Are you using artificial intelligence? I bet you are. I certainly do. I find AI chatbots to be incredibly helpful. In today’s discussion with Sam Tideman, we discuss what AI chatbots are actually doing. We cover how to use them well for research and Bible study as well as some of their limitations. We also talk about the dark side of AI and what incentives have been wired into them. I hope you find this interview as thought-provoking as I did.
Sam Tideman currently works as a data scientist for Google. He is not speaking in an official capacity here on behalf of Google. He’s just speaking for himself. Tideman is also the host of the Transfigured YouTube Channel where he discusses a wide range of topics from AI to theology to church history and beyond.
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- Intro music: Good Vibes by MBB Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) Free Download / Stream: Music promoted by Audio Library.
Very interesting episode. Thanks to Sean and Sam for having this conversation! One area I noticed you guys didn’t talk about much is agentic AI, which is where the AI actually takes action on computers. I use Agentic AI every day for work to write code and other IT-related tasks; I don’t use AI for much else. For writing code and working on IT systems I have seen it do some pretty incredible things, some of which I definitely could not do myself and even the ones I could have done would have taken hours. Here are some personal examples: One Saturday, I made a mock bible app with some public domain translations and an interactive bible atlas. My wife left Instagram some time ago and I made an Instagram clone on her Mac in roughly 45 minutes using Grok Build. It didn’t have all the features of course but it did display all of her exported data sort of like Instagram. I had Agentic AI use my browser to create spreadsheets from scratch with complicated formulas. I am very curious what impact Agentic AI could have on Christianity at large. Maybe it will prove to be about as significant as regular AI. It will be interesting to see.