Liz talks with Mark Dreistadt, President and CEO of Infinity Concepts, about the recently released “Artificial Intelligence: An Evangelical Perspective” research report by Infinity Concepts and Grey Matter Research. Mark will discuss the results of this survey and what Evangelicals had to say about this controversial topic that is infiltrating our society.
This is Liz Frenzel with Crawford Media Group and today our guest is Mark Drystad, president of Infinity Concepts, a company that gives businesses strategic solutions for success. We’ll be talking about a recent study on artificial intelligence and why evangelicals view AI with cautious optimism. Welcome to our program Mark. Thank you Liz, great to be with you. Hey Mark, could you first tell us a little bit about AI and some of its uses? Sure. AI is bringing up all around us that you have to recognize that it’s becoming a pervasive force in our culture today. Everything from social media to computerized services, websites are all incorporating and some type of AI to begin to enhance their communications at some level. AI is being used for communication purposes, it’s being used for research purposes. It provides a large language model where it’s put a library full of resources together into a memory system that it can access any and all of that data instantaneously. It becomes a source of great ability for, especially for research of creativity, but it also provides functionality through some of the ways that the AI is being implemented in terms of day-to-day life. It has broad ranging implications from driving our cars to using our cell phones to browsing the web. AI is becoming pervasive everywhere. Yeah, even I know that they have programs where if you want to write a book even, you give it certain points and it’ll come up with a whole outline. Yes, I’m working on a project now where we are within the next couple of months we’re going to be releasing a new website that will be called Quotes for Life. You all can watch for that coming. It’ll happen sometime in the fourth quarter. Quotes for Life is going to have hundreds of thousands of quotes, but more than that it is going to take each of those quotes and AI has helped us tie in biblical references and themes and study outlines all based on the quotes. So it not only do you have the quote but you have paraphrases and ways that you can use those for discussion groups for Bible studies. And so it’s amazing that with the press of a button I can have an entire collection of research and commentary around a single quote generated. And so we’ve been working on this for quite a while and I think it’s going to be a fun resource for people to use. So talking about that and what you’re doing now, you did a study and it targeted evangelicals. What were your conclusions on that and why did you target evangelicals? Well, we do a series of studies every month. We’re releasing reports about the evangelical community and its perspective on a number of things. Everything from giving to doctrinal beliefs, to public policy opinions, to thoughts on Israel, thoughts on government, thoughts on giving and donor development. And this was something that as we were planning out our research we felt like there was so much diversity about people’s opinions. Even among my own staff when we first started talking about it we had some who were really enthusiastic about it. We had others that didn’t want to touch it and every position in between. And so we felt like that was probably indicative of the greater Christian community, evangelical community. And indeed it was as we found that the one thing the evangelical community is not is all of one mind. We have many minds. And about 97% of the people we surveyed heard about AI. So they knew there was such a thing. There were a few that hadn’t but some felt like they were well informed. About a third felt like they were somewhat informed. Some felt like they were not informed at all. But again there were mixed opinions. About 25% were positives. About 28% were neutral and 38 had a negative opinion. So again it’s 25, 28, 38. And then 9% said they didn’t know enough to have an opinion. So it’s interesting that there are diverse opinions currently in the evangelical community about whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing and whether it’s going to have a good impact on our life or a bad impact on our life. So right now there’s a lot of cautious optimism I think was the term you used earlier. I think that’s true. And I think there’s a lot of questioning about okay how is this actually going to impact us? You know I know that some think that AI will help their businesses and produce things faster. But also that comes with a side effect of do you need as many humans to do those jobs? How is AI could it how could AI displace the human factor in the workforce? Well you know we took a number of different topics. I think we’re nine different topics and we asked people’s opinions about what they felt like the impact was going to be in these nine different areas. And three areas they said they felt like AI would have a real positive impact and that was in medical care and productivity in the workplace and efficiency in the workplace. And you know I think in medical care we see there’s a way AI can be used to help with diagnoses and trying to discern appropriate response medically. And of course as you mentioned using the workplace can increase productivity and efficiently but on the flip side of the coin everybody with a majority of evangelicals felt like it would have a negative impact on the available number of jobs. Now the interesting thing is when you look back over history almost every time new technology has been introduced we’ve had the same concerns when computers were first introduced computers are going to take away people’s jobs. Right. When robotics were introduced robotics are going to take away people’s jobs. And what really ended up happening is it changed the nature of people’s jobs but it really didn’t take any away. In fact in many times it created new jobs that hadn’t existed beforehand. So I’ve seen that’s also going to be the case. I’ve seen in like let’s say factories where you now see these robots, these robotic arms moving and putting pieces into place and I can see where you’re saying that you know possibly now they need people to run those machines but not as many because before it would be people putting the pieces into place. And it is it is though we using it as an agency. We do a lot of research directly with AI and testing and as I mentioned we’re using it on this this website development project and we’re learning all kinds of wonderful things. But what we found is that we really can’t trust AI to be a final authority. One of the things that we have a strict rule is that you know if you’re using AI for research or for for drafting that’s fine but everything has to be fact checked because you know the output is only as good as the input. And if the data that has been fed into that whatever AI system you’re using is not accurate or if it reflects any particular kind of bias then that bias is going to be reflected in the output. And so we recognize some of the the efficiencies that can be achieved through using AI but we also recognize that as content creators we have to be extremely careful to make sure that we’re putting the human touch on everything we generate so that we are sure that the facts are correct and that it’s being stated in the way that reflects our our brand and our position on whatever it is that we’re discussing. So going back to the surveys your study what do you think is keeping evangelicals from learning about AI and what would be done to overcome that? Well I think there’s you know they see that AI is a tool that’s emerging but a lot of people don’t like to have like to address change they like to keep things the way they are I think that’s a tendency with many of us on a lot of levels but and I think there’s some concern about what does it really mean but I think there’s a lot of misconceptions about AI you know in movies they talk about AI as being sentient intelligence where it’s actually thinking and taking over and you’re replacing a human brain in the process. Well that’s not really what AI is AI is simply a collection of data and with rapid access and the ability to index that data in multiple ways. So but I so I think as people learn what AI is and what AI isn’t I think they’ll find greater level of comfort in that but you know there are concerns that you know AI may make people mentally lazy but not let AI do all the work or that it will become smarter than people well I think time will tell but I doubt that that in the long term that may have a short term effect people may may I can see some students submitting papers that were AI written but it won’t but it won’t last long because there’s also programs that can look at a document and determine whether AI wrote it or a human wrote it and so that’ll be short lived I believe and then I think we’re we’re going to begin to see how AI can be used correctly and I think that that’s part of where we emerge with this I think the other point is most of the AI systems that are out there are secular systems that they’re loaded with data that are coming from a non-biblical worldview a humanistic worldview and so there’s going to be some bias that may not align with biblical worldview and there are some developers out there who are trying to address that and I think as they’re able to to create AI that operates with a biblical worldview I do think that’s going to open up a lot of new opportunity in the Christian space and that that research is being done that process is being done by a couple of different companies to try to see how it can be done what can be done and so the output that you receive is not only accurate but it’s in alignment with biblical values in a biblical worldview we’ve been visiting with Mark Drystead president of Infinity Concepts a company that gives businesses strategic solutions for success and we’ve been talking about a recent study on artificial intelligence and why evangelicals are concerned about it so Mark what would be your overall counsel to it evangelicals regarding AI I think the first one would be that for AI is a tool and just like all tools tools can help us or tools can hurt us it depends on how the tool is used so is there and a possibility that AI could become dangerous or could have a negative impact on our culture or on our our businesses absolutely but there is also a tremendous upside that there is a huge possibility because of the ability to use AI for research rapid computing and then building out initial collections and curations of data for whatever the objective would be and I think there’s application in the churches as well so my final word would be don’t run away from AI recognize it as a tool and then look at that tool in a way that that can be used objectively and and productively but always fact check always make sure that a human output is what your final is at the final end of the process and because I don’t believe AI can be trusted I think AI can be used but I think humans I need to add their their perspective and worldview to bring a happy ending to the process so where could our listeners go to find out more about this and actually see the full report yeah the report is the report we put together is very very detailed there’s a lot of information I’m just touching the surface I’m not even splashing in the water but they can go to infinity concepts dot com forward slash research infinity concepts one put towards together infinity concepts dot com and then forward slash research and when they do that the very first report they’ll see will be the one on artificial intelligence and there are dozens of other reports they’re welcome to download as well mark thank you for joining us today you’re very welcome it’s my pleasure
