9.21 Devotional - In Whose Image?

0:00Today is Monday, September 21st. The title of our devotional is In Whose Image. Today we begin week two of our campaign titled Being Human. In this campaign we're exploring what the Bible has to say about what it means to be human so that we can hold on to our humanity in the age of AI. I believe this to be one of the foremost spheres in which the church must speak in our current age. This week we'll be talking about one of the most powerful principles in the history of the world. And that's not an overstatement. We'll be talking about the image of God, the Amago Day, if you prefer the Latin. Before we get there let's take a day to talk about AI and images. Okay, AI can make a lot of images really quickly. You can prompt it to make an image of pretty much anything you can think of. Of course I've played around with this a bit. I've used it to create some illustrations and tweak some images for our family.

1:01It's pretty fun. But there's a sinister side to this use of AI as well. Deepfakes are images and videos made by AI that closely resemble real people. It doesn't take much imagination to see how these can be used for fraudulent activity and scams. It can obviously also be used to harass, bully, and to mean others. So generating a false image of someone can be fun and silly. But it can also be used for evil purposes. Descerning truth and verifying truth is becoming increasingly more important as we can't even trust that a video we see is real. Deepfakes are a problem that has come about with some societal changes. However, I think there's a deeper question we must ask about AI and images. And whose image is AI made? As far as I understand it, AI functions based on a system called large language models. It has been trained on billions of pages of language that humans have already written. When we give it a prompt, then it is essentially analyzing which word usually comes next in response based on all the language it has been trained on.

2:03It doesn't necessarily choose the next word based on hard and fast rules so it can answer the same question in different ways. It's like a neural network that builds a representation of the words we use and then responds based on those representations. Therefore, AI is trained on us humans. We could perhaps even say that AI is created in our image. As humans, our both created in the image of God and infected by sin, there's potential then for both great good and great evil. This is a tension that we must balance in the development and deployment of AI, just as we have always done in our interactions with fellow humans. I was thinking about AI being made in the image of humanity. I was wondering which world view it would answer some of the bigger questions from that various world views have come to vast their different conclusions on. So I did a test with the models that I use. I use notion AI, which pulls from all the main models and chat GPT. I asked these AI models about the existence of God and the basis of ethics and human dignity.

3:07They both spit out a very nuanced answer that included a synopsis of a lot of differing world views. I was really pleased by the response in the end. It's a certainly good approach for AI and one that must be maintained. There is a concerning development that I've been hearing about, however, it's called recursive self-improvement. This is the process by which an AI system can analyze itself and make improvements on its own. It's easy to imagine how this process, if left unchecked by human guardrails, can lead AI to choose one world view over another and operate based on that view. In a world in which AI has already been used and not only autopilot drones, but could also even be used to choose its own targets on the battlefield, this concern is immediately pressing. Imagine if an AI develops a differing view of the human person and the biblical view, it could make life and death decisions that are unethical in the end. However, this isn't really reason for panic. Okay, humans have done this since the beginning of time and are continuing to do this even today.