Few things seem further apart than artificial intelligence and the Bible.
AI is built to generate, adapt, and constantly produce something new. The Bible has endured for thousands of years precisely because generations of believers have fought to preserve its words.
Yet I have spent the past year or so bringing the two together.
IN WAR ON BIBLE, PASTOR CONVICTED FOR PREACHING GOSPEL
It comes at a strange moment.
Some of the people who understand artificial intelligence best are issuing extraordinary warnings about where it could lead. Former Google DeepMind researcher Bilal Chughtai recently warned that advanced AI could lead to the loss of life. Bill Gates said it could cause a “billion deaths.”
Other experts have warned about less devastating but more immediate threats, from cyberattacks and deepfakes to job displacement and the potential misuse of AI in developing biological weapons.
Those aren’t warnings we should casually dismiss.
So how did I end up using this potentially dangerous technology to distribute the Bible?
It started when my father, a pastor, asked me to put a chapter of Scripture to music for a sermon.
That experiment eventually led to Music Bible, an app we launched last month that has used AI to help turn the complete, word-for-word, verse-by-verse Bible into more than 38,000 songs. Scripture can now be heard as worship, jazz, country, rock, and even hip-hop.
But from the beginning, we established one nonnegotiable rule: We don’t change Scripture to fit the music. We change the music to fit Scripture.
And that’s where this unlikely friendship gets interesting. AI is famous for creating new words — we are using it to help distribute words it isn’t allowed to change.
Working on Music Bible hasn’t made me less concerned about artificial intelligence. In some ways, it has made me more aware of the importance of deciding where its boundaries should be and how it should be used.
AI can reproduce words. It cannot pray. It can generate the sound of a song. It cannot worship. It can process every verse in the Bible in seconds. It cannot believe a single one of them.
Artificial intelligence is not wisdom. And the ability to imitate human creativity doesn’t make a machine human. But acknowledging the danger of a technology doesn’t require us to ignore its potential.
The Bible has been here before. It’s not its first dance with technological disruption.
Exactly 500 years ago, William Tyndale was determined to make Scripture available to ordinary people in English. His mission coincided with a communications revolution: the printing press.
Tyndale seized it. His English New Testament was printed in Europe, and copies were smuggled into London. Authorities confiscated and burned them, and Tyndale was chased, prisoned, and eventually executed for heresy in 1536.
The printing press wasn’t Christian or anti-Christian. It could distribute Scripture or propaganda, truth or lies. What mattered was how people chose to use it.
AI is obviously different. The potential dangers are vastly greater, and the technology may eventually possess capabilities we cannot yet imagine.
But the principle still matters.
We shouldn’t ask only, “What can AI do?” We should ask, “What should we allow it to do?”
There will be places where the answer should be no. But there will also be opportunities to use this technology for good.
Music Bible is one small example. Most of us have heard a song we haven’t listened to for years and suddenly remembered the lyrics. Music has an extraordinary ability to make words memorable. It can speak to young and old.
If technology can help someone encounter the Bible through music they already listen to, that’s worth exploring.
For someone who struggles with conventional reading, listening offers another route. For someone who would never think of opening a Bible, perhaps hearing a passage in an unexpected form creates curiosity.
THE SPIRITUAL SICKNESS BEHIND TRUMP’S BLASPHEMOUS AI JESUS POST
AI will undoubtedly be used in ways that cause harm. It will also create possibilities we haven’t yet imagined. Our job is to learn the difference.
Five centuries ago, a communication revolution helped put the Bible into people’s hands. Today, another may help put it into their ears.
Micah Fiechter is the founder of Music Bible, an app that turns the entire Bible into song without changing a word.
Continue reading...
[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
