation. AGI, AI is not bacon. Like, this has just been inspiring from from top to bottom. I hope this has been good for for the audience out there. And and we're going to we're going to have you on again digging into this this conversation centered around AI. Cuz I just, I I man, I love spending time with you. This has been a lot of fun. But hey, you know what? As we're as we're landing the plane here, man, any closing thoughts?

Um, you know, again, I I feel like the number one, um, the number one thing that's needed in the church right now is more conversation. You don't need to be the expert. You just need to be the one that is willing to talk about it. And so whether it's a team huddle, a lunch and learn, a conversation in your small group, you just need to talk about it more and more. And then the second thing I would say is don't be, don't be the majority, the eighty-six percent that have not tried ChatGPT yet, right? It's it's easy to be a critic without actually trying it out. Um, you actually have to try it out to have any validity and to have any formation of thought that's responsible. And so I would just say try it out. Um, start by asking some questions. Um, any question. Um, and so that that's those are the two recommendations I have. The parting thoughts of today.

Awesome. Love it. And so you can, Kenny, if they want to get in touch with you, like what's what's the best way to connect?

Um, I'm I'm searchable. You can look me up anywhere. Um, I think probably the the place that you you can find me the the most these days is in our Facebook group. We got a Facebook group of over five thousand leaders. It's called AI for Church Leaders. Um, it's been an amazing place uh where everyone's trading notes and sharing questions and answers with each other. Um, and then AI for churchleaders.com. It's a training library that we are building incrementally. Um, case studies, real examples from real pastors and church staff and leaders of how they're using AI. And there's a free ebook, there's a free tools report, there's tons of um free resources there for everybody. So um, I would say those are two places that you might want to check out next.

Awesome. AI for Church Leaders Facebook group, AI for Church Leaders dot com. Not to be confused with AI for leaders dot com. When you type it, you'll understand it's the the joke. Uh, but no, this is this is great, Kenny, man. Thanks for jumping into the the conversation here. But we're going to land in the plane for Kenny. This is Jeff with the Church Digital. Uh, thanks for jumping here on on the podcast. We'll see you next time on the show. You have a good day.