Dearest J,

As somebody who works in tech, design, and innovation for a living, this blog post is meant to be an exploration of spiritual warfare within systems of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). And for full transparency, I am speaking on this under a commonly used term in Christianity “Spiritual Warfare” from a Christian perspective.

With giant algorithms feeding writing as we know it, why should we become concerned with this? Because machine learning is based on scraping the web. And in many cases, it’s used as a tool to discover our basic questions: does God exist, what would God say, and what does God look like? When we think of the web, not all data fed to it is Biblically accurate. Not to mention, it has the power to become heretical.

To unpack this further, I’ll have to explore this into two categories:

Images + Text Images + Art made with machine learning

• DALL-E

• Midjourney

• Stable Diffusion

• OpenAI’s ChatGPT

• Chatsonic

• Jasper Chat

• Character AI

• Chinchilla

• Perplexity AI

On Images:

Art expression was important enough to God that He made it the subject of one of His Ten Commandments. Exodus 20:4-5 says, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them." On the surface, this command is negative; but as we look more deeply into it, the commandment does not prohibit art. That said, we are not to use art to create idols, and no visual depictions of Jesus are included in the Bible. Therefore, we are not to create visualizations on God, where none exist. Doing so is becomes a form of idolatry.

On Text:

My bigger concern is with text, and it’s potential to become an idol who provides philosophical advice in replacement to the true words of Jesus Christ in the Bible. Jesus’ main form of communication with his followers was through the spoken word, and through writing. He could have expressed himself through visual art form, but he chose instead to use text. For this reason, written data is of utmost importance in the connection between spiritual warfare used in AI systems.

For example, the discussion cannot be continued without addressing OpenAI’s ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a machine learning model that is free and available to use, and is often used for philosophical discussions, and encouraged by many blogs.

But as we find in the Bible, “See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.” Colossians 2:8 ESV

 “Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you.” Deuteronomy 4:2 KJV

Later in this same book of the law, Moses repeated the admonition in similar words. He said,

“What thing soever I command you, observe to do it: thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish from it.” Deuteronomy 12:32

This is actually exactly what the issue is with the Book of Mormon, and any additional texts that capitalize on adding to the original scripture as revealed by Jesus Christ in the Holy Bible.

What I’ll continue exploring as time goes on includes the following topics:- Explore ML models in conversations about what OpenAI has to say about Christianity- Explore philosophical questions with AI, and ask where there source comes from- Find places where spiritual warfare could be explored more in this area

To those reading, if you’re interested in following me on this journal, please shoot me a note and I’d be happy to chat more about this.

Thanks

Amen ♡ xo, Fay!