The whole truth and nothing but the truth? 

AI, and how it relates to the gospel, was the focus of a guest service at Kendal Road Baptist Church in Gloucester earlier this year. Minister Steve Ayers explains why.

Izzy is one of our older members in the church. She came up to me on the Thursday after our Guest Service and asked, “Sorry love, am I being thick, but what were we doing last week?  This AI, what were you saying?” 

The team working on the Guest Service wanted to talk about something current and how we might relate it to the gospel. In the end it was my daughter showing me pictures of Donald Trump being arrested that brought us to the subject of AI. Because these pictures weren’t the real thing but mock-ups, done by a bored journalist using AI, while waiting for Trump’s arrest.  

On one level they were great fun, who doesn’t like to see a politician lampooned? But these images were later shared by others on social media as pictures of a live event, and that’s potentially dangerous. So we decided to use the AI debate to ask, ‘How can we know what is true?’  

And then a German artist, Boris Eldagsen did us a favour. He hit the front pages in March for winning the creative photo category in the Sony World Photography Awards and then refusing the award.  The reason? It’s not a photograph at all, it’s what he calls a promptograph. It’s all been done using AI on a computer. He enters descriptions of what he wants in his picture and the programme generates an image. And because he’s an accomplished photographer and artist, over a number of weeks, he produced something very credible indeed, and fooled an international panel of experts. Part of our service became a True or False Picture Quiz, where we tried to spot what was a photo and what wasn’t, using some of the pictures we’d put on the invitations.  

“As an artist, I just love it.  As a citizen, I’m deeply concerned.  Most kinds of photography can be augmented by AI but not the photojournalism part. The press needs to come up with a system to make it clear what is authentic, manipulated or generated. If you don’t do that, democracy will be manipulated and misinformed by anyone who can write five words.”
Boris Eldagsen

Then, two weeks before the service, Geoffrey Hinton, described as ‘the godfather of AI’, resigned from his role at Google. He warns us about the potential dangers of GPT-4, which is AI generated text. How it works is this: you write a simple request – such as ‘Write me a talk about truth and AI’ and, seconds later, you have 413 words on the topic.

Now the 413 words aren’t great, but they were coherent and logical, which is more than I manage some Sundays. It was dry and impersonal and too short for most preachers (congregations may differ!) It’s only going to get better but I still think an incarnational sermon preached by a man or woman who knows and loves the congregation will win out every time. But I would say that, wouldn’t I?  

‘Right now, what we’re seeing is things like GPT-4 eclipses a person in the amount of general knowledge it has and it eclipses them by a long way. In terms of reasoning, it’s not as good, but it does already do simple reasoning. And given the rate of progress, we expect things to get better quite fast. So we need to worry about that.’
Geoffrey Hinton

Up until recently, if we look really carefully at pictures and texts, we can have a reasonable idea whether something is real or fake. Those slightly odd posts on Facebook, those texts from a family member saying they have lost their phone, the wording usually gives them away – they are using words and phrases that don’t sound like them. 

Similarly, with pictures. In the service we looked at some things to look out for on pictures.  For a long time AI didn’t do hands well, fingers disappeared or were added or just looked plain odd. Eyes didn’t always look in the same direction, man-made structures and backgrounds could be a give away, and text looks like gibberish. My friends at Camera Club could produce better images using Photoshop, fixing text, for example.  

But don’t get too complacent. Google the work of Julie Wieland and her gorgeous photographs,¹ which aren’t photographs . Or Michael King’s pictures of celebrities in a coffee shop.² The technology is getting better all the time.  

Look very closely at what purports to be true. That’s the message we emphasised. And from there (and some of you are way ahead of me here) it was a short step to talk about Jesus, who claimed that not only is there such a thing as truth but that he was the truth. We used John 14:1-7 to introduce Jesus’ claim and to begin to analyse it. We encouraged people to look very carefully at something (indeed, someone) who purports to be the truth and to decide for themselves. We had gospels to give out and we invited people to Hope Explored, a short course that will help them do this. The whole service is online – (disclaimer, I’ve not watched it). It’s a guest service and so deliberately different to what we would do most Sundays but if you want to watch it, it’s there.³  
A few weeks later, Izzy was back, hardly able to believe how much there had been about AI in the news and telling me she understood the news reports better now. She first heard about it in church and though the service was designed as one for people outside church, it seems people inside church were equipped by it. It was one of those times when things came together at just the right time. 

Our next guest service is in September. I have no idea what we will talk about. But I’m convinced that the gospel will have something to say about it and that we will benefit from thinking about it.   

Steve Ayers is the pastor at Kendal Road Baptist Church in Gloucester
www.krbc.org.uk
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