A few weeks ago I was sitting in church – listening to a sermon about the salt and light passage in the sermon on the mount. It raised some questions in my mind about the use of salt in ancient Roman culture.
What’s a guy to do? I pulled up ChatGPT on my phone and quickly entered a prompt about the use of salt as “salary”.
Don’t judge me. I was just looking for some information.
But such is the way of ChatGPT that it very quickly figured out that I was interested in the passage about Salt and Light in Mathew 5. (I use ChatGPT for support in a number of Bible study and book marketing activities – so it knows I do a lot with the Bible, so it wasn’t tooo surprising.)
Ok – back to the story. Very quickly the AI dropped right into the theological question I wanted to explore (what is the meaning of “you are the salt of the earth”?).
It took the same view as the pastor (salt = preservation). I’m telling you it took like 2 interactions for it to get there. I was really shocked.
On a lark I said “I disagree with that perspective”. So the AI came right back with other interpretations of the passage – one of which was the particular view that I believe.
I have to say I was shocked, surprised and (slightly) impressed.
But this leads me to an interesting point. ChatGPT certainly sounds like a competent spiritual advisor in this little scenario.
This is where I have to insert a really major warning. ChatGPT for all of it’s command of the material, is NOT controlled by the Holy Spirit. It’s just regurgitating content patterns that it picked up from its training data set.
It’s tempting to turn to AI’s like this to get clarity on confusing things. They are REALLY GOOD at figuring out what you want to know and feeding you information about it. Even if the data is “accurate” that doesn’t mean it’s “right.”
We believe that the Holy Spirit illumines us with respect to spiritual matters. He is the arbiter of truth and only He knows the mind of God. Therefore we submit to His involvement in our discovery of spiritual things.
These AIs look like and sound like they have the same power behind them. But as Christians we need to be exceedingly careful how we leverage them on spiritual topics.
I’d be curious to hear if you have stories like mine. Did you use an AI on a spiritual matter and find that it gave you “good sounding answers”? How did you respond to that?
If you have an AI story like this, click REPLY and share it with me in an email.
Thanks,
Dennis
