The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
Christian leaders join Dominic Steele for a deep end conversation about our hearts and different aspects of Christian ministry each Tuesday afternoon.
We share personally, pastorally and professionally about how we can best fulfill Jesus' mission to save the lost and serve the saints.
The discussion is broadcast live on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/thepastorsheart">Facebook</a> then on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@ThePastorsHeart">YouTube</a> and on our <u><b><a href="http://www.thepastorsheart.net">thepastorsheart.net</a></u></b> website and via audio podcast.
The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
AI Ethics and Preaching: Plagiarism, Spiritual Formation & Pastoral Voice - with Stephen Driscoll
What are the dangers when pastors let AI assist… or sometimes author?
How do we think well about plagiarism, spiritual formation and the loss of our pastoral voice?
And are there positive, God-honouring ways to use these tools?
Stephen Driscoll works in Campus Ministry in Canberra. He's the author of 'Made in Our Image: God, artificial intelligence and you. '
Stephen argues that writing is thinking, and when we automate the writing we risk automating away the deep thinking and wrestling with God’s word that forms the preacher’s heart.
We talk dangers, temptations, reputation, the Holy Spirit, and the kinds of careful, ethical uses of AI that still require the pastor to be the author.
Stephen helps us preach faithfully and use AI to assist in that in an ethical way in a rapidly changing world.
Also see:
The traumatic implications of artificial intelligence.
What morality to teach artificial intelligence?
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Shortcuts in sermon preparation are not neutral. Assist but not author. The ethics of AI in sermon writing. Stephen Driscoll is our guest. It is The Pastor's Heart. It's Dominic Steele. I want to be a better preacher. And there's an ad in my Facebook social media feed promising all sorts of attractive things to help me in my preaching. I can cut down on my sermon preparation by four to five hours a week. Should I jump right in? But what are the ethical dangers? How do I think through plagiarism and AI? What might I positively do? How might I use AI ethically in a way that God and the congregation would approve of? Stephen Driscoll's involved in campus ministry in Canberra. He's the author of the book Made in Our Image. Stephen, now you didn't um author that course that's been coming up in my Facebook feed.
SPEAKER_01:No, no, I didn't.
SPEAKER_00:But um what are the temptations and dangers for my pastor's heart in AI and preaching?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean, uh two that immediately come to mind uh are a danger to our thinking and a danger to our reputations. Do you want me to explore? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm interested in let's go danger to our thinking first. Yeah, yeah. So there was an article in 2008 uh in the Review of General Psychology called Writing as Thinking. Uh, and it it actually argues that writing is a form of thinking. It's not that we do all this thinking and then we sort of go, all right, well, I'm all sorted out, I'll sit down, I'll write it out. It's actually part of the thinking process. Um, in a similar way, I think speaking is thinking, it's it's a way of arranging and editing and reflecting upon what we really mean and what we really want to say.
SPEAKER_00:Um, writing is part of the thing, I find that when I'm writing a talk, I write a full script, but then I don't actually quite say my full script. But the process of writing the full script actually makes me work out my logic tighter.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's right. So what happens when all of that writing, all of that thinking is automated away? It might be that you're automating away four or five hours a week of writing, but you're really automating four or five hours a week of thinking and reflecting on God's word. You add that up over your career, and I think you will have pastors that have spent significantly less time really, really wrestling with God's word. Or maybe the best wrestling with the theology and exegesis was done by Chat GPT, and you just went, oh great, thank you. Copy and paste.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, I have found that the process of making myself a flow diagram and then translating it from the Greek. Yeah. Um, I mean, on the one hand, I discovered that the English translations are excellent, but the process of translating it with a commentary open slows down my thinking. Yeah. And then I understand the passage better.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. There's no one selling you a course uh aimed at slowing you down, making you less efficient.
SPEAKER_00:Um to make you ruminate in the word.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, how to how to make your 10-hour sermon take 20 hours. There's no one running that course out there. But but in a sense, there is a value to slowing down around certain things and at certain times. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And so it worries me, somebody who says I can save five hours a week in my preaching, because I mean the bit that I'll save time on is the exegesis, you know, and that's the bit that I actually need to be forced to think in.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah. So that is a potential danger. I don't want to be entirely negative. Um, there's times where we need to be more efficient. There's a lot of things we're trying to balance in ministry. Um, I'm just kind of flashing that warning light, particularly, I think, to younger ministers that that they may be automating um before they've ever gone through the process of spending 20 hours laboring over the exegesis. Um, some of some of us who've been in ministry for longer, well, we we we do know how to do it. We've developed the skills and maybe we've earned the right to speed up some things. Uh, the younger you are, I think the less you want to rely on those sort of tools. When when I was at Bible college, I think in first year they encouraged us not to get Bible software. It was the same sort of principle of don't speed up all this stuff. Um, don't have the Bible software that can tell you what tense it is and all that sort of stuff. Um learn it, have have have internal knowledge of all this, and then maybe later on, all right, you get the Bible software and you speed things up a little bit.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, maybe I'm a dinosaur here. Yeah. I'm sorry, I'm sure I'm a dinosaur here. Um I do have a copy of accordance, yeah, but I only got it when I wanted to make a flow diagram, and I'd I mean I'd had the Greek New Testament on my computer forever just as a p as a as word documents, but the font went out of kind of use on my thing, and so I couldn't get a Greek New Testament without getting one of those Bible software programs. I couldn't work out how to maybe there wasn't a way, but I couldn't work out how to. Yeah. But I only use it to copy and paste the text into the Word document to then make the flow diagram. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Because I want to think myself.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and that and that's great, and that's great. And um, but but on the other hand, it's I think it's unrealistic to think that young people won't use the software, use the tools. Yeah. Uh when I was at high school, Google search was kind of becoming a thing. There was there were some teachers reacting against Google search, sort of saying, don't use Google search, it'll rot your brain, you'll be searching all sorts of things. Instead of using Google, you won't know how to go to the public library.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. I mean, there is something, there's some truth in that though. If you if I think about Google Maps, um as some I mean, we used to have a big map of Sydney on the wall, uh uh both when I was growing up and with our children when they were growing up, um, so that they could learn the directions of the city, you know. And and yet I find myself, now that I don't have a street directory on my lap when I'm driving into an unknown place, and I find myself not knowing the big picture.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so instead of storing information, we're kind of storing links or the location of information. You think about phone numbers, for instance. My grandma knew off the top of her head the phone number of all her friends uh and family members.
SPEAKER_00:Because I can give you the phone number of our house growing up, but I'm not sure I can give you my wife's mobile number.
SPEAKER_02:I don't know anyone's phone number, but I know where to go to get that information. Now, that's internal and external knowledge, in a sense, I have external knowledge of phone numbers. It's stored in my phone. Um we we can't have our knowledge of God's word, of what the Bible says, of our of theology, of these sort of things. That knowledge cannot be X like purely external. We can't, you know, someone asks us a question about Genesis, and we say, Well, I don't know much about Genesis, but I I I I've got this program that can tell me about it. No, we've got to internalize this knowledge. And God commanded Israel to internalize this this knowledge. The the Shemar in Deuteronomy 6.4 is an example of that. Is you know, write it on the doorpost so there's some an some external reminder going on. But it's they're supposed to have it in their hearts and they're supposed to be saying it to each other all the time. So it's not enough for the the knowledge to just be over there on oh, the door knows the Shema really well, but we don't no, no, you're supposed to internalize it as well as externalise it.
SPEAKER_00:I'm just thinking about Paul Center Timothy, um, so that they might see your progress. Do you know? I I want to be making progress and I want to be showing them that I'm making progress. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um in a seminar you gave to pastors a couple of weeks ago, you said um dangers letting AI write the sermon for you, short circuiting exegesis, producing content without spiritual formation, but the next one was losing your pastoral voice. What did you mean by that? There's a danger of AI causing me to lose my pastoral voice.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I I think what we need to do is whenever we're getting output from uh a commentary from Bible software or from AI, we need to re-express it and reformat it. So it's actually us saying what we're what we're saying to the people that we love. I think that if you said to your congregation, I'll give you option A, it's 5% slicker, the the word choice is a little bit better, but I didn't, it's not my words, I didn't write it. Or option B, chat GPT, you know, no chat GPT. I I I wrote this or I reformatted out. This is authentically me. This is authentically me. I think almost every congregation is going to go, please give me, please give me option option B. Um faking wisdom? What do you mean by that? Yeah, I I think that there's a whole issue of plagiarism that I think is worth getting into. And that's sort of what I was when I said there's a danger to our thinking and there's a danger to our reputations. The plagiarism thing feels falls more under the reputations.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I'm gonna come back to the reputation in issue in a moment. Yeah. But I'm uh I'm I'm going to just let's see one more of the dangers and then we'll work on some of the positives. Okay. Teaching error by accident. Teaching error by accident.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, uh, you could do that. You could um have such a high trust in ChatGPT that you'll you'll take something out of it. So issue one could be what people call hallucinations, which is a love, a wonderfully human term to describe what large language models sometimes do, what Chat GPT could do, which is they um they they'll say something quite confident to you that's in the realm of plausibility, but it's not true.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean I I put into Chat GPT ahead of our interview something about you coming in and it it described you as a lecturer at more theological college, didn't it?
SPEAKER_02:Did it? Wow, okay, that's not plausible. Yeah, um yeah, so it's it's it's searching for something instead of saying I don't know, it's giving you a sort of plausible bluff.
SPEAKER_00:Just for those listening, Stephen's not a lecturer in more theological college, he works in campus ministry in Canberra, keep going to.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah. And yet it's interesting that it would invent that because I studied at More College, and you could imagine, you know, maybe I could work at a place like that. Um, or someone like me what might work at a place like that. So it's a plausible truth, but it's actually untrue. And um we need to be careful about that. I I guess the other danger is this is not an objective voice of God that we're dealing with here. This is a program trained on particular flawed human data that has a particular um worldview that comes through from the policies and procedures of the people who do the reinforcement training. So um it might be that you have a large language model that feels uneasy around certain Christian doctrines that we want to uphold, the the really hard doctrines of judgment or exclusivity. And the large language model isn't so comfortable about that. So you say, What does this verse say? And it tells you what it kind of wants the verse to say within its code of conduct. Just a few little dangers there. So we need to be in control and we need to be the ultimate authors of every piece of communication.
SPEAKER_00:And that's why you're saying we need to be the author, treat AI as an assistant, yeah. Not have the AI being the idea generator.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's right. That's right. So another test of that could be uh, could you have preached what you preached, or could you have run the seminar that you're the Bible study? Could you have done it without the tool? And if so, then the tool is helping you, and it's the the seasoning on the dish. Um, but if it's the other way around, if you couldn't have done it without the help, then it's the dish, you know, and you'll you might be the seasoning that uh that sits people down and welcomes them, and then really ChatGPT serves up the main meal for them. That's a terrible situation.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, let's talk about some of the positive ways to use AI in our sermon preparation. Yeah. Um, because people are going to be.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so uh to start with, um, technology is not kind of in and of itself bad, but we can uh I'm sure we can drift into that way of thinking. And I'm sure some of the people listening in will go, yeah, that is my tendency. I I whenever I think about technology, I drift to the negative, I think about the doctrine of sin, and I go, oh, why can't we just keep it like it was? But actually, there's always been technological change. The the early church was grappling with technological change. Co codexes in the second century replacing scrolls was just a whole new world. Instead of just having one book, you could have multiple books of the Bible, you could be flipping back and forth on pages and so on. So um technological change is a is a constant. And it's in addition to being a constant, it's a good thing. Um, the gospels come to us because of all these technologies, you know, sailing technologies, so they could get around the Mediterranean or the printing press or whatever it is. So technology isn't something that you can just write off, and there's an inevitability to it. We will be using technology um in time, it'll make us more efficient, and and again, efficiency is not um just kind of in and of itself a bad thing. Efficiency could mean more relational time, could mean an extra hospital visit, it could mean an extra young man that you can mentor to be a leader in your church. Um efficiency can be a really positive and beneficial thing.
SPEAKER_00:Uh let's go through some of the things. Are you using uh AI in your sermon work?
SPEAKER_02:Yes, yeah, I I do use AI.
SPEAKER_00:Um how have you found it helpful?
SPEAKER_02:It's almost like there's someone sitting in the back of the room while I'm trying to prepare a sermon who's really knowledgeable, a little crazy sometimes, a little naive, but very, very knowledgeable. And if I want to at any point in my sermon process, I can turn around and say, Hey mate, what do you think about X, Y, and Z? And that can be a real help and it can kind of unblock me sometimes in the process. It might be, oh, is there an example of this? Or um it might be that I form a point of view and I go, Am I crazy? Has anyone else read the passage this way? Can you can you tell me? Can you look into that for me? Um, I might just add that I think there's kind of, at least with uh ChatGPT OpenAI, there's at least three levels you can run it at. Um, you can run it at the standard level where you get 10 seconds of thinking or something like that. You can run it in, you know, sort of a thinking mode where you might get a minute, two minutes of of thinking, of computing power. You can run it in deep research mode where you get 10, 15 minutes of mulling over the problem. 90% of people are just using it at the most basic free tier, which means they're getting the most hallucinations and the least thoughtful stuff.
SPEAKER_00:Which is going to put you down as a lecturer.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. Maybe you were using the free tier. I wouldn't I would judge. Um if you've got a thorny problem, an exodesis theology, the strategy of your church, anything like that, you might want to go to the deep research tier and actually get a really thoughtful piece of output. Yeah. Or at least the medium tier. I've I almost never use it on the top tier because I just wouldn't trust what it says to me at that point.
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_02:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:Well, that's helpful, and I'm gonna have to learn how to switch between tiers. Yes. Um here's a thought. Um somebody taught me years ago that um when I'm preparing a sermon, I should find my pile of commentaries, you know, and start with the most um complex commentary. And uh the most dense, difficult, complex commentary. And then I work all the way down, and the last commentary I look at is Have I taken notes listening to anyone else's sermon who's preached on this passage before? Yeah. And did they ha what what was the way they structured it? You know, and they said to me, Don't start with that kind of how somebody else preached it, because that will inform your thinking from the beginning. Start with the you, the text, and the most difficult technical commentary that you've got and work down. And uh I think for me, in the little dabbling that I've done with AI and sermons, is I've looked at it at that last tier, you know, um, when I've actually already formed my position, already formed my thesis, written down what I'm saying, and then almost as a spell checker, like like like tell me what you think of this, do you know? And yeah. When I've already formed my opinion. Yeah. So it's definitely not playing the role of author at that point, yeah. It's playing the role of assistant. Yeah. But am I too cautious?
SPEAKER_02:No, I think that's I think that's really helpful. Um, so the reason you go to the hardest commentary first, what would you say that reason is?
SPEAKER_00:I I I don't want to well I don't want to have my um impression of what the text is saying formed by if you're like, well, I suppose it's the work that somebody else has done. Yeah. I want to do the work in wrestling with the hard stuff.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And you're uh you're unable to take that content straight out of your hardest commentary and preach it because it's so far from what you'd actually use. It's going to get you to think about some important issues, maybe in the grammar or the words or whatever, but it's not immediately usable. And so there's a process to that. Um, and I'm sure you're you're assuming this, but but um my advice would be you know, start with the Bible, start with the text. Yeah, start with the text, which I'm sure you're doing. And then I get the most difficult commentary out. Yeah, yeah. So it's not it it it really shouldn't be start with chat GPT, and I think that would that would scare me a bit.
SPEAKER_00:Um if somebody I mean somebody said write a Bible study on one test colour. When the first thing they do is open up ChatGPT.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And I'm we're probably making people feel guilty because there's probably people out there that that is what they've been doing. Um, that oh, I've got this thing, I'm under time pressure. Okay, what does Chat GPT say? No, like you have to start with the text, have to wrestle with the text. Um, yeah, I use the phrase chew first, so just just it's okay to be inefficient, sit down, chew, chew over the passage. Uh, I write notes on each verse that I if I've got a chapter, I'll just write some notes on each verse, and it's just really forcing me to do, and then I'll go to the commentaries. Um, I'll read the commentaries. You're right, a formal point of view, and then um I think ChatGPT is at its best when it's arguing with you. So you're actually it's at its best when you're in disagreement with each other. You go, well, I think I think this, and but am I wrong? What's the what are the best counter arguments? Can you talk me out of it? And suddenly you're you're not going to plagiarize Chat GPT, it's it's push, it's strengthening your thinking by disagreeing with you.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, that's interesting. Um I dumped my full text into ChatGPT when I basically finished um uh last weekend, and uh it told me um I was spending too much time on it, it basically took away what I would call all of my folksy charm. Dominic and actually some of the pointed, sharp points that I wanted to make. Yeah, and so I thought, oh, that's interesting. If I wasn't more, I don't know, headstrong, confident or whatever, I could see it talking me out of that and talking me into something blander.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So there's two things about the training data. If you visualize all this training data that's been fed through these large language models, there's far more essays than there are, you know, public speaking. I I often find that what it's trying to do is it's getting me to rewrite my sermon as if it's an essay, as if I'm at university. So I want to resist that tendency. No, no, no. I yes, I repeat myself four times, but that's all right. I'm that's the rhetorical technique I'm working for. Exactly.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And it'll say that story's too long, boil it down to a sentence. And I'll go, well, no one wants to hear a one-sentence story. They want to they want to hear you um spell it out a little bit. So there's a lot of that going going on through it. Um, that I think I think you have to resist that. But having said that, I think it's a it's also very good as a sermon critic. Um, you put it out there and you go, um, uh, let me remind you, Chat GBT, this is spoken communication. Don't turn me into an essay. But have a look at what I've written. Is there anything unclear? Is there any point you think I need to develop? Or is or or if I was to cut 200 words, where should I go to? It's a very good sermon, sermon critic. And the more it knows about you over time and your tendencies, the more it could be really sharp and being like, now, you know, Stephen, you've got a you've got a tendency to to to tell um to tell long stories. Have a look at this one. Are you sure it needs to be 1200 words? Yeah, could we do it in 800? It can be a very helpful partner in that sense.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, one uh one friend I was having a coffee with yesterday, and uh she's been a massive early adopter of Chat GPT and had used it enormously extensively, and so it had got to know her personality and her foibles and all sorts of things. Yeah. And she said she actually found it almost bullying her. Do you know?
SPEAKER_02:Why is that?
SPEAKER_00:Or telling her she should do this and that, you know. Um so she's actually had a she described it as a breakup with ChatGPT. Yeah, okay. And she's I mean, she is still using it for um kind of spell check type stuff, yeah, but she's giving it much less say in her life than she had been six months ago.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so they introduced a memory function in 2025, which just allows the large language model to be aware of previous conversations that you've had. It doesn't have perfect recollection of anything you've said, but it just has a vague sense of what you've talked about before. And that means that it starts to to just tailor itself to you more and more the more you the more you use it. So I don't need to tell it that I like the ESV or the NIV or that I'm evangelical, because it it knows those things about me. And so that means that the advice it gives me is much better than when I first started using it. Because back then it didn't it didn't have the foggiest idea who I was or what I what I needed from it.
SPEAKER_00:Although interestingly, um I mean we're off sermons now, but uh yesterday we we just did a survey of our church and I I I dumped all the ra raw data into Chat GPT and asked it to tell me what uh what its summary was.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But it uh gave me all sorts of stuff that I think went beyond the data from its previous memories of things that I've entered in. And so I then had to go back and say, no, no, no, no. I don't want hypotheses of things we ought to do that you think I might agree with, like Stephen get Stephen in as a lecturer from college, do you know? But um, but I want you to just tell me what the data says. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, no, that's helpful. You might need to turn off the memory function at point. At that point. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Now, um we pushed into the topic of plagiarism a couple of minutes ago, and I said we'd come back to it. Sure. Talk to me about Chat GPT and plagiarism and and the congregation and what they would expect of me and Chat GPT.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so we um you know, we we face the um the temptation of of plagiarism uh in the past when when we had more and more access to online sermons, to celebrity preachers putting all sorts of material up there. That's a great temptation for young young preachers or Bible study leaders to to take away.
SPEAKER_00:I'm gonna try to find my voice, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, to take stuff and and throw it in.
SPEAKER_00:Do you remember 30 years ago one of our young guys um preaching a sermon and he he basically was parroting Spurgeon?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, that's right.
SPEAKER_00:These and ths.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, okay, that's a bit of a good thing. You've got to find your own voice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so there's that, there's been that. It's not a new problem. But but it's easier to get away with now because there's no these and thou's in in Chat GPT. There may be no, you know, it actually could um personalize itself uh and copy the way you normally would talk, but just be a lot smarter and sharper and give you a new sermon very quickly. Um so uh no one's gonna um have public record of of these words, so you can't just oh something that my preacher's the preacher's sermon on Sunday sounded a bit off, but I can't just Google it and see if he's stolen it or plagiarized or anything like that. So I can't, it's hard for me to catch him, but there's this sense of unease. Is that is he genuinely speaking to his congregation or is he or is he just taking stuff online? Um I I I I've been throwing out three Ps for plagiarism um that I think help us to think about it. But I have to disclose that two of the P's came from ChatGPT. So I have plagiarized my my my guidelines on plagiarism, but they're just you know a simple rule of thumb that I've been saying to some people. And the first one is um how proportionate was your was your usage? Because we, you know, you taking a sentence from someone, I think, is very different to taking an entire sermon or to taking a page of a sermon and copying and pasting it over. So how proportionate um is your usage?
SPEAKER_00:Because I don't I I don't want to try to think about in those categories with how I use commentaries as well. Yeah. Um I mean, um this is a good conversation for us to have um I have found that 30 years ago, well, compared to 30 years ago, and knowing that my talks end up online, and I am much, much more careful about attribution in talks and much more likely to say, so the commentator Doug Moose says, Do you know?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:No, that's I think I never would have said that 30 years ago. Yeah. Whereas um given that it's now become a permanent record and it's sitting there, and yeah, I'm just wanting to make sure that people don't think that I had that idea and I got it from him.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, no, that's good. I I don't want to have a culture of nitpicking though, either. I don't want people to be going around, oh, he got that sentence from from someone else that preached that passage a few weeks ago. I don't want us to nitpick. Um, there's all sorts of phrases that I use all the time that I didn't invent. I talk about character, conviction, confidence, yeah. I didn't come up with that. I never thought of that, I don't know. But um so we don't want to nitpick. So there's the issue of proportionality, yeah. And but there's clearly something wrong with someone just taking large slabs of text from someone else. Um, the second thing is is the idea of how purposeful was what you did. You know, did you just make a mistake? You just forgot, you know, you copy paste something into your notes and then it ended up in the sermon or something like that. So again, we don't want to nitpick people who've just made mistakes. Uh the third one is how how personal is it? I think the more personal, the more it has to be your original work. Um, if you're telling a story about your kids, obviously it needs to be. It's got to be your kids. Your kids they need to exist. Uh you need to get the names right, all that sort of stuff.
SPEAKER_00:Um, so I I used to give talks at the City Bible Forum. Yeah. And uh I had to go do a seminar in Melbourne, and Peter Caldor was um filling in for me as the speaker at the City Bible Forum. Yeah, and he he said, Um, no, I'm filling in for Dominic today, and uh he sent me his notes, and uh so I'm just gonna give you his talk, and he said, I was lying in bed with Kathy and Kathy's the name of my wife, not the name of his wife. Anyway, he got a very big laugh at that. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, the other end of the spectrum would be you're talking about the Hebrew, you know, whatever, past tense or something. It's not personal. Yeah, and I think that you've got a lot more liberty to to to uh well, you know, draw on commentary or draw on what Chat Gibbt says or something. I mean, within limits, still proportional and all that sort of stuff. But I think the less personal it is, the more we give people liberty.
SPEAKER_00:What's the danger of the AI, if you like, sitting in the spiritual driver's seat?
SPEAKER_02:Uh I guess the first thing I'd want to say is that I don't think AI um necessarily or intrinsically threatens the role of the Holy Spirit. Um, you can use a tool, and the Holy Spirit will work through you, in a sense you're a tool, and it'll work through the tool that you're using, the the commentary or the AI. So there's some people that might say anything that comes out of um an AI is just kind of spiritually, you know, just just bereft and not worth drawing on. Um, I think the Holy Spirit can work immediately in the world, and we call that a miracle, but he can also work immediately, you know, through things. He he works through us, he works through our language, our reason, our tools, our all that sort of stuff. So um there's nothing directly wrong with using a particular tool like OpenAI um to do something from a spiritual point of view. The question is, you as a spiritual being, where are you at as you used that tool? Um, are you praying? Um using chat GPT in in a with a sense of kind of weight and seriousness. I'm I'm this tool is helping me to preach the word to people. Um should I pray before I open up my chat GPT for discernment that I would I would be careful with what I use and um and all that sort of stuff. So yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Stephen, thank you so much for coming in. And I'm really appreciating the helpful thought that you have given to this to help all. Of us navigate this new world. Yeah. Stephen Driscoll is my guest. He is the author of the book Made in Our Image, and he is involved in the campus ministry in Canberra. My name is Dominic Steele. You've been with us on the Pastor's Heart. We will look forward to your company next Tuesday afternoon.
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