Bible-bots: Friend or Foe? While Facebook took 10 months to reach 1 million users, and Instagram just 2.5 months, ChatGPT (a chatbot that generates original content when prompted) reached 1 million users in the first five days of its release. Just three months later (January 2023), ChatGPT had reached 100 million visitors to its site. And now BibleGPTs are coming online. In part two of our Artificial Intelligence (AI) series, Jules Badger explores what this could mean for the Church and, perhaps more importantly, our personal engagement with the Bible. Many digital natives have never owned a hardcover Bible—they use a Bible app on their phone or other device. The term ‘digital natives’ refers not to a specific generation but to anyone who has used digital technology, computers and the internet from a young age. There are still plenty of people who can recall life before we transitioned into the digital age, and many people swapped out their hardcover Bible for an app years ago. That said, there are others who keep a firm grasp on their favourite, dog-eared, coffeestained ‘real’ Bible. Which begs the question, has the digital age diminished the living Word of God in any way? Of course not! The digital revolution has not constrained God any more than the printing press did. In fact, what was once unimaginable, even feared, became a good gift of God. God is alive and well in both digital and analogue forms!
Unchartered waters However, AI technology is next level—seriously. Why? Generative AI 12
November 2023
systems like ChatGPT (GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer) could completely alter engagement with the Bible. It remains to be seen if the results will be helpful or harmful, but this is unknown territory. In his July article titled ‘Robot “Church Fathers” Might Curate New Canons’, Adam Graber explains that there are already multiple tailor-made AIdriven chatbot systems being used for Bible engagement. ‘As a digital theology expert, I believe these kinds of “BibleGPTs” will continue to proliferate, and eventually become proprietary systems. And as this happens, the Church and its leaders will be prompted to make some momentous decisions about the Christian canon. This will, in turn, influence how we interpret the Bible and impact the future of our faith and practice.’ Readers may not be aware that BibleGPTs must first be fed data. But which denominational traditions should be included? Which theologies? What about hermeneutical tools? What about
AI bias? Could this mean that mainstream Christian traditions might be over-represented and push important voices, like the Quakers, to the margins? What might a Salvation ArmyGPT look like? In a time when Salvationists hold divergent views on some key issues, who decides what’s included and excluded?
Safeguarding Scripture But let’s not panic quite yet. Graber explains that ‘the systems and defaults we programme into BibleGPTs must be trained for the purposes of Scripture reading. Careless BibleGPTs can lose valuable insights and critical context in
