Look don’t hyperventilate but I’m just saying I’ve never had Pulpit AI passive aggressively text me about chain of command in the coffee ministry so there’s that I guess
Every time I talk to a new pastor on the ground doing real ministry:
"AI? Oh yeah, I've got 3 use cases and I'm working on a 4th. Here's my favorite models in descending order and a custom prompt setup I built."
Every. Time.
Wonder what would happen if you ran a conference and then ran it through weapons-grade ministry tooling so that months of work lasted longer than a few days
The correct Christian take on any possible technological horizon is optimism.
Not reluctant, not hedged, not whispered. The man who builds by the strength of God is wise to be bullish.
Much of the current AI conversation inside and outside the church is tainted by the fact that posturing as a pessimist is almost always accepted as the intelligent, wise, spiritual or humanist path.
I mean optimism crushes it when you backtest, but pessimism sure SOUNDS smarter
SITUATION ANALYSIS: Religious texts may work as AI alignment tools.
What @timhwang says Institute for a Christian Machine Intelligence (ICMI) is testing:
• Put Psalms in the model context window
• Run the model on moral decision benchmarks
• Measure changes on virtue-based evals
• Test Christian reasoning as a steering method
• Try images like the Annunciation in multimodal models
• Watch how the model uses religious symbols in reasoning
• Compare theological alignment against secular approaches
The weird part: Tim says the Psalms result improved Virtue Bench in a statistically significant way.
The magic of Austin is meeting some long haired SVP engineer on s congress who works at big co and proudly wears a shirt that says “Tap my shoulder if you need prayer” (real)
Conversations from the long weekend indicate we continue to experience a generational change of epoch effecting every area of church ministry. Not just the technology, that's only part of the story.
The future is gonna be so fun
I’ve got a little theory that the response to AI in ministry almost directly maps to the generational leadership handoff and there are many downstream conclusions that could be made from that fact
But it isn’t actually ready to discuss publicly yet
In one of the largest religion surveys ever conducted, perhaps surprisingly, people who are actively religious are the ones who have the highest confidence in AI right now