Your Place in the AI Revolution

by Cowboy Bob Sorensen

Give up and submit. They have won. Okay, I am being facetious because some folks indulge in too much science fiction where artificial intelligence and robots take over the world. The AI revolution is under way and developments occur so quickly that articles are often outdated as soon as they are published.

You have been using AI for some time, but much of it is on a lower level. It is on websites and search engines. I used it in a recent post to remove the background of a zombie graphic so I could paste it into my photograph. Artificial intelligence is a tool that has many applications.

Charles Darwin playing chess with a life-sized silver robot, made at Bing AI image creator*, then modified

The computational power of AI is amazing, and some systems are self-taught in certain areas. Like any tool, it can be used for naughtiness as well as niceness. I have a coworker who disliked an AI image I showed him because he felt it takes away from the creativity of artists. The results are clearly machine-generated in the material that I use, but I do prefer to use real photographs. Unfortunately, it is increasingly difficult to tell those from top-line AI-generated graphics.

Free AI material is still buggy. Many times, AI does not render (or refuses to render) text prompts. Free versions on the popular level often give me results that are hideous and unusable. Seven fingers on one hand?  Too many chess pieces of various size? The robot is small and standing on the chess board?  Do not want!

All of the AI graphic sites I tried require people to sign up for them, and one required a sign-up with Google. I managed to test a couple with a temporary email account generator, but that does not always fool them.

Of course, there are concerns of using artificial intelligence to generate papers. Some were used to fool the vaunted peer-review process. (I used some machine stuff that is nowhere near as sophisticated as those that exist today and garnered a result that is quite weird.) Deep fakes are convincing and can be used for nefarious purposes. The undesirable aspects of AI need to be counteracted, and steps are being taken so that those things can be detected.

People may give deference to computers as if they had some kind of moral or factual superiority, but I must repeat: Artificial intelligence is subject to is programming and the biases of the programmers. Bill Dembski "conversed" with ChatGPT about Intelligent Design (a long article that I only skimmed), and it showed a heavy bias toward methodological naturalism. This reflects the biases of the programmers. Remember, particles-to-programmer evolution is an a priori assumption by secularists. Some people go as far as to make AI a replacement for the Creator.

Something that I can imagine is a dystopia of AI taking over the world: It says humans are inferior and there is no need to keep us around. A human replies that artificial intelligence, although it grew, is ultimately based on the design work of humans. More than that, we are created in the image of God, the Creator and Redeemer of the universe. If something with AI can be made to grasp the concepts of the holy Triune God taking the form of the man Jesus, dying for the sins of rebellious humans out of love, rising from the dead because he loves us (adding that prophecies were fulfilled) — it would probably blow a fuse.

In late 2022, Google CEO Sundar Pichai issued a ‘code red’ for the company. What could pose a challenge to such a huge tech giant? The answer: Artificial Intelligence (AI). Specifically, an advanced AI chatbot called ChatGPT, a more advanced version of which (GPT-4) Microsoft has now integrated into Bing and Microsoft Edge. ChatGPT and GPT-4 are large language models (a type of AI) that can give detailed answers to almost any question (including about images you ‘show’ GPT-4). They can pass high-level exams, write, proofread and summarize articles, write poems, computer code, sermons, and detailed commentary on passages of Scripture, translate between languages, play games, and much more.

You can read the rest at "The AI revolution — What does it mean for you?" Also of interest is Bill Demski's series on Artificial General Intelligence.

* This was a "settle for" attempt. It was pretty good, but none of them understood my text prompts (Bing actually said my request was a violation). I wanted Charles Darwin wearing a gold Starfleet uniform from Star Trek, playing 3-D chess with a human-sized robot. I showed the prompt above that I used to get that result. Then I edited in something to mess with people.