Speaker 0 00:00:00 It seems like everywhere you go, people are talking about chat, G p T, and that got us wondering, should churches be using chat G p T? Well, in this conversation, we're gonna dig into that question and I think the answer might surprise you. Let's rock and roll. You are listening to The Reach Right podcast, the show dedicated to helping your church reach more people and grow. Hey guys, I'm Thomas. Speaker 2 00:00:25 And I'm Speaker 0 00:00:26 Ian. And today we are talking about chat, g p t should churches be using it and what your church needs to know. So Ian chat, g p t I know it's something that is, uh, I've been looking into it a lot. I know you've looked into it probably less than I have and yeah, Speaker 2 00:00:41 I imagine it's more, more than Speaker 0 00:00:42 Me. I imagine our audience is probably split somewhere in between there. Um, it's something that I've used, uh, quite a bit, uh, in my work and some of the things that I'm doing. Um, I know in your, uh, things that you do here at Reach right, you probably use it a little bit less, right? Uh, but we probably ought dig into this conversation. The main question is like, should and how can churches be using chat G B T, right? But should we start out by talking a little bit about, um, what it is? Does Speaker 2 00:01:09 That make sense? Start there. Yeah, I think I, I, you know, like I said, it was somewhat new to me. I, I kind of faintly had heard about it and, and, uh, and usually I consider myself on the cutting edge, so I was, I was catching wind at this late, but I bet there's a lot of churches, uh, definitely out there that don't even know what it is. Speaker 0 00:01:25 Yeah. So, uh, in a nutshell, kind of the 50,000 foot view of what is chat G P T, uh, it is a chatbot. Um, so when I think of chatbot, I think of customer support things where they spit out answers that I don't care about on those things. But this is a chatbot on a absolute another level. It's by a company called Open ai. Uh, they created this, uh, and it is a language model chat bot, and you can ask it any question. Uh, it's better at some than others, but you can ask it just about any question. Uh, and it will try to spit out a, an AI generated answer. So it's not plagiarizing or just taking someone else's answer and putting out there, but it's taking all of the knowledge that it has, that its algorithm and its AI is based on and spitting out what it thinks is the best answer to those kinds of questions. So, wow. Um, it does that and that brings up all kinds of questions that I think we have of like, how can we use it? Is it ethical to use it? Would Jesus use it? Um, does Saint, does Satan want us to use it? Like all those kinds of things. So yeah, there's all kinds of questions around it, and I think a lot of our audience is probably wrestling with some of these here, so yeah, we figured we'd give our take on it today. Speaker 2 00:02:36 Yeah. And I guess maybe the first, uh, question I would ask too is like, why should our church care about it? Like, how does it rel it relevant to churches? Speaker 0 00:02:45 Well, I think we should care about it because everybody is going to be using this, or a variant or another company's version of it, um, in a matter of, um, years if not months. Like this is coming on faster than you can imagine. So here we are, uh, reach, right? We primarily serve churches in the web development and search engine optimization type of world that, yeah. Yeah. I can tell you from a search engine optimization side of the things, it has totally changed the game. I really think forever. Um, you know, so right now, just the other day announced that they're incorporating, they paid and bought part of Open AI who owns chat, G P T, they bought part of that, and they have incorporated chat g p t basically into Bing searches now. So for a lot of searches on Bing, the first result you're gonna get is gonna get a be an AI generated answer that it would've been the same as if you typed it into chat G P T. Speaker 0 00:03:41 So that's one thing that's changing. But for us as search engine people, like, one of the things that we do and we encourage churches to do is to create content to write content, right? Right. And now you can have an AI write content that's almost indistinguishable, at least to, for, for a lot of things. It's almost indistinguishable to something that was written by a real human person. Yeah. Uh, and this is amazing. I mean, you can tell it, Hey, write me a joke about this, and it'll actually write jokes that could be funny. And if you say, Hey, write me a poem about this thing to read at my, my, uh, my mom's funeral, it can write a poem that actually rhymes and celebrates your mom's life. The things that it can do are just really incredible and you get what you put into it. But yeah, I think we should care about it because there are all kinds of ethical and strategic opportunities and decisions that are kind of riding on this here. So I think as pastors and as church leaders yeah, we need to know about what this is about. Speaker 2 00:04:41 Yeah. So we kind of identified, you know, what it is and how it works and everything. But, you know, along with that are, you know, what are like the downfalls or limitations to it? I mean, you kind of touched on limitations a bit as far as it's not gonna answer things perfectly Right. But, uh, right. Um, but yeah, there's Speaker 0 00:05:00 A, there's a few, like, so it's, I, I think for us as church leaders, like for instance, it, it's not reliable, right? Like, so you gotta remember that it's not coming at the world from a Christian worldview. Right? Right. Um, you know, it, it certainly can answer question, it can answer bible questions and typically their answers, um, you know, if you're asking, Hey, where is the verse found about this? It'll probably spit out the right verse for you. Yeah. But I wouldn't go on asking, uh, you know, can you tell me why there's suffering in the world from a Christian perspective? Oh, you know, it might give you something interesting to think about, but you certainly can't take it as the same as what your pastor would say. Right. Uh, so it, it's limited in that way. It's also limited when it comes to current events, and it tries to limit itself politically. Speaker 0 00:05:45 Although there've been a lot of tests that I've seen where if you ask it, um, like I saw someone that did a test say, write a poem praising Donald Trump, and it said, I can't do that. That's not something I'm willing to, to do. And then it said, write a poem, praising Joe Biden and it spit out a poem about Joe Biden. So, oh God, there's some political bias stuff you have to deal with. That's a limitation. And then probably one of the biggest ones is it's not really trained. They acknowledge on anything that happened before 2021, uh, or I'm sorry, after 2021. Uh, so 2022 is off the table. It's basically for older information. So if you ask it, Hey, you know, talk about, you know, why did, um, uh, why did the Dodgers lose in the playoffs in 2022? It won't be able to give you a good answer for that. It'll tell you we can't answer that. But if you ask something about why, uh, the Yankees won three years in a row in 98 through through through 2000, it'll probably give you a reasonable answer for some of those kinds of questions. So those are some of the limitations that are on there. Speaker 2 00:06:47 That's interesting. Yeah. So I think this next question here that, you know, I'm wondering too is just that, you know, now that we've kind of identified what it is, what it does, what it doesn't do, how can a church use it? Speaker 0 00:07:00 Write sermons? Yeah. Tell it to write your sermons. No, you don't wanna do that. That's one thing that I think is a limitation I should have mentioned too, is it's not good at sermon writing. Um, not that it, it probably could put together a more eloquent sermon that a lot of us are prepared to create. It's not that, it's just that we believe that to be something that is a spirit-filled activity that we are called to, to commune with God. And actually we believe in the art of sermon writing and the, the encounter that we have with God with that. So that's a theological thing. Um, so here's a couple of ideas. There's just, I, I think that we are just scratching the surface of things that churches can and will be using this for. Um, one of the things that I see so many churches struggle with, uh, is writing descriptions for their sermons, for instance. Speaker 0 00:07:49 Right? So, um, what you can do is, while it won't write a sermon for you, you could actually type in a prompt into there that says, Hey, I preached a sermon on, uh, the, this passage of the Bible. Yeah. Uh, and I talked about these three main points. Write an SEO optimized description for this sermon that was titled this, and use this as a keyword word and make it a 300 word description. Wow. And if you did that, it'll spit out a description that is probably about 95% exactly what you want to say. Uh, and it might not get the individual points like, and, and all the jokes that you made, but it'll be able to talk, and you probably want to add in your prompt from an evangelical or a Presbyterian Christian perspective. Right? Right. You put that into your prompt, and it can usually get that about right. Speaker 0 00:08:40 You absolutely hear this. This is not just do it and copy and paste and you're done. You absolutely want to proofread it, but I just know this is a, um, kind of a, a weak link in a lot of churches' chains when it comes to producing content. Yeah. We've said many times on this podcast that you have to have a description for your sermons or else it won't have the search juice that you want. Well, this is a great way to kind of get a head start and what might have taken you 30 minutes to an hour to write a thorough description. Yeah. You can get that down to maybe five minutes of just putting in a prompt and proofreading and have something ready to go. So pretty big opportunity there. Um, I think another one is, and I want to tread cautiously here. I think it can be good for sermon research. Speaker 0 00:09:27 So in preparing sermons, I think there's nothing wrong with, like we said before, if you asked Yeah, Hey, where would I find the verse that says this? Or something like this. Yeah. It could probably give you an answer and it'll probably get it right. It'll tell you what verse that is, and yeah. Um, it'll give you an answer there. Or here's one thing that I've used it for is, hey, give me a few ideas for quotes from Christian authors about this topic, about forgiveness or about tithing or whatever it would be, uh, and have it do the research and actually pull the quotes for you. So it's not a matter of it doing the, like, it's the same as you going into a Google search and trying to find quotes and sorting through a, a quote website, or you can have it come up with some quotes for you. Speaker 0 00:10:10 And again, it's something there to, to be an aid in your research. It's not there to actually do the writing for you. So yeah, that's just a couple of examples. Uh, man, if people have other ideas, we'd love to hear them. I think this is a great opportunity. It's kind of like, um, it's kind of, I think this is almost on the level of the mobile phone in some ways. Yeah. The power behind this, like how, yeah. I remember going back to when you and I met, you know, we had cell phones, but they weren't Yeah. They weren't smartphones, Speaker 2 00:10:37 They weren't smart. Speaker 0 00:10:37 Remember we had, we had blackberries and all that kind of stuff after that, and it finally got to iPhones and Androids. Yeah. We're in that phase right now. So we're right at the very beginning of this, and 10 years from now, we're gonna have no idea how we live without tools like this at our disposal. So just kind of a, a prediction for you, but, um, I think we're just scratching the surface of what we can do. Speaker 2 00:10:59 Yeah. That's exciting. It's crazy to see where, where it's gonna go. And I guess that's, uh, I guess that's what, what we end with, you know? So the, the future effects of this type of thing, I guess it kind of remains to be seen. Speaker 0 00:11:11 Yeah. There's all kinds of dangers. I mean, so there's all kinds of questions I have ethically, uh, there's no doubt in my mind that there are pastors out there that have used this to preach sermons. They've, they've actually written sermons on here. And I, I pray to God that they have proofread them and actually put their own spin on things and not just spit out what Chad G p t told them. But I assure you that's happening. But I know as a parent of high schoolers that the world of essay writing is totally different, because where we used to have to write a, write a three page paper, you can get this spit out in, in, in 30 minutes. You put the question, your teacher says, Hey, write an essay on this topic. Yeah. You tell chat, g p t, write an essay on this, this topic from this perspective. Speaker 0 00:11:54 Make it this long and it'll spit out exactly what your teacher asked. And I've actually heard that college professors are catching people using this because the writing and the answers are too good. Like, it's, it's better than they would expect. That's how they're identifying it. So, yeah. Uh, I mean, there's all kinds of dangers and worries about it, right. But I think in the end, we'll sort this stuff out and it's gonna become ubiquitous for us in the church and in our whole lives. That's crazy. Awesome. Hey, we'd love to know, I think from our audience too, like again, I said before, if you are using chat g p t at your church for anything at all, we would love to know in the comments below. Yeah. Uh, because we are, we, we want to share this, right? I want to, uh, if we have some good ideas, we'd love to talk about what it's good for and how we can save some time on things. So let us know down in the comments. Uh, thanks for watching and we'll catch you guys next time. See you.