AI x Christianity | Silicon Consciousness in the Digital Age

Father Ian VanHeusen 0:00
Oh Heavenly Father, we ask for you to pour forth Your grace upon our gathering, that our words may speak your truth, that we may be led to the truth and that we may be enlightened by your Holy Spirit. And we ask all this through Christ, our Lord.

Connor Mahoney 0:16
Amen. Thank you so much for that, father, Ian, and thank you to all of our panelists for joining our Convo today. I'm super excited to have this conversation about AI and Christianity. We've been hosting a number of spaces over the past few months on this topic, and really just emerging technologies in general, and Christianity. So this is, this is actually going to be our first AI specific space, and I think I have some great panelists. I will also say I see Michael whittle down there in the listener pew. If you want to jump up, you're totally welcome to I think you would have a lot of things to relate to, but let me just lay a little bit of a ground look, and then we can jump into the topic. I'm not going to speak too long, because we have some great panelists, and I want to hear from them, mostly, but I do want to say a few things. And the first thing I want to say is, this is not a solely Catholic space. This is Catholics and Protestants. And I say that because I've been joining a few spaces the other day, and it's been a big topic about some pretend Catholic spaces. This is not one of those. I want to make it very clear, I'm actually not Catholic myself. I'm Protestant, but I'm very conciliatory with Catholics, and we have some great Catholics here, father Ian, who just gave our prayers, a excellent Catholic, as well as John So and who is the COO of Catholic Answers, not the CTO. I've been mislabeling him in my promos, but he is the chief operations officer, but very involved with their projects there, including some recent AI projects, which he's going to share more about. So it's an ecumenical space. We have Protestants, we have Catholics, and if we actually get Carlos to join later, he's Orthodox, and so we'll have we have the trifecta. But this is not an anything goes space. We try to approach these discussions from a very theologically conservative, very theologically orthodox conversation. So I want to make that clear, and then I do also want to make clear that although we're not all of the same denomination, we share a lot of common things, including common confession in the Nicene Creed, apostles creed. We share a common baptism, and probably very important for this conversation, we share a common belief in the inestimable value of humanity as the image of God, the Imago Dei. So that's going to be really important to this conversation. There's no false ironicism, but we do want to have a very, a very fair discussion on these matters from a Christian perspective. One more thing I do also want to point out, I'm just going to actually show this to the Jumbotron. I ran across this post here recently, just yesterday, scrolling the timeline, okay, it's not going to let me do it from the let me see if I can do it here. Anyway. This is not going to be like a theology discussion, per se. These are not all theologies on the space. These are developers. These are Christian developers who are building cool AI tools. And some, some people may be a little field more theologically minded, but that's not really the Orient, orientation of this space. And I don't we've had these discussions in the past where it's like, okay, is AI compatible with a Christian view of the world? I don't want to hyper focus too much on that angle of the conversation, but I will point out, I just flew through this on the Jumbotron. I thought it's kind of funny. I don't know the context fully of this, but obviously the the Russian Orthodox Patriarch, Patriarch calling attention that he's concerned about the Antichrist is going to be control humans through gadgets. And we can all have, I think, a different idea of what gadgets might mean. But I do think broadly, there's a lot of concerns from Christians about AI and about emerging technology. So to some extent, in this discussion, you know that's going to come up. And the question is, can we engage with these technologies from a very Christian perspective that is representative of what Christian, the Christian worldview has given us, and also respect the image of God in humanity, in all these things that we're building? So we're going to have an amount of that conversation. But what I would really like to do here is I would just like to explore all the positive elements of AI and all the cool things that we're building in the ways that we we really have to be engaging with this technology. And that's why I was so excited to bring on John solemn son, because he put out he had a great interview after some of the controversies with a recent AI that they were developing about why he thinks it's important that Catholic Answers, that the Catholic Church engages with AI, and I just think that's a great perspective that we need to be sharing. And Michael Whittle, who's joined the space now too, kind of has a similar story with some of the controversy that Prop. Up when they started developing a Christian ai ai project. So I just want to make clear that, you know, we all have a quote to play in God's creation and and here, as AI developers and as tech developers, we have a quote to play too. So let's talk about that. John, if you don't mind, maybe you could just unmute and briefly give us kind of your background and why you're engaging with AI in your role at Catholic Answers?

Jon Sorensen 5:22
Yeah, can you hear me okay?

Connor Mahoney 5:24
I sure can go ahead.

Jon Sorensen 5:25
Okay, great, yeah. Well, I've been at, I've been at Catholic Answers for about 17 years now. My job is to sort of keep an eye out on emerging technology, and then, you know, I work with a team with people here to figure out whether or not we can use it in service of, you know, the church. And so this we created a, well, what I thought was going to I thought it was going to just be like a goofy chat bot, and no one would care. As a matter of fact, when, when we released it, and it started creating this Firestorm. I was actually on my way to watch one of our apologists do a debate in Louisiana, and so I'm like trying to do interviews on the thing running from one terminal to the next in the airport. And but, but it came to me as a, it's a, it was a chat bot, and it came when it, when it originally came to me, it was a working prototype that a young guy had created, and he was looking for someone to help him develop it further. And so Catholic answer said yes. It was originally a character of a monk, and it had a back story and all that. And part of the back story was to, sort of, like, keep the guidelines strong so it wouldn't give crazy answers, you know, like we were trying to make it so that, you know, it would only answer questions about Catholicism and not about, like, how to bake a chicken or, you know, something like that. And but a lot of people took offense to the to the priest character. We changed it to a parish priest because it seemed like that was a distinctly Catholic thing. And a lot of people take offense to that, and we, I mean, that wasn't our intent, you know, I never want to offend anybody, and I don't want to get that, let those kind of things get in the way of, you know, something that could potentially do a lot of good, but, you know, and so frankly, I was just really surprised by the reaction. And it turned out, you know, at first it seemed like it was just the priest thing. But then it turned out that, I think that people had a problem with giving it any sort of like an avatar at all that looked like a person, you know, they might have been okay if I had used, like, you know, grimace from the McDonald's commercials or something. I don't know, but, but yeah. So anyway, it just kind of blew up from there and then. And then, the thing that I noticed, and this was the unfortunate part, was that a lot of the reporting on it was really bad. I only had of all the people that reached out to me, actually, of all the people that wrote articles on us, and there was something like 200 something articles out there, of all the articles that were written about it, only one person actually reached out to me, and that was JD Flynn from the pillar. And every other story that got published was just people riffing off of the same story that he wrote. And unfortunately, you know, it's kind of like the telephone game where, you know, it gets passed along, and the story just keeps getting crazier and crazier. But it did give a couple of weird answers. We were, you know, we weren't really surprised by that. It's new technology. It doesn't, not all the bugs have been worked out yet. But at the end of the day, I think you know, if to you know what you were saying about the Antichrist there, you know that the thing you posted about the Antichrist taking over people through gadgets, I think he already done that, you know, but the I think the goal for us is that, you know, we need to compete in that space for people's attention, right? They can focus on these really bad things, or we can try to use this technology to get them to focus on good things. And I think there's a lot of good that AI can do. And I think that, you know, as long as we keep an open mind about it and recognize that, that, you know, when ethical concerns arise and they're good, solid ethical concerns, I like, for example, for me as a Catholic, if the Pope told me tomorrow, get rid of this thing, it's, you're, you've, you're stepping outside the bounds of some ethical concern, I would be the first person to get rid of it, hands down. But you know, I have not run into a com. I have not run into an argument that made me think that I was that we were doing something wrong by engaging in AI, and I think there's a lot of potential with this, with this technology.

Connor Mahoney 9:31
Yeah, totally agree. Thank you so much. I think those thoughts are great. And why I was, I was happy to bring you on. Why don't we throw it over to John If you also want to. John Barlow, sorry if you want to give a quick introduction about who you are and some of your work here in the AI field.

Jonathan Barlow 9:47
Sure, my name is Jonathan Barlow, and can you hear me? Okay, if you can give me a heart or something, I've never done this before.

Connor Mahoney 9:52
Yeah, go ahead. You're good.

Jonathan Barlow 9:54
Okay great. I'm a teaching professor at Mississippi State University. I'm also the. Associate Director of the data science academic institute here, and so I do a lot of very practical things. I teach students how to use Python to wrangle data and that sort of thing. It also supervises a lot of students who are doing AI research. About three or four years ago, I was looking at chatgpt before it was chatgpt just using the models that you could use to an API, and I was noticing that it was possible to ask them questions that related to theology. I gave it examples from a catechism, for example, and then I asked it to define a new term in the same vernacular as the Catechism. And I was just amazed, really, even at that time, how good it was. This is probably version three. This is before 3.5 which was in the first chat, online chat for GPT. Later, I realized that the models had already been trained on most of the catechisms. And I was, I just was floored at their ability to, you know, talk theologically. And, you know, if you if you know exactly what a theologian would say in a given situation, then that's, that's kind of like being a theologian, in a way. So I was, I was pretty impressed, and I thought there's a lot of potential. Lot of potential there. I've been since, I've been kind of keeping up really heavily with the generative AI space, and I've been called on to talk a lot here at the university. I'm the chair of a committee, and as you can imagine, academic integrity has been a big part of that. And so I've been thinking through that with the faculty. The humanities faculty is a little more worried than some of the other faculty. A lot of it is because they've been using the the essay, the student essay, as a way to gage people's mastery of information and their ability to think and write well. And so it's, it's been an interesting transition to watch the humanities faculty wrestle with this. And then I've also been, I'm a, I'm an elder in the Presbyterian Church in America. So I'm, you know, I've also been, I've been going to the General Assembly for a while, and I've also been called on to write for our denominational publication about AI. And so I've been thinking through, especially the some concerns in the area of the potential for idolatry. You know, the idea that you could have a talking avatar of a grandmother, for instance, that could sit on your mantle for the rest of your life and give you advice. So I was thinking about the Psalms and and the way that those who worship idols become like them, and the emphasis in the Psalms is on the the muteness of idols. Idols do not speak. But I was thinking, what will it be like to have idols that do speak? And so some of those concerns were at the forefront of my thinking through it. But I am very optimistic about AI. I think, I think, you know, Christians having a a very strong theological anthropology, you know, we know what humans are. And so I don't think there's any, you know, any problem with us having other intelligences that we interact with. And so maybe, you know an analogous kind of person, not not really human persons, but these AIs can be very useful to us as analogous kinds of intelligences. So that's kind of where I am right now. Really focus on the ethics of AI. My PhD is in the humanities, even though I'm in a data science program. Glad to be here.

Connor Mahoney 12:56
Thank you so much. And John, I got to say, like I do really appreciate your optimistic view of AI a article that I read that You sent Me, you said, in just as Christians in union with Christ engage in various arts and crafts in ways that reflect our devotion to the Triune God, we should be directly involved in building AI systems in faithful ways. And I think you and I just totally agree on that we need to be building these technologies, we need to be engaging with them as as Christians, because if we're not, you know who is right. Okay, I want to throw it, I guess, to Father Ian, I can never, I never know what I'm allowed to share about what father Ian does. Everything is always under wraps. So Father Ian, I better just let you tell people what you do yourself.

Father Ian VanHeusen 13:41
I never know how to introduce myself. I'm also talking to my team a little, the people I work with, so Crescite, search advisor for that. And I'm doing some lecturing, Blockchain web, 3.0 I just gave some lectures in Kenya this summer. Crescite, Eddie Cullen, we were partnering with Georgetown Notre Dame, and Hakeem is our first major project in Kenya. And then we're working with faith games on video game technology, and there's a few other projects. And then I have a lot of buddies that I consult with on a regular basis that are big shots in the the tech world, and they kind of helped me, advise me on a lot of projects, so I think that's enough to give me a little bit of credibility. So let's fire away.

Connor Mahoney 14:27
Okay, great. Well, I don't know if you're allowed to show about your AI projects, but maybe we can get into that a little bit later.

Father Ian VanHeusen 14:34
I can't, actually a lot of stuff I'm working on is going to be probably anonymous. Hopefully it stays anonymous. Now that you guys know that if you see Catholic AI content, that's anonymous, but I shouldn't have said that out loud, I'm trying to work more anonymously.

Connor Mahoney 14:52
Totally, well, appreciate you having you on the space and again. Thank you for opening us up in Pro I keep on trying to invite you right to. Back on the panel. I don't know if you get those notifications. Maybe you need to jump off and then come back. But I also see that Daniel, Daniel lossy is here. If you want to jump up, you're welcome to as well. I know both of you are working on AI translation, Bible translation technology, and I think would be really cool to hear about that. Let's throw it to Adam grab if you can give a brief introduction to and what we're going to do, by the way, we're going to have a little bit of a panel discussion, and then we're going to open it up to more people who want to ask questions, and we can have an open discussion after, I don't know, maybe 45 minutes to an hour. Go ahead, Adam.

Adam Graber 15:38
Hey, Connor, thanks. Yeah, it's great to be with you. Great to be on this space. I do a bunch of things. I consult with ministries, helping them align their emerging tech to their ministry strategy. So I have a number of clients that I'm working with. A number of them are, you know, asking about AI as well. I also host a podcast called vice and virtue with a buddy of mine. We argue about technology and faith in everyday life and and I also run a sub stack called Christianity tomorrow. So I'm deeply embedded in the faith and tech space in various ways. I'm not a builder myself, although I have been built building some AI systems for some organizations more recently. So I am finding my way into that a little bit too. I would say, you know, in full disclosure, I'm a more, I'm much more ambivalent about AI and tech in general than maybe some of the other panelists. But we can dig into that. And I am much more the theologian than the builder in this conversation.

Connor Mahoney 16:55
Yeah you know, that's kind of why, that's kind of why I brought you on. So you can be...

Adam Graber 17:00
Yeah

Connor Mahoney 17:00
...you can be the sour sack now, but totally appreciate some kind of thoughts, and he's really pretty level headed about these... technologies. So...a

Adam Graber 17:01
Thank you.

Connor Mahoney 17:05
Happy to have him on. Ryder's back on the space. And it's funny, he just texted me. He he was asking if he's back on the panel, because it was shown on his end. But I have him, he texted me, and it shows up on my contacts. Ryder, friends with Daniel lossy, because I've been trying to get Daniel on his face for a long time. Now he's finally listening. Maybe he'll actually join. It would be great to have him. But Ryder, why don't you go ahead and tell people about what you guys are doing with Bible translations.

Ryder Wishart 17:33
Sure. Sure. Thanks, Connor, thanks for hosting this. Yeah. And Daniel told me he has to go for somebody's birthday party or something. So, you know, no such luck today. But yeah, no, it's good to good to hear about all the speakers so far. And I've met Adam before, but I think that's about it. And yeah, my my backgrounds, academics as well. I got a theology degree myself. And then I, you know, while I was doing my theology, I did computational linguistics for my dissertation research for, you know, ancient Greek and grammar modeling. And when I did my masters, what was looking at vector space modeling as a way to sort of more objectively or empirically discuss word meaning in ancient Greek, of course, with very small corpora, so kind of a unique challenge. But then, yeah, my dissertation, I started to kind of step back a bit and look at genre from a more computational perspective. And when I I wound up coming back to looking at vector space modeling. All of a sudden, I realized that everything had totally changed, and transformer models had come into existence, and I had to get caught up to speed by some of my colleagues. And it was, yeah, it's been interesting since then, just trying to figure out how best to apply this new technology to Bible translation, and in particular, translation of ultra low resource languages, which, if any of you are familiar with how the technology works, you'll know that the one thing AI cannot do is translate, you know, into a language where you have no data. And so it kind of creates some unique challenges and obstacles that we're trying to work through. And luckily, I can lean on Daniel for a lot of interesting ideas. But yeah, I mean, I I have a I think I hear a lot of discussion about AI, and most of it is pretty baffling to me, because I think a lot of people come at this thinking, Oh, this stuff is, you know, sentient, or it's going to be sentient very soon. And to me, it just kind of sounds like more, you know, apocalyptic thinking that, you know, you people are apocalyptic about everything, like overpopulation is going to end the world, or climate change is going to end the world, or war, you know, nuclear war is going to end the world. And you know, of course, there's. Some some validity to any apocalyptic theory. That's why they catch on. But, you know, I, I really am seeing the way that God can use AI technology for Bible translation, and it's extremely encouraging. And I think we're, we're on the brink of a new stage, or a new era in the growing, the growth of God's kingdom, as we have, you know, this, this unprecedented ability to deliver the most valuable information in the universe to people all over the world who we formerly would have a very difficult time communicating with. And, yeah, I mean, I just think the the implications are just, you know, astounding and awesome and exciting. And every day I'm just thrilled to get to work and and keep working on it. So, yeah, I mean, I'd be interested to hear what I think, especially I like hearing people's concerns. I mean, there was a guy at church the other day who told me he was very concerned because he heard that these AI models were being corrupted. And, you know, they were trying to learn about us as human beings and how we work and and that sort of thing. And I thought, you know, if only he understood that it's basically a calculator, and when you press clear, everything is gone. The whole there's no state, you know, the state comes from the programs we build around them. And I don't know, I'm not sure if that, if there's probably someone who needs to hear that on the call, or you, you guys, will know somebody who needs to hear that. These things are basically just word calculators that doesn't, you know. I'm not saying that to say that they're they're not important technology. I think it's incredibly important, and it's incredibly powerful, but it's just not the kind of doom scenario that everyone is imagining. I think people are going to do evil things with any technology that gets created, but God is going to do better things. So I'm, yeah, very, very optimistic about what's going to happen.

Connor Mahoney 21:53
Thank you so much, Ryder, really appreciate that. And Daniel did join the space. So if you got to jump off, please, if you want to add to some of Ryder's words, because I know you guys are working on this together, please do.

Daniel Losey 22:04
Hey guys, awesome to be on here. Finally. Yeah. So I kind of grew up in the Bible translation world, and that's most of what I can say online. But yeah, also, yeah, I've been sort of probably trying to learn as much as I can about AI since GPT two came out, um, and now getting to work, um, you know, with writer has been amazing, um, and, yeah, it's been awesome. I think the main thing that kind of drives me is just, I think, when I think back to, like, sort of, who built the internet, a lot of the wrong people did, and it still ended up being, you know, overall, like a force for good in a lot of ways. So that, that gets me excited about AI, and I think, yeah, just how much better would it be? We got good people, especially Christians, also, yeah, helping actually invent new things and push the tech forward. I think that's, that's kind of what excites me.

Connor Mahoney 23:15
Totally, yeah, Daniel isn't speaking himself up enough. He's He's very smart. Some of the things that he's doing with even like genetic AI algorithms, I don't even understand it, but super happy. Thank you so much, Daniel for joining. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I have a lot of, let's see. I've already brought on a couple people that won't initially on the panel, but I'm going to throw it to Michael too. I brought him up. I think John, you might have a fellow traveler with Michael. Whittle, you guys both had a very similar experience on the internet with your first adventure with AI. Michael, do you want to introduce yourself?

Michael Whittle 23:53
Hey, yeah. What's up? Everybody? Awesome to be here. My name is Michael, and yeah, founded a company called pulpit AI, and founded that about a year ago, and, you know, put it out on Twitter, went to bed and woke up the next morning, and it had gone viral. Our our name, obviously, pulpit AI, and some of the verbiage we were using, you know, it can, by the way, can you guys, is there, like a Can you hear something going on behind me? Is that me, or is that on here? I feel like I'm here. You guys can hear that? Fine.

Sounds fine to us.

Oh, it does.

Connor Mahoney 24:32
Yeah, you might need to mute yourself, Ryder... Okay,

Michael Whittle 24:35
Sorry about that. Anyways, yeah, yeah. Long story short, had, yeah, kind of this moment where it went viral and people were telling us we were demonic and, you know, ruining the church and telling me we should go out of business. And we still get those all the time. But to be fair, you know, a lot of the language around our initial product didn't make it super clear that we weren't. Like an AI to help you write sermons. And so, you know, kind of got thrown into the middle of what I didn't realize was a big hornet's nest. But yeah, so that's been about a year ago. So we built our initial product with around 200 pastors, and have now officially launched. And, you know, have like, over 600 churches using using the product every month, and it's just been really interesting in talking to so many pastors, a lot of the fears associated with it, it seems like, from what we've seen, you know, the part that people really don't love is this idea of, if I'm using AI to help me either a study the Bible or prepare for a sermon. And so we're just kind of navigating, you know what that looks like at the moment, and how best to, you know, serve, serve churches, and what that what that looks like. So anyways, it's just been, you know, awesome to be here and awesome to hear everybody's perspective. And honestly, just learn, I am not a developer. I'm a you know, pastor and entrepreneur who has just kind of tripped and fell into this space, and have really just been diving into all this over the last year. So it's just cool to be around so many other folks doing doing really cool stuff and thinking about this in a thoughtful way. So I will say, just from my perspective, churches in general, you know, seem to be open, but then there are obviously cohorts in various pockets of the church who really are afraid of it, and still, there are those that think that this is demonic, which is interesting. So anyways, I'm just gonna, I'll mute and listen to the to the smart folks talk. But I appreciate you having me on here, and it's so good to meet, meet all of you and want to hear more about what you're all building. So anyways, I'll let you guys take it from here.

Connor Mahoney 26:49
Awesome. Yeah, I think we passed it around the panel. Now, I don't think I missed anybody. And again, what we're going to do, we're just going to have kind of a small, maybe panel discussion here, and then invite it open space people want to ask questions with all these small AI Christian AI developers here. So I know there's already a couple people who've requested will bring will bring people on in a little bit here, maybe to start off with the panel, we kind of have our discussion now. I don't need to throw it to anybody specifically, but maybe I'll throw this one to John to get started. But I think some of the things Daniel lossy was saying are really important for this discussion, you know, talking about the origins of the internet and who built that technology. And, you know, whatever you want to say about that tech, the fact that it exists is the only reason that we're able to have this space and have this discussion in the in this way, you know, and something else that we ought to think about as Christians, like, what really, what really is the church? What really is the Christian mission in this world? And, of course, that's a very, that's a very large conversation, but some aspect of it is the church is ultimately, you know, the unity of mankind and the fact that we're able to be brothers and sisters in a very real way. We can have these types of discussions. We can actually do life together as as maybe some of the more non denom people are familiar with that phrase, but we can do it in ways that were previously impossible through technology. So, you know, there's lots of ways that technology really aids the Christian mission in the world, and I think the more that we can kind of have these discussions, and we can collaborate, and we can coordinate around technologies like this, it's really going to be positive for us. So John, maybe you can echo some of what you have said previously, but I'm curious why Catholic Answers decided that it was important, important to pursue AI. And then maybe also you can share a little bit about how you guys are planning to take it in the future.

Jon Sorensen 28:43
Yeah, well, it's we, that's, I mean, that basically what we do is just keep an eye out on the technology and how it's evolving, and what, you know, what's the next, latest, greatest thing. We think about it for a while and see how we can, how we can use it. And I think that's important. I think it's important for Christians to do that, and, you know, there will be bumps along the way, like this. You know, the AI thing was a blessing and a curse. You know, we took a lot of heat for it, for creating this chat bot, but at the same time, it got tons of attention. I mean, my boss and I got interviewed on CNN, and I don't think anybody would have cared really about Catholic Answers in any other way. So I guess, in a sense, it's kind of like when, you know, Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off a bat and sold a million albums. You know, I guess it's dumb, kind of dumb luck for us that way, but, but I'm committed to it. I'm not changing my mind. No one's gonna sway me from it, because I believe AI is here, it's not going away. It's already incorporated into, you know, half the things we use on the Internet, probably more already. But I have this, you know, I think of it this way. Is that, you know, one of the complaints that we got was that people will. Uh, will develop unhealthy attachments to technology, and I think they already do. And so, you know, without AI, they already do. So the there's a two pronged message, at least from my perspective, that I want to send to people. One is that you should spend less time on with technology and more time like creating real bonds with other human people, that's where real evangelization happens. But on the other hand, you know, the time that you do spend on Tech, I want to compete for some of that, for some of your attention, and so that's what I'm trying to do, and it's a weird spot to be in to, on the one hand, be working on these kinds of things, and also telling people they need to use less of it.

Connor Mahoney 30:43
Absolutely. And... were you finished there? Sorry, I didn't mean to...

Jon Sorensen 30:47
Oh yeah, yeah.

Connor Mahoney 30:48
Okay. If you can, because I know, and I don't know if you said this in the I was kind of following it as was happening with you, and you put out a number of posts and whatnot, but I know, like you said, You guys aren't planning to stop, you know, pursuing this technology. And so your first one out of the gate was this chat bot. But can you share anything about, maybe some of you your future plans with artificial intelligence? Are you guys, like, still developing stuff, or what's going on?

Jon Sorensen 31:14
Oh, yeah, well, I mean, one of the things I'd like to do is, you know, I don't really have any control over, I mean, you know, I mean, there's some control that I can as far as giving the chat bot guidelines and whatnot, but really, what I'd like to do is work more on the gamification aspect. You know, it's right now, it's like a, you know, goofy looking 3d character, but it'd be nice to have, you know, you could select maybe different characters, different voices, I don't know. I mean, it's so finding looking at ways to make it a little more interesting than just, like a straight, the, you know, text, you know, just a bunch of text on the screen. I'd like to, you know, I'd like to look more into that, but also even our on our website, I mean, we've already been using AI for a long time. We, you know, we used an AI product that basically translated our entire website into Spanish. I mean, we're talking about 10s of 1000s of articles. I never could have done this, you know, a decade ago, even five years ago, would have been really difficult. But, you know, I we just did it. I mean, not that, I mean less than a week ago, and it didn't take long. And so there's all kinds of or, you know, we've been looking at Hispanic Outreach lately, and one of the ways that we've been using AI, and you can probably find this, you can find it on YouTube. It's called respuesta Catholicos. I'm probably butchering that because I don't speak Spanish natively. But on that YouTube channel, we've used AI to translate videos of like Trent horn or Jimmy Akin, or, you know, any one of our apologists. And, you know, you look at it and it's, you can't tell that these guys don't speak a lick of Spanish. That's how good it is. The only time it really messes up is, you know, some of the guys will get more animated, and they're moving their hands around. When the hand moves across the, you know, in front of their face, takes AI a second to catch up. But these the videos look pretty convincing. And the people who know who these guys are, they're a little bit creeped out by it. But the Spanish speakers that you know have been emailing us, you know, pretty frequently and telling us how much they appreciate it. So we're going to continue to do that. We're looking at probably launching in the next week or so on catholic.com a something that will for people who have less time, something that will summarize articles on the website. I think that would be helpful to a lot of people. I mean, I don't know about you guys, but, you know, I love reading, and I want to know more, but my time is limited. I'm so it's so filled up with so many other things that I don't always get a chance to read everything that I want to. And so sometimes summaries are helpful. So it's things like that. I mean, you know, we're using AI all over the place in small ways, you know. And as you know, when bigger, you know, more important things come up, you know, we'll definitely open to it, and we're not afraid of using the technology.

Connor Mahoney 34:09
Awesome. I know we have a lot of people who haven't been on spaces before, but an easy way for me to know, to throw you the conversation is, if you can just raise your hand in space on the bottom of, if you're using a mobile on the bottom of the space there, there's, there's some emoticons, and if you click that the hook symbol, then you can raise your hand right there. But I'm going to throw it to Drago, since I just invited him up. He sent me a DM, and I guess he's working on a on a an AI enabled spiritual service Drago, if you want to join the comment, go ahead.

Drago Dimitrov 34:45
Hey Connor, yeah, nice to see you here. Thanks for organizing the space. Also, Hey, John. Said John. John and I met in person once. So really cool to see what you guys have been up to with your AI, yeah, so I run a startup called. Holy habits. And we also have our sister company that folded into it, called seek direction, which is a matchmaking service for spiritual directors. But the app that we have with holy habits, it facilitates a it's the only habit tracker that will assign you habits tailored to your specific walk with Christ, and so we leverage AI to assign you holy habits to build virtue. And so, right? It's this interesting space where it's like, you guys would understand the value of using AI for something like this, and our users get it too. But of course, at the back of my mind, I do think like, how do you you know we have to straddle here, right? Because we're offering a sort of proxy for spiritual direction using AI. Again, it's not that AI is necessarily going to be your coach. So and then totally resonated with what John said about Absolutely, it's like we want people to use technology less, but for the timeshare that you do use technology, we want it to be dedicated towards the Christian pursuits of technology, as opposed to the other things. And so I think that's probably something we all actively want to manage as, let's say, AI Christian leaders, or at least the different things that we're doing.

Connor Mahoney 36:20
Absolutely Adam, go ahead, you got your hand up.

Adam Graber 36:27
Yeah, you know, I find it interesting. You know, we want to compete for time, and so we're going to offer more content, but we're going to say at the same time, hey, you know, spend less time on this app or on the internet. You know, those two things just aren't going to work together. Philosophically, they're just not. But I understand, like, the competitive mindset I get that. I think it's interesting too, like we're talking about AI as a tool that might do translation, for example. And then we're also talking about it as like, we're trying to create an avatar, and we're trying to, you know, make this more like a person, when, you know, there's lots of you know, concerns, and you've even mentioned there are people out there who are like, this is demonic. And I think the more you try and make it look like a person, act like a person, be like a person, the more you're going to have people who are reacting that way. And so, you know, I think the perceptions people have around AI are certainly influenced by the way that developers are creating these AI systems to sort of embody that belief that this is a human intelligence, or this is somehow, you know, an avatar of a human. And I, you know, I want to push back on that and say maybe, maybe it's worthwhile for us to say like, you know, this, to to depict it as a tool to depict it as, you know, something that is computer based. But when we start to, you know, present it as an avatar, presented as being like a human, you know, we give it a name. We call it him or her. You know, all of those ways of talking about it are, you know, both humanizing the computer. And also, you know, calling it a question, sort of the what it means to be a person. And I think, I guess the last thing I'll say is, you know, I will question the sort of attitude towards, let's just translate everything from the west to the rest. And this idea, like, let's just take all the English stuff and make it Spanish. Let's take all the stuff and make it French. Let's take it all and translate it and into every other language so that we can continue to sort of colonize people's thinking with the Western way of seeing the world. And I think we need to be mindful that we're doing that, and be mindful that, you know, as we extend sort of the Western world view, we're doing that through AI now as well. And you know, there are going to be people who are really excited about that and receptive to all the media that we put out. But I think we also need to recognize that, like, there's lots of ways that that you know, continues to, yeah, expand. A worldview that isn't necessarily the best worldview out there, and I think we need to, you know, recognize that diversity can help us not only just translate from English to other languages, but translate those languages into English so that we can hear the voices of our Spanish brothers and sisters, our French brothers and sisters, and all these other languages in order to for them to be heard in English speaking countries as well.

Connor Mahoney 39:55
Yeah, you know, I will say I've thought about this in like, a number of different ways, but. But, you know, some people bring up like, we wanted AI to take the workload off of us so that we could be free to do what, make music and make beautiful at work. And we kind of built the AI that did that first, before we started building AI that that took that did work right in the same way, it's it's interesting we somewhat do this for ourselves, and that we jumped into AI building chat bots. And that's not necessarily what AI is. AI is not just a chat bot. It's and I think in some of these ways that we're talking about different applications, like translating, you know, footage of apologists For Catholic Answers or doing Bible translation look or like Michael widdles pulpit AI project is, is, is creating content out of sermons that can be shared on social media. So it's, it's these different ways that we're using AI that is not necessarily a chat bot. And I think the more we can, I think talking about some of those aspects of artificial intelligence would be good because we could, not only because of the bad aspects of potentially bad aspects of chat bots, but but because there's so much more potential in the technology. But I will say too, I I do kind of think there's something good about the way we are inclined to Anthropos. Uh, AI, it's not some disembodied technology that we're talking to. We're talking to something, and we will incline to put a human element on it. And, you know, and I think that's actually a positive inclination, because it does show that we, you know, we recognize that there's something in the human form, in the form that is the image of God, that's that's really powerful to us. And there's, there are, I'll just say there's certain people out there that are happy to call themselves post humanists. They're happy to say that there might be a future where, uh, humanity doesn't exist. And so I don't see like chat bots, per se, as as playing into that narrative. You know, we are anthropomorphizing. I'm pushing that word, but we're making this technology human, in a way. And I think that's kind of a positive inclination. Drago, you want to jump in?

Drago Dimitrov 42:14
Yeah, I'd like to say that AI has the accidents of consciousness, but not the substance. And so right? It could externally, it could as especially as it gets more advanced, it could give all the appearances and attributes and features of a conscious being. But we know underneath the hood, ontologically, it is not it's not made in the image of God. It's just copying certain patterns. And a word calculator that someone said here, but I mean, you guys raise an interesting point. I suppose you know to what extent and this, this, this might be an ethical problem that emerges over the next five years with increasing, you know, degree, but to what extent as an AI builder, are you morally obligated to stay away from UX that makes it feel like it's a person. But on the one hand, that's kind of the conversational aspect. Is one of the nice things about it. Like everyone wants a Jarvis, like you want, you know, where you just talk to your you know, virtual thing, and the person does that, but obviously, when it, when it comes to people feeling like they have a relationship with this, AI, with the entity, yeah, and then that's obviously detrimental to the soul. And so it's, it's an interesting question that y'all pose.

Connor Mahoney 43:37
For sure, Carlos, I think your hand was up. I don't know if you want to jump in. I will say Carlos brings us the trifecta. So now we have Protestants, we have Catholics, and now we have an orthodox here. Carlos. Are you able to talk now?

Carlos Davila 43:49
Yeah, can you hear me? Yeah. Very, very interesting space. Very interesting speakers. Yeah. So, well, I think, well, in my personal experience, I train, I train an AI on the Bible, on the Scripture, or looks Christian bible and, well, first of all, I realized that the Bible is the best ai i like meant data set ever, because it really helps the AI to behave. I don't know if you, if you guys have ever tried to train a model before, but if you do, the model is just like, schizophrenic, like, really, like, because, especially because some, sometimes you use certain training data that make it sound more human, and that usually leads to the model to speak super randomly, to use bad words, for example, when we use chat GPT, chat GPT has already like reinforcer learning through human feedback, and that model will not ever say, Nothing crazy. But if you talk to cloud, for example, it does sounds like Cloud is more i. A human like or whatever, more organic, more random, etc. And that has to that has to do with the training data. So the first thing I realized is that the Bible is a pretty well, pretty good, probably the best moral alignment data set. That's what I wanted to say, not only for AI, but also for humans. So, so I trained to say I call Seraph, and it went amazingly well, and tomorrow has been helping me to convert a lot of people. Because sometimes people want logical arguments. You know, some people think that we believe in Jesus Christ, just because we have blind faith, but we actually have evidence, like Jesus Christ is literally the Son of God. And there's evidence for that historical evidence, and then there's scientific evidence to prove the existence of God, like insanely easy, thermodynamically even so that that type of arguments, Serov can can have those debates with people. It's like automating evangelizing people or something. So it really helped me to do that. And people really liked the model. When I read the Bible, sometimes I have questions about some some specific burst, and I asked Sarah, the AI model, I asked about that verse, and it helps me to understand it, etc. So it's very good at that. I think that's a good example of AI ex Christianity. But I will say the more the most important thing is not, how can we align, not only how can we align AI with Christianity, but also how not to use AI, because I think AI is just like another tool, just like another thing that exists in the universe. I mean, intelligence exists as a force, I think, as a resource, part of the universe. So God created intelligence, the essence, the essence of intelligence itself, and we just happen to be using it right now. So just like God invented drugs, we can either build great things with rocks. We can build buildings, we can build tools, or we can grab a rock and kill another human being, like Bobby the rock in the half, right? So I think it's the way we use it. And I think the most concerning thing is how some humans are actually like currently using AI, for example, I know the Tiktok algorithm to literally brainwash people, using Skinner conditioning psychological methods to subvert them and to control them psychologically. Those things, those type of things, those algorithms are also artificial intelligence. And I think those are two things we shall be fighting against. So, so yeah, if I had to say anything, I'll say we really have to fight, in the name of Jesus Christ, in the name of God, against those who are using these technologies for evil, not only use these technologies for good, but also fight those who are using it for evil. So yeah.

Connor Mahoney 48:11
Thank you so much, John. You had your hand up. Go ahead. John Barlow, sorry.

Jonathan Barlow 48:16
Sure, sure. I thought interesting that the model that was just mentioned, was called Seraph, and I was, I was thinking about how the concern might be that we're giving these we're anthropomorphizing these models, but there are other kinds of intelligences. I mean, the divine persons are intelligent. Angels are intelligent. You know, humans, of course, exhibit human intelligence, and then we have animals that exhibit a lot of intelligence as well. So I guess I'm not. There's nothing, I think, in Christian theology that would force us to limit intelligence to being a human trait. And if these models are extending intelligence, kind of our image and image of human intelligence, it makes sense to anthropomorphize them to some extent. I was kind of interested to see that the father Justin model only interacted through voice. It was not a text model, as far as like, you don't type, you know, but it interacts with voice. I thought that was an interesting choice. But if I think about humans, two really important forces that are, that are common, or that are, you know, said about humans is that we have these. We have bodies. We're physically embodied. And that's really central to so many aspects of Christianity that the Eucharist fellowship around a table, you know, being together, you know the holy kiss, all those things. We're together as physical beings. But words are very important. And so a lot of times when I'm when I'm reading the critiques of AI, and even on the call, you know, we're, we've been referring to AI as merely a word calculator. But there is something really powerful about words. I mean, that's the way God creates the world, is through words. And so I, I feel like there's almost, there's almost no innocent way to use words if we, if we train a model on just words, I really do believe that it will inherently gain some model of the world, some way of thinking about how reality fits together. So I'm a little more, I guess I'm a little more. Are optimistic that these models are more than parrots, they're more than word calculators, and that they can assist us in ways, and they can kind of be like something made in our image that's a little bit more than a word calculator. So I'm not you know if, if you look on online, a lot of times, Yann LeCun will be taking up for the for the merely that they're merely parrot side of things, and then you might see, you know, Elon Musk or others argue that they're, they're more than that, but I just don't feel like any model that can use words with great facility is a mere calculator. I feel like there's, there's something really, real and important about using language well. And if you know exactly what a human would say in a given situation, then your use of language, whether you have consciousness at some sort of mechanical level or not, your use of language is very human like and your use of language could be just as salutary as a human using language. So I'm very I'm a little more optimistic about the these systems as agents, as being more than mere words.

Connor Mahoney 51:00
I don't know if it was something controversial you said, but I saw a number of hands go up as you were talking, John. So what we're going to do is I'm going to go to Daniel, and then before I go to Adam, I'm going to go to Ryder, because he left a comment in the in the below, in the chat, and I want him to respond to something Adam was saying, and then Adam can respond to that. Go ahead. Daniel.

Daniel Losey 51:23
Yey, yeah, I just wanted to talk about Anthropo just like, Yeah, the question of the image of God and AI and whether or not, like, you know, is this some form of, you know, idolatry, the fact that we're, you know, making things that speak and talk and sort of image, as, like some people said, and I think it's, it's valid that we're, you know, raising that kind of concern. And I think it makes sense and it's natural, and it is probably really good. But also, I don't think it's unique to this. I don't know wave of science in and of itself, like, if we think back to sort of the transition from, you know, like even alchemy to chemistry, or, you know, any of these, any of these things. These are questions that the church has had to deal with before. And I think generally, what we've come up with is, you know, things that where we can sort of trace the chain of cause and effect. We know it's scientific, are very different than, say, you know, carving some sort of something, and, you know, praying to it and hoping it gives us our answers is very different than using our knowledge of math and statistics and putting together something that, even though it's a black box, we know how it works. And I think that makes it, you know, something very different. And if we, if we go the route of, I think what a lot of you know, Christians are worried about of, oh, we're we're sort of creating sort of a false idol with these AI systems. I think if we go that route as a whole, then we have to go back and question basically every other scientific wave, if that makes sense, at least, that's sort of my thoughts off the top of my head, wondering what you guys think.

Connor Mahoney 53:34
Yeah. You know, like you said, we might have to go back and kind of recapitulate some of these discussions about even previous technologies, and some people are happy to do that. You know, there's kind of been an ongoing discussion about like technology and even the effects of the industrial age, and how positive that was. I will say that's one of the reasons I named this space, I said silicon consciousness in the Christian age, because I think it's more tempting to frame a discussion as Christianity in the silicon age. But I do feel very strongly that, you know, we live in the Christian age. The spread of history is the is the spread of Christianity. And so this technology exists within a Christian frame, and we just have to define, you know, its place in it, right? Of, if you want to go ahead, and I know you had some response to Adam about a few things.

Ryder Wishart 54:20
Yeah, now we started talking about the Imago Dei, which I think is probably one of the most interesting theological conversations relating to AI. Because, you know, in the past, people have found a lot of you know, the argument that the image of God is defined by rationality and language, and now that we have machines that can, we can imbue with rationality, or quasi rationality, it suddenly makes that definition somewhat problematic. And I think there's, I think there's more we can more we can discuss. There. I mean, I think there's a, there's a big difference between a model that's rational and a human being who is, you know, so creating social reality with other human beings, just by their very nature as the image of God. And, you know, it's like, I saw an article a couple months ago where someone pointed out that people have been teaching apes sign language for like, 60 years, but eights have never once asked a question. And just because we can make a model that asks questions and talks like us, it doesn't mean that it's not still a projection of our rationality, of our dominion mandate. So there's a big difference there to kind of speak to what John Dr Bardo, I guess was talking about so but the the one thing I wanted to just touch back on that Adam brought up was the kind of post colonial view of translation with AI and, yeah, I find this kind of interesting, because for one thing, it's not that we're actually just translating English or French into all the languages of the world in order to colonize them. I think it's important to recognize, first of all that the Bible is both from, you know, product of the East and the West together. And it's not, it's not just, you know, something English that we're transiting. It's Greek and Hebrew originally and Aramaic. And unless, of course, you're Greek Orthodox, and it's all Greek by this point. But yeah, I'm gonna, I'd want to know, I guess, what? What would you suggest as a follow up? Then, if, really, this is a colonial, or colonizing activity that we're engaging in by translating the text that we have into the languages of the world. What should we do instead? Should we stop translating the Bible? Should we say no, that's just colonial like, I feel like it's a way of slandering the task that we have, and by describing it as a colonizing thing, suddenly it's just bad. And it's sort of like just shouting at somebody and calling them a racist. It just means, well, I guess this rational conversations are over now, and so that's I'm kind of, I'm being, I'm being a little more antagonistic. Hopefully that gives you something to rip off there.

Adam Graber 57:13
Yeah, Ryder, I think that's a good clarification. I think in part, I would say, when I'm saying that I wasn't specifically referring to Bible translation, but I think simply,

Connor Mahoney 57:30
Sorry I muted you. Adam, go ahead. Sorry. Jump back in.

Adam Graber 57:37
I don't know where you cut me off, but Ryder, I think you're I think you're making some good points when you say, like, we shouldn't be thinking I wasn't specifically referring to Bible translation when I was kind of making the colonizing critique. And I think what I'm thinking more about is there's a Western interpretation of Scripture and the kind of Western media culture is the one that's, you know, trying to spread our interpretation of of Christianity, our our interpretation of Scripture, when you know, there are Latin American and African and Asian sort of views that are, you know, embedded in their own language systems. And I think those deserve to be heard in the US and in English speaking countries as well. And I think you know, so, I think my answer would be, we need to be translating in both directions in order to increase that dialog. But I appreciate that push back, and I hope that clarifies it a little bit

Ryder Wishart 58:48
Connor, if I can just respond quickly there. Yeah, I completely agree with you, Adam, it's the interpretation that, if it's only our interpretation that we're sharing, then, yeah, sure I can. I can accept that that is kind of a kind of colonizing sort of attitude, perhaps, but yeah, that's why the task is actually about translating language. The language of the scriptures is theologically accurate. It's not that it's our job to make it that way. It just is. And if we translate the language accurately, then that we're actually giving or empowering other communities to engage with scripture, because we're just giving the text.

Adam Graber 59:21
Yeah, sure, I see that to some degree, but I do recognize that, like translation is a form of interpretation as well, and and we need to recognize there, there are decisions, interpretive decisions, that translators are Making when they are translating from one language to another, and, you know, you know, that's a whole can of worms that, you know, I'm not an expert in, but I'm, I'm just aware and and recognizing that it's more complex than just saying, like, it's just, you know, it's just a one for one translation. Situation, you know, and there's always a one for one kind of equality between between languages, and that's just not the case. But yeah.

Connor Mahoney 1:00:13
well, I'm gonna throw it to Drago then, because he has his hand up. But I have a question for father Ian afterwards about some of this Imago Dei question.

Drago Dimitrov 1:00:23
Thanks, Connor, yeah. Well, before I get to my original thoughts, I suppose here, yeah, I'm trying to wrestle here with the problem Adam's proposing, where, in theory, it sounds like, right, there can be something that's lost for me from, like, a sizing perspective, I'm not really sure tangibly, what that loss would be. Is it some super obscure interpretation of a specific passage that will forever be lost because a community in Asia read that one verse differently. I suppose that's why I'm trying to size the degree of loss there with this quote, unquote colonization. But I suppose, in theory, there could be something that's lost. I just don't know what that would be, but, but the other thought I was going to say, because, right, we've heard so far express these views where on the one end of the spectrum, we just say it's a word calculator. AI is the word calculator. But then someone here mentioned, well, you know, there's something a little more special happening here, and right? Like, obviously there's there we say something magical for it sounds like a child at Disneyland, right? But there's definitely something interesting happening. And I suppose. And I don't know if this is the worry I have or how to completely elaborate on it, but, but the point is, like going back to first principles, the fact that we even believe that other human minds exist is kind of like an axiomatic assumption or or you could say it's a base perception of intuition. So what I mean is even you guys here talking right like I hear sentences, there's ideas, there's rationality. I you know, by default, I assume there's like, ontologically a human being, a Mago day person on the other side of this broadcast, and I'm connecting. And somehow we're inter webbing with a relationship. So now we have relationship with each other, like someone used the word social reality. We are creating a social reality here in the space, but I can't The fact is, I can't see underneath your hood. I can hear you producing words. I can hear this stuff, but I can't actually see your fundamental experience of consciousness and the Imago Dei, and the person that is you, that's an assumption I make, because I can see my own interior life. I can see my own internal experience, and I just assume that other people who look like humans have the same characteristic of an internal experience Imago Dei. So going full circle when I said I was worried is that when we have, let's say, more advanced AI and heck, if you want to put a robot exterior on it, where, again, you're going to hear patterns of rationality. You're going to hear ranges of words, pseudo personalities, if you want to call it, there's that fundamental assumption of like, theory of mind, like, and you're going to have some people who jump and say, yes, there is a mind there, there is a person, and then you have the other people saying, no, no, like, I just know there's not a relationship there. I don't have ontologically, there's no image of God there. But the problem is, none of this is falsifiable, because the fact is, I can't prove that any other human being has an internal experience. And I also can't prove that the AI has the internal experience, so it's really a matter of faith. And I think you're going to see camps almost cult like mentalities, especially from the non religious, who they're going to be more inclined to associate theory of mind to the AI. And there, we say venerated in some respects, whereas others were, you know, we're more like, No, this is a word calculator that's really convincing and, oh my gosh, it's like intelligence, but not really. So I don't know that that was my reaction.

Connor Mahoney 1:04:14
Yeah, you know, I think John Barlow kind of Dr. John, you kind of threw in a wrench into this discussion a little bit with that, but I I'm curious, maybe father Ian can respond, before I throw it back to you, just about we're talking about the imago day. What kind of defines humanity? On what level can we look at artificial intelligences? And as they progress, progress. We have to realize, obviously it's they're going to become more and more intelligent for whatever that is, or if you want to say the world calculators, they're going to be able to calculate better and faster. Right? So, how can we look at, how can we look at theological perspective of what artificial. Intelligence is while still respecting what the Imago Dei is as distinct Father Ian. Can you respond to that?

Father Ian VanHeusen 1:05:07
Yeah, before I do, I do want to make a couple of comments, and I'll address that. I did think it was really funny when you put me on with Catholic Answers, because I was trying to talk with those guys four years ago when I was still relatively unknown, and didn't have my partners in New York City, and, you know, all these big universities, when I was just kind of this random nobody who showed up at Catholic Answers. So it's kind of bittersweet. I was like, Well, you guys missed your chance, because I would have done a lot of the work you were describing for free, but now you got to pay but, um, all joking aside, but I really did. I mean, it was very providential, because it helped me learn a lot more about tech, making my connections. And then also, you know, also kudos to Catholic Answers, just for taking the bullet for everybody. It was a real learning lesson, you know. I mean, really, guys, most of this stuff, if you just took AI out of it, that's just, I mean, I maybe I'm giving away too much of the secret sauce. AI has been used in the gaming industry for 30 or 40 years. VR has been around for 20 or 30 years. None of this is new. It's new to the Christian world. It's new to public consumption. Most of the problems that everybody's describing has been worked out in the game industry for 2030 years. I mean, you think about it, all of the people that would hijack NPCs back in the day, you know, non player characters, and have them say and do stupid stuff. I mean, game industry has been dealing with this for 20 or 30 years. And I talk about this a lot with my buddy Chris perna, and how Epic Games deals with it, you know, Fortnite Gears of War and all of that. And so he gave me a lot of insights in that. And I have a lot of friends in the gaming industry. The gaming industry is probably 2030, years ahead of the church. In this regard, there's a lot of ways. I mean, I have a lot of opinions about what Catholic Answers did wrong. You know, I think the problem we always have in the church world is we don't have enough disagreeable people that are often in our organizations. They're very altruistic people. And we need some more gangsters. We need some more people that are just bad people, or were bad people, and think like bad people, because sometimes the Christian world is just a little too rose colored, but, um, you know, it's funny. I've been listening some gangster rap lately and reconnecting with my days in the hood. But, um, that's another story for another day. But, um, so the, you know, going back to the imago day, I mean, like I was saying, been rambling a little bit. We're refrain. We're not framing the question properly. Um, I think I deal with this in my book meta Catholic. You know, we believe in Providence, so nothing happens by chance. There is a certain sense and this could open another can of worms, a predestination of God's perfect foreknowledge. So none of this is by accident. This was all part of the plan and the imago day. You know, with machine learning, first of all, machine learning is not really intelligence. It's machine learning. It's computations, which, if you if you study logic and rhetoric, especially logic, it's all really right there in Aristotle's logic. You know, machines can be taught to run through deductive and inductive reasoning. That's all this is. It's inductive and deductive reasoning, which goes to my point, which, you know, I've talked a lot about this with friends of mine who are big scientists. And the real, the real poverty we have with the tech world is that the tech world really needs to realign itself with a classical education, a classical curriculum, because a lot of the mistakes that are made in tech are really not tech problems. They're more logic, rhetoric, ethics, and a lot of the foundation of that was worked out, you know, by Aristotle and Plato, um, really, you know, the whole joke that philosophy is just a footnote on Plato. I also joke around the first I talk about this in my book, The first complaint about technology was Plato that books were making people more stupider. I talked about this at seek and one of the breakout sessions, you know, one student joked around that in the 16th century, the bishops were railing against the reading of novels in Spain, I'm sure other places. I mean, I joke around. It wasn't like I tell the kids all the time, because I work primarily with young people. It's not like in my time, we're all sitting around philosophizing in coffee shops. I mean, we were doing bad stuff just as much then as we are now. People are, humans are I mean, maybe instead of scrolling endlessly on on Facebook back then, it was Mindlessly scrolling through magazines, because you remember, back in the day, something you're going to remember, you know, anywhere you went, there was all these just random magazines that were just, you know, just fluff. They were just, they weren't much different than Instagram. It's just you didn't. Have a phone with all that you had you everywhere you went, there was magazines with all that same, same stuff, just different tech. And that's what I call myself, a tech realism. Sorry, I don't know if this answer your question. Sorry, Connor, I'm kind of ranting a little.

Connor Mahoney 1:10:16
Go ahead, don't make me stop you.

Father Ian VanHeusen 1:10:19
Let me open it up, because there's a lot of different directions that I could go. I mean, I've written a book on this, so there's a lot of the, you know, it's coming out by the grace of God. I finally got a publisher. But, yeah.

Connor Mahoney 1:10:33
Sure. And, I mean, just to kind of you were talking about, you know, looking back in past, not just even Christian history, but philosophy with Plato and Aristotle, and we can see kind of the lineage that these things have come through. It reminded me. I had a I did an interview sometime back this other account that's in the space, the crypto conversion account, was a podcast I was running with a couple other Catholics for a little while. And we interview people working in the emerging tech space. And we interviewed this Julian a horn of the Chesterton Academy, and he had a funny story. There's actually, if you look back, there's a legend about, I think it's st Albert, the Great, who built a mechanistic Android figure. And some people say it, I forget it was, it was built on logic. Other people say it was actually built with demons. And so the legend says that Saint Thomas Aquinas was just totally freaked out by it and smashed it to bits. So, you know, we see this, you know, going back for some time, this kind of problem with creating these kind of humanoid figures and and what you know, what does that say about humanity? And what does that say about the imago day? It's kind of just an interesting conversation. I will say, though, that when we look at the imago day, we understand that we are created in God's image, and we're not created to be passive spectators of creation. You know, God is calling us to to participate in in this in this activity, because we're created in His image, right? So, in the same way that God is a creator, we are also creators. And I think that's an important aspect that we have to recognize about the Imago Dei. I'm gonna throw it back to John, and then I see father in through his hand up. I don't know if you were trying to respond to something I just said, but if so, you can pop in after John.

Jonathan Barlow 1:12:26
Sure. I guess. I think this is very helpful to think about the Imago Dei. And it's always hard. If you try to locate the Imago Dei in any one particular aspect of humanity, it's probably going to fail. For instance, if we located the Imago Dei in the fact that we can worship God. Well, actually, angels worship God, and they're not in the image of God. So therefore, you know, that can't be the locus of it. I guess the Incarnation really is the only thing that's unique. And Jesus became a man and not an angel or anything like that. So that's one of the most unique things. But maybe, you know, your suggestion just now about about being creative, that's a very good that's a very good point. I'm not sure. Maybe that could be one of the places we locate it. Back to the theory of mind. I thought that was interesting. Drago point about the theory of mind is very helpful. And there's been a debate online where this happened back with the Google engineer, where the AI will claim, well, the chat system will claim that it's trapped in some way, that it's and so there's a difference, I guess, functionally, if we, if we locate this, this being human, in some functional characteristic, if, if a system knows exactly how a grand a chess grandmaster would move a piece on the board, there's very little difference between that system and a chess grandmaster with regard to playing chess. But if it, if a system knows exactly what a worshiper would say, that doesn't make it a worshiper. If a system knows exactly what it's a person trapped in a room, would say it doesn't make a make them a person trapped in a room. So I'm edging closer and closer toward clarity on on some of these issues, but I do think that there is an extent to which these systems are more than a word calculators and less than humans. So, you know, I think there's room for that in the Christian worldview. The other thing I just wanted really quick. I love what Fauci Ian said about the game industry being ahead of us. I think the right now these systems are so capable. And I think, you know, the old joke is that AI is what computers can't do yet. And so right now, they can do so many things. And a lot, a lot of the robots of my youth, you know, the canine on Doctor Who or even Jarvis, for that matter, these robots are pretty good at speaking in different ways. I've used recently. I use a product from France that has a real time chat, and the LLM will actually interrupt you to speak in real time with you. And that's a very different experience. And so I think right now we're our technology, the base technologies of the foundational models, is really far ahead of the product models. No one has really learned how to make a good product yet. There's been some wearables that people have tried out, glasses, that sort of thing, getting the interface right. There's just such a huge room right now for just some basic product creation. I think there's some real Star Trek type devices that could be possible right now. All, but just require someone to do the right kind of product engineering. And if, if the very first usable chat bot or companion is created by Christian, then so much the better. If we can, if we can do a really good job with with the product side, it will really show the way. And the best first example of that kind of device could be from a Christian point of view. So just wanted to definitely echo what father Ian said about that.

Connor Mahoney 1:15:24
Yeah, and I mean, kind of getting back to the main topic that I was really hoping to cover in this space, like I do think we need to be thinking about it's impossible to have this type of conversation to say we're going to talk about Christianity and AI, without having to bring in, kind of the theological aspects, because people really are concerned about some of the way these things are done. But getting back to the topic of the space, I really think we need to, at this juncture, we need to start looking at AI, the positive aspects of it in and think about how we can be engaging with it. I don't like to, I like to frame things positively, not to, you know, frame it from an aspect of fear, but I do think to some extent you have to realize that if we're not building it, and we're not we're not engaging with this conversation, then there is other people who are and who do you trust more to be building these technologies which, in some way or another are going to come to define the landscape of The future? Do you trust people who converted or people who are unconverted? Right? So I think it's, I think it's really good, and I think it's helpful some of the optimistic sides that John, Dr John, is trying to convey here, because we need to be imagining. We need to use our human faculties given to us by God as the imago day to build and to create, imaginatively, embodying, of course, all of the, all of the aspects of the Christian faith that should be guiding that as well. But we do need to be building. We need to be engaging. I'm going to throw it back to father. I think father Ian was the next one with his hand up. And then we'll throw it to Carlos and then Drago. I will say I found that clip if you want to check it out. About that ancient legend. It's kind of a funny one. It's on the Jumbotron. There's something else. Go ahead, Father Ian.

Father Ian VanHeusen 1:17:11
Cool, cool. Yeah. I mean, I think right now for me, I'm really, not even really interested in the tech conversation in the Christian world, just on a practical level. I like, I'm just a lot of this is going to be a mute point. And even, like, three to five years, you know, if you see, and I want to get into where the tech is going too much, because I don't want to give away too much of the secret sauce of what we're doing, you know, it's just it's going to advance so quickly. You know, the church always gets stuck in this conversation. You know, they were talking, you know, when I was in seminary, should we even be on Facebook? Then it was the conversation, should we be on Tiktok and, you know, and all these different things and, and the answer was always yes, but the church was always 10 years behind saying that yes. And I get the whole prudence thing, like Catholic Answers. I think, you know, a lot of big corporate Catholic in corporations are risking a lot by putting their name on something, in terms of donors, in terms of money. So I get the fear institutionally, from people. But I would just encourage everybody with a closing comment, which is, get into the tech space. If you're, if you're, if you're feeling called, to just get into it, start doing stuff, and be honest with you, even a lot of the projects we're talking on are going to be pretty easy to do in three to five years, like maybe even sooner. Um, it's really just the, you know, if you see the future of this, it's really going to be pretty quickly and pretty easily. A lot of this is going to be done. I think, you know, I don't know. I don't want to step into, like, other people's pools about other denominations and what they do internationally in terms of colonization. I do just want to address that briefly. Ain't nobody in Africa worried about ideal. I mean, they're worried about that more with LGBTQ and condoms and abortion. They just want to learn from us. So my partners in Africa, we haven't really broke into Latin America as much, just our Well, no, that's not true. I have a Mexican crew, sorry, a lot of friends in Mexico I'm working with, and we've done a lot with the Mexicans, more the upper class. But you know, it's like most of the world just wants to learn from us because they know that we're ahead of them in technology, or they want access to our markets, like my Mexican friends reach out to me because basically they want to build clients in Mexico or in America to outsource because their labor is cheaper. So I think a lot of it, I would just encourage you with this closing comment, which is, if you're feeling called the end of the tech world, just do it. Just start doing it. And then, you know, if you're young and hungry and you got some good ideas, shoot me a DM, because what I learned, no offense to Catholic Answers, is that when you're young and hungry, the world doesn't pay attention to you. They don't pay attention to. You until you're a big shot and all the big institutions get institutional creep, where they stop ignoring young and hungry people with the crazy ideas. And I was the young guy. I wasn't that young with the tech stuff, but 20 years ago, I was the young guy with the crazy ideas on a lot of things, and I followed them. And it took 510, 1520, years, but it paid off. So just because I know a lot of this audience is going to be young, most of my audience is under 40, under 30, and a lot of them are young and hungry. And what I've just seen, I was just out in Napa, and I was connecting with some of these guys that were young and hungry, that nobody was paying attention to. And it's tough, because you feel like nobody's noticing what you're doing. I was there. I mean, you know, Catholic Answers, you know, has never really paid attention to what I do. But you know, don't worry about that. Just keep plugging away. And if God has in your plan, you know, you'll find the people that believe in you. And that's what I was, really hope. That was really the beneficial thing for me, was I found some big shots that knew how to, you know, spot my talent when nobody else in the Catholic world was really giving me a shot. And this was back in the meta Catholic days, and you know all that. So I'll just encourage everybody in that way.

Connor Mahoney 1:21:10
Thanks, Father Ian, I will say, if somebody wants to ask a question, you want to jump on the space, totally willing to to bring on some, some old people, Carlos, we're going to throw it to you. And then jazeer joined the space. So let him join the discussion and then Drago.

Carlos Davila 1:21:24
Can you hear me there?

Connor Mahoney 1:21:28
Yeah, go ahead.

Carlos Davila 1:21:30
Yeah. So, well, I wanted to say something like an hour ago or something. It was about the language, like, how, how, like, machine learning can be like, like human beings, because it's pure language or something. I don't know who say, I think he was John, who says something like that. I don't know if he was Drago, but someone say something about language and about words, and it just came, came to my mind that in the Bible says that in the beginning it was the word. So I think language itself, in words like language, is very powerful. So I'm not surprised that when we take these words and we put it in an algorithm that that that shoe pulls them randomly, increasing the entropy until there's a desire outcome produce intelligence. Actually, I think it's the Hebrew philosophy, or something, that believes that God created the universe, making permutations of this 27 letters in the Hebrew language, something like that. But I think that's that's just some something interesting. And what I really wanted to say that this is why I raised my hand. It was about what the Father was saying on, if he's still here, is the father still here?

Connor Mahoney 1:22:58
No, he's not here. Now he had to jump off.

Carlos Davila 1:23:02
Ah, right. Well, he was saying something like, you know, yeah, like, how Christians, you'll get into touch or something and and make startups. But it's, I'll just say it's insanely hard for a Christian to make it in a cursive world. So this is a thing like, I think, for a good Christian, that you're going to start a startup and wants to make it it's insanely hard, because this world is weak. It's cursed, and the only way to succeed, like, one of the easiest, at least ways to succeed is to become a sociopath, or something like, it's insanely easy to succeed when you are prone to the temptations of the devil. So I think that part we should be addressing. So first of all, I don't know if every Christian should start working in technology, because sometimes it's not in their gifts, it's not in their talents. What we should be doing, though, I think it's converting the people who is currently working on AI. So, for example, I was an agnostic two years ago. For example, I was agnostic, and then I became I became a taste. I started believing in God. Two years ago, two years ago, I was already working on machine learning and artificial intelligence. And, you know, some people like I start receiving a certain I don't know content or whatever, some some influence. Some people already in my field, some of them were Christians that picked my interest. And, you know, my, my, my story of how I converted. It's very long. But the point is that I eventually convert into Christianity. What I was building before I was a Christian was pretty much weird. It was it was like artificial intelligence for psychological manipulation. That was basically what I was working on. Now that I'm a Christian, I'm working on normal, normal stuff. Are there? Know, intelligence for business to business industries, and trying to evangelize and convert as much people as I can. So I was working on pretty weak, I don't know, maybe satanic stuff, not satanic, but pretty evil stuff, free market building, and it was very far away from God. And then I got converted. And I gotta say that a lot of accounts from Twitter were very like influential on my conversion. I really got influenced into becoming an Orthodox Christian, because some of my I don't know, my real life friends, but also because of Twitter, a lot of Christian Orthodox accounts. So I will say that it's that I will be pretty it will be pretty smart if we take that example, my own example, that how I got converted into a bigger scale, and we start converting to people who is already working on AI or in technology, into Christianity, instead of taking Christians and giving them tools to become, start to CEOs, whatever. I think it's better if we go directly to the people who is already working. So, for example, Mark Hunter said, You suppose some diabolical thing about Apollo statue or something, who's gonna convert that guy? We gotta convert that guy. He can, he can get away with it. We gotta convert the guy into Christianity. If we convert Mark Anderson into Christianity, how good that will be? He will start maybe investing into startups from Christians or something. You know, that's, that's the thing we should be doing. I think at least that's what I want to do, and I will do, I'll make sure of it, to focus on converting people who are already in certain positions of power or who are already working on certain industries, such as artificial intelligence, algorithms, machine learning or whatever, and convert them into Christianity. I think that's what the devil does the backwards. He doesn't. He doesn't give people talents or whatever. He goes for the people who already have power, intelligence or money. He corrupts them, he makes them sin, and then he has an army of powerful people who are worshiping. That's what the devil does. So what should we what we should be doing as Christians, or some others, or even, I don't know, leaders in their churches, or whatever, she'll be the same thing, but backwards, like going to those people, converting them, and that way we'll have a lot of powerful, influential, intelligent people in the side of God. So that's what I wanted to say.

Connor Mahoney 1:27:40
Amen. I think that was Marc Andreessen you were talking about of Andreessen Horowitz, Carlos.

Carlos Davila 1:27:47
Yeah, yeah, I don't know the guy that had, that had, like, a cartoon profile picture or something. How is this called?

Connor Mahoney 1:27:54
Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz.

Carlos Davila 1:27:57
Mark Anderson, right. Whatever. that guy.

Connor Mahoney 1:27:59
Yeah, that would be cool. He, he actually engaged with one of our spaces. At one point, he shared something, oops, I muted everybody. He shared something that somebody posted responding to this space about building in the in the image of God. So that was, that was kind of cool. But, yeah, totally I agree. We should be. We should be looking at how we can use technology and use our human faculties a voice to actually talk to people and and convert. So let's do this. I'm going to throw it to jazeer, if you had a question. Then we'll do Drago, and then autumn Adam. And depending on how the space goes, we might, we might just pass it around the original panelists one more time and and go from there.

@JazearBrooks 1:28:45
Hi, good to connect with everyone. I'm grateful to be in this community. I've kind of seen some of the Christian x ai people on Twitter, but it's extremely small in comparison to the entire AI space. I sort of wanted to maybe share a slightly different perspective, as I'm a new Catholic, just converted last year, and I am pretty devout participating in St Michael's lent now, I spent a good amount of time getting spiritual direction from my priest and getting to know the Catholic community, I grew up Baptist, but had a huge lapse, and now I'm more Christian, I guess, suppose, than I have been for most of my life. But you know, as far as like actually converting leaders in AI to Christianity, my experience is that there's a huge cultural disconnect between the people who are at the cutting edge of AI and the people who are essentially Christian society. For context, I'm in the tech space in San Francisco with the most cutting edge people, and I'm also talking to certain groups. Groups that are, I would say, very much at the cutting edge in terms of just understanding AI and also understanding consciousness at a fundamental level. You know, from what I've heard in this chat, it's feels very Christian and like a cool Christian community, but maybe not as deep into the the tech in a way that I would say there it may be challenging to get certain points across. For one, I think just religiously, Buddhism is probably the bigger default from a spiritual perspective, um, than Christianity, to the extent that people think about these kinds of questions at all. And there, there's just so much to think about in terms of what spiritually is happening, or, let's say, get, from a consciousness perspective, cognitively what's happening. I do think that there's, and I imagined, when I was going to talk in this space that we might dig into some of those questions on like, you know, what is the hard problem of consciousness? Maybe you guys wrestled with it more as Imago Dei, but for one, I would say it would be nice if I found a good priest who could provide spiritual direction. I've worked with one. Maybe I'll message father Ian layer, but I just feel like, generally, what seems to, I think, the awkward piece of this, which maybe we'll wrestle with another time, is that if you actually want to take AI and the singularity in particular seriously, it actually challenges a lot of the ontology or even the theology of Christianity. And I have really been looking for someone to represent the faith in a way that can take those challenges head on. What I'm finding more of is that Christianity is basically focused on pastoral care, helping people live good lives in like administration of a community or a state, which is nice, but I think if you want again truths about some of these kind of uncomfortable questions, we may have to come at that conversation differently, and I'm wondering, you know, who in the community, in the Christian community, is actually ready to take on that challenge?

Connor Mahoney 1:32:11
You know, I think I'm gonna throw it to Drago to maybe give some of the thoughts though, along with whatever question he wanted to ask, I will say, though we've hosted a note of discussions, and obviously, you know, I understand some of the things you're asking questions about, especially with the culture in Silicon Valley, I think maybe you describe it as Buddhist. I don't think it's really true Buddhism, but I do think that there is definitely a strong push towards spiritualism happening in Silicon Valley in relation to some of these technologies, and it's kind of been going on for some time now, and I think that's actually broadly a good thing. I think this is Christians can kind of engage in these types of discussions about consciousness and about spirituality in ways that we weren't able to previously, when everybody was kind of like the, you know, the the Beau Tran Russell, atheist, right? So, and I do think that there's been a much deeper discussion about that from a strictly Christian perspective for some time now. I don't think Christians have been silent on that. You know? I'll say, I know this. This figure is kind of controversial, but even some of the ideas of teho de Chardin have really been integral to what Silicon Valley is calling the singularity. Now, with the Omega point, he kind of originated some of those ideas. So people, people have really been pulling from Christianity, I think, more so than the other way around. If you dig into it, I am going to show my friend Ian Ian Wyatt wrote a piece about this that I think might begin to engage with some of your your questions. I'm just going to put that on the on the Jumbotron. If you want to check that out. I think you might, you might find it interesting. But let's go ahead and go to Drago and then Adam, and then we might run it through the panel one more time, unless somebody else wants to jump in.

Drago Dimitrov 1:34:03
Thanks. Connor. Jazeer, you were the last person speaking before that, right? Yeah. Cool, cool. Okay, the first of all for spiritual direction, yeah, if you ever want to shoot me a message. I mean, one of our co founders runs a spiritual direction Institute. He's like, arguably the leading authority in the world on spiritual direction. So certainly, if you want to get connected, let's let's get connected. Also curious before, the other thing I wanted to say, Did you I'm just curious, like, what did you think of my earlier comments? I don't know if you're here on the space like, did you hear those? And I won't repeat them, you know, to not waste other people's time. But I'm just curious, like, if that satisfies some of the intellectual hunger of reconciling AI with the Christian language, was any of that helpful, or did you find that unsatisfying?

@JazearBrooks 1:34:55
First off, I was going to say, I'll DM you on spiritual direction. So, and I've been here for the entire talk, my read is that there are really thorny issues that you kind of like you pointed in the direction of. But at the end of the day, from what I can tell, the truth of the what's happening is challenging theologically in a way that you didn't quite touch on. And I know Connor you mentioned that there's spirituality in Silicon Valley in a way that Christianity can engage, which I think is true, but I think AI, from what I can tell, actually enables the exploration of spirituality outside of Christianity, such that Christianity, like culturally, hasn't been able to maybe address like, I'm aware of the Omega point work, but I think it's not even so much the... like some of the more controversial pieces of AI. I think mysticism is probably like the the center point of discussion where there are Catholic Christian mystics. But politically, it's actually very challenging organizational it's actually very challenging to show people these nuanced pieces of information that someone who has some mystical experience directly may be able to amplify with AI in a way that they weren't before. And I think that's really more that gets closer to some of the thorny issues like I'm alluding to.

Drago Dimitrov 1:36:41
Okay, well, it would be interesting, I suppose, in a subsequent discussion, to drill in further on some of the details around that. Because one, I would say, like, just in my experience, as far as the teaching of the Church and the repository, like the intellectual tradition the church has, and of course, you know, the big guns, Aquinas, but there's many others. I wouldn't consider it. There's no existential challenge by any means. I think the church is more than equipped enough to handle this. Now maybe to your point, are there enough representatives and people equipped to handle these discussions? That's a different criticism, like you said, maybe the culture of having these discussions isn't sufficiently well formed. But yeah, I think I mean a hard problem of consciousness. To your point, the fact is, the non religious person will never be able to transcend that curtain. And again, that exceeds the scope of the space Connor design here. But frankly, it's laughable for, in my opinion, for the materialist who try to pretend like they're about to uncover something new about the emergent phenomena, because that's their favorite words to use to describe the core of consciousness, which is just really intellectual garbage. At the end of the day, that's just me being opinionated. But what I wanted to say to connect full circle back with, like, the experience of consciousness, with AI. Because, great point. And someone mentioned, right, Imago, dei, these type of things. How do we know what's truly the core part? So I'd say this like, Okay, we have rationality kind of mapped out. I mean, the AI can, you know, use deductive patterns, induction arrange the words like, okay, so reason and rationality, that's kind of that, that part of consciousness, that feature, is mapped out. And then, you know, yes, we'll have some kind of sensory data collection apparatuses. So like to mimic eyesight, because as humans, we have our fundamental sense faculties, you know, seeing, hearing, tasting, etc. And so sure we can create hardware that receives data inputs and that we already are doing that, obviously, and then synthesizes those data inputs with the reasoning layer. LLM, etc, fine, but here, here's where I think we'll hit the barrier. And this is kind of where everyone has to decide for themselves what their opinion is. In addition to the exterior senses, like eyesight, etc, humans, through the Imago Dei, actually have interior faculties, so we actually have other senses, which, if you're going to be skeptical, you could say, well, you can't prove it, of course. But I also can't prove that you see a TV screen in your head and you're seeing colors. I have no way of proving that either I can measure your brain electricity, but that's not the same thing as proving your qualitative experience. So all I'll say is, you know, decide for yourself, but we have interior sense faculties such as the connection to the true, the good and the beautiful, and most simply on the good. This is like natural law. You know, we all have an innate perception of the should and the connection to transcendent objective morals. Now, with an AI, you could create a proxy with an objective function of you must maximize the utility of XYZ, whatever, but that's just artificially creating a hierarchy layer of goods, whereas humans are. Connected to, let's say, the teleological structure of reality through our interior faculty. And it's not there's no immediate technological mechanism to create interior faculties in this way that when we we might be able to mimic the eyeball in some proxy, but to mimic, you know, the internal peace and beauty. You know, encounters with beauty and drama, these type of things, they're not just like hormonal reactions. There's actually a fundamental sense faculties. But of course, again, if someone wants to be hyper skeptical, they'll just deny that. But I think everyone, through base awareness and intuition, can attest to the realities of these things and to the reality of love, because you understand when you encounter love versus the absence of love, that is through a particular faculty. It's not just you know random language patterns or you know chemical interactions.

Connor Mahoney 1:40:59
Okay, well, I'll tell you what. It's getting close to two hours now. We're probably going to be wrapping up here. I do know that Daniel pop back on. I think he, he wants to add something, so we let him do that. I'll say Jazeera too. We've been, we've been having a few conversations here, really, since the beginning of the year. And I think, I think there's a lot more Christians here than than maybe you even realize we've been specifically engaging with the effective acceleration of is the movement. And a space we hosted back in January, I mean, we had about 1000 people in the space. It was a huge discussion about these questions. And I think, I think what I what I was trying to convey, is that people in Silicon Valley are kind of hungry. Kind of hungry for answers to some of these more spiritual questions. And I don't think, I don't think it's true that Christianity isn't equipped to handle them. I think, I think there are questions that we have to wrestle with within Christianity about consciousness and about the the the full effect of some of these theological realities, but, but I do think that the conversation is happening, and I don't, I don't, I don't, I personally don't find it one sided towards non Christian spirituality. So I think if you maybe check out that article I included in some of the previous spaces, too, are still publicly listenable. I can send you some of those, if you would be curious. But I think, I think there's a lot, I think there's a lot more weight behind the Christian side of the argument than than maybe you realize, Daniel, do you want to jump in here?

Daniel Losey 1:42:37
I don't think I have anything to add. I was, yeah, I just wanted to hop back on and listen to the rest.

Connor Mahoney 1:42:41
Okay, great. Let's pass it to the panel again. We haven't heard from John Sorensen in awhile. John, if you want to just maybe some final thoughts. And also, you know, if people want to kind of engage with with Catholic Answers, and what you guys are doing, though, with artificial intelligence or otherwise, let them know how they could do that,

Jon Sorensen 1:43:01
Sure. I mean, the best way to find us is on catholic.com but we're on all social media. I mean, it's basically what we do. But I wanted to say something in response to Father, I wish he was still on is that Catholic Answers actually isn't a very big organization. I work with 40 people. That's it. And the reach that we have is because of the way we view technology in general, is that you know all these different platforms, these, you know, all these things that emerge. They, you know, can, can they be used and approaching them with the spirit of like experimenting, but at the same time respecting like, for example, I respect everybody's opinions here, the ones that are skeptical of AI, the the the, you know, the anthropomorphic concern, all of those things. I hear all of that, and I appreciate all of it. And I'm, I'm not wedded to any particular position, even to some of the things that I've said here, other than the idea that whatever technology is out there and whatever is emerging, I want to look at it and find ways to use it to help me tell people about Jesus, because that's what I really want to do. That's the only thing I care about, is telling more people about Jesus, and to the extent that I can reach them through some of these platforms, awesome, you know. But like I said, I really don't. The other thing is, I don't. I disagree, obviously, with the idea that there's a philosophical problem with developing technology and at the same time encouraging people to be careful how much time they spend on it. I don't see that as a philosophical issue, but I'm, you know, open to being corrected or good arguments on that. But at the end of the day, whether you whether you partner with some organization, or you partner with your peers or whatever it is, I encourage all Christians to experiment with all the technology that's out there. How do we use it? How do we get. It. How do we get more people to come back to the church? Because, you know, it's, it's taking a hit in the West. I don't think anybody can deny that. And so, you know, and we're losing out to a lot of these, you know, sort of secular organizations who are making good use of all of these sorts of things. And you know, so I would just encourage everybody to do that. And again, thanks for inviting me into the conversation. It was really interesting to hear everybody's points of view.

Connor Mahoney 1:45:26
Yeah, thanks so much for joining John. And everybody go. Go follow John. And also Catholic Answers. Great resource there, right of if you want to hop in and maybe give some final thoughts and also let people know how they can maybe check out some of the work you're doing.

Ryder Wishart 1:45:42
Oh sure, yeah. Thanks Connor for hosting this. So if you want to see some of the work we're doing with Bible translation, AI, you can just send me a message. Probably it's the easiest way, but we're working on a app that is for Bible translation. Well, actually several different projects, but we're really trying to figure out how to empower people around the world to translate the Bible into their own heart language. Not just this kind of scenario where we have to give them permission. We have to, you know, be in control of the process, or we have to sign off on the quality, but really just empowering them with the tools they need to leverage AI to do this in a way that wouldn't have been realistic in the past. And so, yeah, it's lots of exciting stuff going on. You can talk to me or Daniel OSI here. And yeah, I mean, final thoughts, I think we touched on some really interesting topics. I think I would love to hear some conversation going a bit deeper into a few of the specifics I know. John Barlow mentioned he a few times the idea about these things being more than just word calculators. And I'd love to hear more specifically sometime what, what does that mean concretely, and what does that actually look like when I'm writing a program and I yeah, anyways, the Imago Dei stuff as well, very fascinating. Would love to discuss that more in terms of the sociology of knowledge, and yeah, other perspectives that people want to bring in. And yeah, looking forward to talking with anybody else who's who's interested in looking further, if anybody knows, developers too, who are interested in contributing to Bible translation. We have lots and lots of work to do, so we, we've got lots of direction to give as well. So just reach out. And we would just love to partner with anybody who's interested.

Connor Mahoney 1:47:40
I threw Adam... Adam Graber's recent project, people should go check that out on the screen, because he looks like he had to pop off. But go check out his work. He's been curating a lot of resources for people who are interested in in Christianity and tech. Drago, you'll kind of be like a guest panelist, I guess. But please give us some final thoughts and let people know how people they can engage with the AI that you building.

Drago Dimitrov 1:48:10
Yeah, thank you, Connor, for hosting the space, connecting some great minds here in AI Christianity. I look forward to your future spaces on this topic. Yeah, we're building holy habits. You can get it on the app store, so it's, it's bridging the supply and demand gap and spiritual direction. And so if you're looking for concrete guidance on what's the next virtue you need to be building, and then AI can facilitate that. Check out holy habits.

Connor Mahoney 1:48:38
Cool and Carlos, if you want to go ahead and jump into please do.

Carlos Davila 1:48:41
Alright, yeah, on my profile. You click on my profile, you'll find or isolated Christianity community. So we have a community, and we like, we have a group chat, and well, if you join the community, you'll find a peanut with the community, what it said, what it has to link, and it's not yet, like, fully public. It probably won't be public. I'm not sure AI. It will basically be like, only the people who are part of, like, the civil Christianity community who will have access, so that you guys might start off. It's completely free. It doesn't actually source the conversation anywhere. It's fully private. You don't have to sign up or whatever, but you do have to go into the accelerated Christianity community on Twitter. So you click on my profile, click on the link, if you click on it, you'll see other Christianity and then you click on Join. That's it. So, yeah.

Connor Mahoney 1:49:45
Okay, I also threw, John Barlow. He he had written a an article recently. I threw that. I know he's not on the speaker panel right now, but if people want to go check out some of his writings on the matter, and I know he's also. Looking on a on a piece that hasn't quite gone through the the peer review process, but it kind of explores some of those themes about the imago day and what what really these artificial intelligences are. So I think that's that'll be kind of interesting. He he showed me a sneak peek, but it hasn't, I don't think it's gone through the full process yet, but give him a follow, and hopefully, hopefully they'll be coming out here pretty soon. Guys, thank you, everybody. So much for joining we we will be hosting more of these spaces in the future. We also host a prayer space every Sunday at 6pm eastern to to pray about technology and Christianity and the Christian future. So you can keep an eye on on my profile. We'll be we'll be posting that as as it goes live, and you. Everybody's welcome to join. So hope to see everybody here in the future. Thanks to all the panelists, thanks to our guest speakers, thanks to Jazeera, everybody who joined and talked. I'm going to play some music out just so that, because if I end the space now, then it'll cut off the recording. Kind of weird, but everybody's welcome to to be heading out. Thank you again, and God bless.