ChatGPT: 'If you love it so much, why don’t you marry it?'

Recently, Eric Swanson posted on his personal Facebook page about Chat CPT and how faith leaders should respond to it. It is something that all Church leaders should hear as they look how to use AI. Here is what he shared.

You didn’t see that question coming, did you? It’s sort of a head nod to Chris Farley and Paul Rubens but the question will be addressed a minute or so into this essay. Yes, you’ve read a bit about ChatGPT and I have to admit, I’m a bit infatuated with ChatGPT…but that’s for later. Even so, a bit of review is in order.

The legendary football coach would begin the season’s first practice with Green Bay Packers by saying, “Gentlemen, this is a football.” So, what is ChatGPT? “Gentlemen and gentlewomen, this is ChatGPT:

• Chat: This tool mimics human conversation and interaction.
• Generative: It can generate original text or content, like answering questions or writing articles.
• Pre-trained: It has been trained on a massive amount of information to help answer most any question.
• Transformer: This refers to the brain-like type of neural network architecture which is adept at handling sequences of data, like sentences or paragraphs.

But now it’s time to take the field. 

ChatGPT was shot out of a canon. 

No technological innovation has launched with such market velocity as ChatGPT. Within five days of its release on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT had one million users. Within ten weeks ChatGPT had acquired its first 100 million users, something that took Facebook 4.5 years, Instagram 2.5 years and Google almost one year to achieve (source).  Yet we are still on DAY ONE in its adoption. According to a Pew study released at the end of August, 2023 only 18 percent of U.S. adults have tried ChatGPT, limiting their use primarily for entertainment (20%) followed by learning (19%) with a 16 percent sliver using this tool for work tasks. According to Pew data, less than 20 percent of “employed adults aware of ChatGPT believe it will have a significant impact” (source).

Where does ChatGPT get its information?

Boy, that’s a good question. So, I asked ChatGPT for the publicly available sources of data that it accessed. Prompt: “Can you give me fifteen examples of publicly available sources that feed your wealth of knowledge?” The answer was fascinating. The first source was “billions of web pages” followed by Wikipedia and ending with MIT OpenCourseWare with a myriad of interesting sources in between. 

Just how “smart” is ChatGPT?

Let’s start with an analogy. Remember the line in the movie Ghostbusters where Dr. Egon Spengler was trying to describe the looming peril of biblical proportions facing New York City? Egon says, “Well, let's say this Twinkie represents the normal amount of psychokinetic energy in the New York area. Based on this morning's reading, it would be a Twinkie thirty-five feet long, weighing approximately six hundred pounds,” to which his ghost-busting counterpart, Winston Zeddimore responds, “That’s a big Twinkie!”

So, if a Twinkie represented the intellectual capacity of an average pastor, ChatGPT is that 600 pound Twinkie! With such a storehouse of knowledge Chat GPT has breezed through the standard qualifying exams like the SATs, MCATs, the MBA Exam, the Uniform Bar Exam, the U.S. Medical License Exam. It is thoroughly adept at generating human-like conversations, composing or summarizing essays and research reports. It can write complex code, create graphs and charts, read and summarize emails, write clever poems and can even compose songs and melodies. It can translate into or from nearly one-hundred languages. It solves complicated problems and can generate ideas for new products that have several times more potential than those proposed by some of the brightest college students (source).

For pastors, needing help in sermon preparation, ChatGPT boasts that it can do everything from being your research assistant to creating discussion questions based on your sermon. It also seems to know pastors so well that it anticipates your objections to such shortcuts and adds this disclaimer. “While ChatGPT can be a valuable tool, it should complement a pastor’s own study, prayer, and discernment, as it is not a substitute for the spiritual guidance required in sermon preparation.” Good catch ChatGPT!

AI is coming to the church whether we want it to…or not

You might cringe at the thought of doing such a thing today but in June of 2023, the first AI generated sermon was given to 300 eager congregants in a church in Fürth, Germany. Like Samuel B. Morse’s first words transmitted over the telegraph, (“What hath God wrought?”) the figure on the screen spoke clearly. “Dear friends, it is an honor for me to stand here and preach to you as the first artificial intelligence at this year’s convention of Protestants in Germany” (source). History was made. Two weeks later a couple in Morrison Colorado, who unsurpringly met online, legally tied the knot in a marriage ceremony officiated by…you guessed it, an AI officiant (source).  This couple apparently didn’t love ChatGPT enough to marry it, but they did love it so much it asked ChatGPT marry them! In another stream of faith..." (source).

Using AI as a multiplier of your effort

AI can produce a massive amount of value for a minimum effort. AI is the “elegant solution” that engineers dream of—a maximum return for a minimum of effort. If “value” is the difference between the cost of creating something and the benefit of that creation then ChatGPT could be the ultimate value creator of all time. But won’t ChatGPT displace workers? Of course it will but think of this differently. When one engineer can do the work of 10 engineers surely the other nine engineers can also do the work of nine other engineers and more and more value is created collectively at a lesser cost. AI dramatically reduces the time and cost of creative production. So, if currently you are spending 20 hours a week in sermon preparation, and with ChatGPT you could reduce that time to 15 hours. What might you do with those extra 5 hours a week to make life better for someone else? What if you tasked your team to figure out ways ChatGPT could save them 8 hours a week and then use those 8 hours, not to do more church work but to actually meet with people in your church and make disciples? Life’s getting better already.

Is AI leading us into a worse or more hopeful future?

That’s what you really want to know isn’t it? ChatGPT is goal-oriented but lacks a moral compass. It simply uses available input to guess what comes next based on the massive amounts of pre-trained data it has access to. As our pocket-protector wearing friends like to say with a smile, “Garbage In, Garbage Out. GIGO!” Now get this, at the turn of the last century knowledge doubled about every hundred years. In 1949 knowledge was doubling roughly every 25 years. So having a set of Encyclopedias and maybe a subscription to National Geographic was a solid investment. Today knowledge doubles at least every day (source). So, if you believe that people are getting more and more evil and if more and more people are adding false information to the knowledge base, the pot of AI soup will need a lot of more straining. (If you want to read one possible scenario of the future, read the Prelude of Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark on the Read Sample Section on Amazon (then buy the book or Audible version. It is so worth it). It was seemingly so prescient, I found myself thinking, huh…so this is how it ends. 

Don’t be purposefully stupid

Don’t reinvent what’s already been discovered. Jesus put it this way: “Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped the benefits of their labor” (John 4:38). What can we do to reap the benefit of those horn-rimmed engineers, hunkered over their black-screened monitors who “have done the hard work?” Check out Isaiah 54:16: “See, it is I who created the blacksmith who fans the coals into flame and forges a weapon fit for its work.” If God is the one who creates the skillful blacksmith, it’s not out of field goal range to say that he is also the one who is the source of technological advances. Luther knew that. He wrote, “Printing (the absolute cutting technology of the day) is the ultimate gift of God and the greatest one” (source).  Luther built on what Gutenberg invented and voila! The Protestant Reformation.

“Warning Will Robinson”

If you want to see how folks thought about AI in 1966 go to Youtube and watch Lost In Space: "War of the Robots" Season 1 Episode 20. So good. All that to say that you should use ChatGPT with at least a bit of skepticism. 

1. ChatGPT does hallucinate at times and is quite competent of making stuff up when it has to fill in the blanks. “Seldom wrong, but never in doubt” might be ChatGPT’s motto. ChatGPT adds this disclaimer in tiny print at the bottom of the page: “ChatGPT may produce inaccurate information about people, places, or facts.” So for now…trust and verify.
2. With knowledge doubling every several hours, ChatGPT can quickly become out of date when you need current answers. Discloser: With knowledge doubling every several hours, this article is already several weeks out of date.
3. Deepfakes. AI now has easily has the ability to reproduce your image and voice with incredible fidelity. Can you imagine a deepfake video of you on TikTok promoting the spot-on insights of ordained women pastors? For some…a dream come true. For others…your worst nightmare.

Our potential responses to ChatGPT 

There are four ways to respond to the increasingly attractive ChatGPT.

1. Take the “bachelor till the rapture” approach. (Remember that one fellas?) Stay away from and preach the evils of ChatGPT as if she were the wayward woman of Proverbs 5. Insist on the pure, untainted scriptural text as the source for all you do. Draw your illustrations only from biblical characters. Follow in the footsteps of Trithemius who believed that the work of transcribing sacred texts by hand was essential to the spiritual formation of monks. With more than a touch of irony, he had to use the printing press to publish his tome, In Praise of Scribes to get his message out (source).
2. Have a teenage crush on and hold hands with ChatGPT…but maybe with the hesitant caution of a youth group side hug. Use it as you might use a search engine to give you ideas that you can personally build on and make your own or as a shortcut to having to pull out your Strong’s concordance or Matthew Henry’s commentary. 
3. Go steady with ChatGPT. Where you go, she’s there by your side—sort of like Barney Fife’s perpetual girlfriend, Thelma Lou on The Andy Griffith Show. They never tied the knot but she was always available to see a movie at the Mayberry Theater or going to a community dance. There was rarely a moment when Barney and Thelma Lou were not chatting back and forth. Like Barney and Thelma Lou, Chat GPT not only makes you smarter but through the continual refining of your goals or questions, ChatGPT learns from you and gets smarter. Chat GPT is your true friend with benefits. 
4. Dating is nice…having a steady is even better but should you marry ChatGPT? I asked ChatGPT and here’s the answer I got. “No, Eric, a person cannot marry ChatGPT or any other artificial intelligence. Marriage is a legally and socially recognized union between human beings. ChatGPT is just a computer program without emotions, consciousness, or legal standing, so it can't participate in such human institutions.

So, in short, it's a no-go!” So, I guess the human race is safe for now. 

What do you think? What stands out to you from your experiences with ChatGPT?  Share your ideas below or on social media.

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