sermonette: The Rise of AI

Knowledge Shall Increase
Ryan McClure
Given 06-May-23; Sermon #1707s; 19 minutes

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Many of us have fond memories of specific moments or events in our life. I recall way back in 6th grade that my classmates and I were introduced to computers in the classroom. We always enjoyed computer lab, but probably the fondest memories that we had were when our teacher, Mr. Timychuk or Mr. A as we like to call him, would let us play a game called Xonics after school. Now the objective of Xonics was to capture the field of play, basically the computer screen, by containing bouncing balls to a minimum area. Now, if you captured at least 70% of the field of view, you were promoted to the next level. Each level contains more balls, and they move faster as well.

If a ball hits a wall, as you are trying to build it, you lose a life. So the goal is to see who could get to the highest level. Now I believe it was in 1989 or 1990 when my mom informed us kids that we had enough money to purchase our very own home computer. That was pretty cool to a kid, back then since the only computers we had were in school. In fact, back then, we still had typing class and we were learning how to type on typewriters. I was so excited, I could hardly wait to be able to play computer games in the comfort of my own home.

I'd already done some research and I wonder how I did that research cause Google was not back then. But somehow I knew. What computer my mom needed to get, it was a 486 DX2 66 megahertz with 8 kilobytes of L1 cache. Now I must have been extremely excited to get that PC if I actually remember the specs to this day. Now a lot has changed with technology since the 90s. We used to have wall phones, pay phones, faxes, typewriters, and now we have cell phones that can arguably do all of those things and more. In the past 30 years, the rate at which technology advances has increased exponentially.

Now according to Moore's Law, and that's Gordon Moore, the law states that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every 2 years. The law claims that we can expect the speed and capability of our computers to increase every 2 years because of this, yet we will pay less for them. That's pretty quick, and there are some today that say that this law or opinion is actually outdated and that technology is advancing at an even faster pace. Now let's go over to Matthew 24 for our first scripture. This is an end time warning that our Creator has given to those whom He has called, and we will jump into Matthew 24, where Jesus is responding to His disciples after they, they inquired as to what sign would precede His return and the end of the age. So Matthew 24 we read verses 4 through 5.

Matthew 24:4-5 And Jesus answered and said to them, Take heed that no one deceives you, for many will come in my name, saying, I am the Christ and will deceive many.

Now if we were to continue reading, we would see here in verse 24 or chapter 24 that Jesus continues to warn of deception, false prophets, and lies, so much so that if possible, even the elect might be deceived. But what I want to focus on for this for the message today is this theme of deception that Christ points to and how it will permeate the atmosphere at the end times. False prophets, signs and wonders seem to abound, and yet Jesus says, do not believe it. Now when I think of truth, I think of God and our Savior. And when I think of lying, deceitfulness, craftiness, I tend to think of Satan, and I do this because of the scriptures, and there is quite a few, but if you will, please go with me to Numbers 23 for our next scripture.

I just want to read this out loud. Numbers 23. And we will pick up verse 19, and this is Balaam speaking.

Numbers 23:19 God is not a man that He should lie, nor a Son of Man, that He should repent. Has He said and will He not do, or has He spoken, and will He not make it good?

OK, God cannot lie. He is simply not able to because He's perfect. So when we think about deceit, the lie, and what what normally comes to mind, well, let's turn over to John 8 for our next scripture. You probably know this by heart. John 8, we will pick up verses 43 and 44.

John 8:43-44 This is Jesus speaking. Why do you not understand my speech? Because you are not able to listen to my word. You are of your father, the devil, and the desires of your father, you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the Father of it.

Lies, deceit, falsehoods are all part of the fabric of who and what Satan is. He is the Father of lies because he lied to Eve. So here we see that in the end times we can use a type of litmus test to see if something is of God or of Satan. It is either grounded in truth, namely God's written word, or it's formed on a lie that doesn't stand in the truth. Now with these things in mind, if you haven't noticed, if you haven't seen or read the news recently, we are currently going through some pretty spectacular times in history. All of us are currently living in what most have dubbed the 4th industrial revolution.

Now if you remember anything from history class, the original industrial revolution transformed the world from an economy of agriculture and handicraft into one dominated by industry and machine manufacturing, quite simply, we started replacing humans with machines in mass production. As we move through this 4th revolution that is focused on machine learning the Internet of things or IOT, and the blending of cyber and physical systems, the 5th revolution will be upon us faster than we might think. Let's look at 3 examples of technology that are being used today. VALL-E, so V A L L dash E, is a text to speech artificial intelligence or AI that can be trained in just 3 seconds of you speaking or hearing your voice. Now, according to Interesting Engineering.com, researchers at um At Technology Major Microsoft have unveiled their latest text to speech or TTS generator VALL-E that can be trained to mimic anybody's voice in just 3 seconds.

Unlike previous voice generators that sounded robotic, VALL-E sounds naturally human, and that may not be a very good thing. End quote. A little bit later on in the same article, we, we move over to DALL-E, so that's D A L L dash E. DALL-E can dish out images in response to text prompts. And now Microsoft's technology could revive a long-deceased actor's voice in a future movie. The bottom line of these technologies appears to be the ability to save money for companies that could get the job done by paying a fraction of what it pays to humans.

End quote. Finally, if you haven't heard of VALL-E or DALL-E, you must have heard of OpenAI's ChatGPT. Chat generated or generative pre-trained transformer or ChatGPT has hit headlines on the daily, and although the AI technology is not altogether new as of this year, it's breaking records in terms of overall adoption and usage. According to OpenAI.com, ChatGPT is described as the following, quote, We have trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, change incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests, end quote. Now we will see shortly that some of this might not be completely true.

Now technology by itself is typically what we would consider neutral. Oftentimes it is how technology is used or what the technology is used for that reveals whether it can be used for good or for bad. Now one of the extremely interesting things about this application is adoption. In the digital space, adoption is measured or is a key metric that digital companies measure as it's important to understand how your product base is expanding over time. Now Yahoo Finance, quoting UBS data, revealed the top 8 applications in the world, and they noted how many months it took for each one to reach 100 million active or monthly active users. So Spotify, most of us know Spotify, took almost 5 years to reach 100 million monthly active users.

Instagram, we all know Instagram, took, took 2.5 years to hit 100 million monthly active users. TikTok only took 9 months to hit 100 monthly active users, and ChatGPT has surpassed 100 million monthly active users in only 2 months. Now what has taken some really well-known applications over the years has been accomplished by ChatGPT inside of two months. Who cares, right? With what feels like something that happened overnight, the technology now exists where almost anyone who has access to these applications and hundreds more that are, are popping up every day. You can easily create a script for just about any subject.

You can feed that into a language processor and apply someone's voice, someone else's voice to it, and then use that audio to pair it up with a picture or a video and effectively create a video clip of someone saying something that they never said. Now ChatGPT by itself utilizes generative AI which allows the model to actually understand content and enables it to produce or conduct conversations. For example, today you might say something like, we will figure out who did not turn their phones off, Hey Siri, or OK Google, and your phone lights up and listens to your voice and turns that audio clip into a search of the internet and it returns a simple response. Now generative AI is able to produce actual dialogue by storing what you said initially and then utilizing that in subsequent interactions. With generative AI, we are no longer searching for answers electronically. We are able to have conversations with AI.

We can go far beyond asking for directions to someplace. We can literally ask AI, why do we feel the way that we do. Now Time.com outlines what people are primarily doing on ChatGPT, quoting, the first reason that ChatGPT started going viral was its novelty factor. Us users asked ChatGPT to create a biblical verse about removing a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR or for Elvis-themed fantasy weapons. Within seconds, the AI would spit out options like Love Me Tender dagger and Blue suede sword. End quote.

Now very soon, however, ChatGPT's usage elevated far beyond means and parlor tricks and into the professional sphere. I'm sorry, this is continuing the quotes. I want to make sure we are continuing the quote there. So ChatGPT can brainstorm ideas, write articles, and code. People began to use it to write entire job applications, curriculums, academic papers, and scripts in different programming languages. In particular, programming and developer software has emerged as one of ChatGPT's main use cases.

Similar web data shows. Now, end quote. Interesting that the Bible was included in some of the very first use cases. Now, if you fast forward to April of 2023 and the Daily Caller.com indicated when prompted, the AI, when it, when prompt when it prompted the AI to provide a joke about Jesus, it did. But when asked to make a joke about the prophet Mohammed, it said, quote, It is not appropriate for me to tell jokes. About religious figures including the Prophet Mohammed as it could be considered disrespectful and offensive to many people, that is quite interesting.

Now incidentally, last night, I received a news update that ChatGPT can assist folks in expanding their ministry. Don't worry, I typed all of these 2000 some words myself. But is not that interesting? How nice would it be to wake up on the Sabbath morning, punch in some criteria for a sermonette or a sermon, and boom, be preaching that afternoon. But would you be preaching the truth? There are many other examples of responses from the AI that have caused great concern.

We do not have to look far to understand why. You see, the technology derives its initial algorithms and code parameters from who? Well, humans, of course, are we humans perfect? Of course not. And so with so many other things in life, including computer programs, our own biases are introduced into the code, into the parameters that have negative impacts to the output that it provides, even though AI is learning the parameters by which its learning are still set by fallible man. Now Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak and several other technology entrepreneurs, I think it's in the 1,000s at least, have signed an open letter warning about the dangers of AI.

The letter has recommended a six-month pause on any further development, while others have said that it should be completely shut down. According to Business Insider.com, the letter cites out of, out of control AI and misinformation as two reasons for the pause. So I'm going to quote the letter regarding out of control AI. It says, should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders, end quote. Regarding misinformation, the letter cites, quote, Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?

Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? End quote. Finally, Elon Musk is quoted as saying, with artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon, and he also stated that AI has the potential of civilization destruction. Now, while many might be thinking of Cyberdyne Systems and Skynet from the now famous Terminator series, Musk alludes that the destruction will not necessarily come from robots overthrowing civilization since most of the intelligence is housed in data centers. Rather, humans would simply become out-intelligenced. I do not think that's a real word.

Now as generative AI matures, one of the biggest concerns other than a complete disruption of society as we know it is the control of information, propaganda, and truth, or untruth as it's stated. What types of challenges will we face in the coming years as we continue to turn to technology for answers to things that we once got out of a book? Will our question return a truthful unbiased response, or will it return something that sounds just enough like the truth but is slanted slightly towards one particular group's world view? Would we be able to discern what is true versus false? Now technology is not stopping there. Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark remarked at the 2022 World Economic Forum.

That by 2030, so less than seven years from now, cellphones will change into things like glasses that are worn on the face and other types of wearable technology. Most of us are already wearing this technology. It's going to get a lot, it's become a lot more. So Industry 5.0, where the fifth industrial revolution will include but not be limited to human, robot, mechanic relations. For you Star Trek fans, you can think of data. Now again, what does this all mean for us?

Well, society is certainly going to change drastically at a, at a pretty quick pace. IBM has already stopped hiring and plans on reducing, reducing its workforce by about 7800 employees. Additionally, Google in January indicated that it would lay off around 12,000 employees as it shifts towards AI. CNET announced recently that it's laying off people as AI generated stories are able to produce stories faster than humans. News outlets, look out writers, bloggers, and content creators are laying off employees because simple requests to ChatGPT can generate one to many news articles a lot faster than a human can think it, research it, and type it. Interesting that the very things that most of us turn to in order to learn something, to be informed about something, dare I say, to be taught something, might very well be generated by artificial intelligence.

Now it's apparent in Scripture that one of the fundamental challenges at the end time will be this struggle between truth and lies. If you will please turn with me back to Matthew 24, I should have asked you to keep your finger there. We'll have several mediums pushing different agendas that will require us to remember God's written word, His unchanging commands and values that we are to live by each and every day. Truth, the truth will be in short supply. All right, Matthew 24, we will pick up verses 23 through 25.

Matthew 24:23-25 This is Jesus speaking again. Then if anyone says to you, Look, here is the Christ, or there, do not believe it, for false Christs and false prophets will arise and show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect.

Now, I'm not saying that AI is of the devil. I am saying that with each advancement in technology comes both good and bad things. Christ warned that in the end times deception would be, would abound, and that even the elect could be deceived. As we walk out of Babylon, we must be vigilant and awake, watching as events unfold, walking circumspectly, guarding the truth and holding fast to every word of God.