We’ll search for something that resembles a verse out of the NIV with 14 words in it, but has the wrong adjective and Google matches the other 13 words to the NIV and corrects our misplaced adjective use. And the Substack post gets more scholarly, and the green grass grows all around all around.
Google has become our concordance and commentary. Whether we knew it or not. Whether we like it or not. And at the moment we are transitioning to A.I. becoming our Google.
A few weeks ago, on a work computer, I looked up a Bible verse in the above-mentioned process, knowing full well that I didn’t know the verse by memory, and knowing full well that the search bar would compensate for that. And as I did, something strange happened. The search bar didn’t give me my expected answer. The A.I. that has taken its place did. My work uses Microsoft products for all its I.T. needs and part in parcel with that is no Chrome or Firefox. To each his own. I don’t need brand loyalty in browser selection like some. So, I do my work, and when I needed to get a Bible verse properly quoted. I improperly searched for it. Google tends to give me the NIV approximate I tend to enter into it, having been raised in mostly evangelical circles, it’s the Bible I know the most of and have heard the most of. So, it's the bible I enter the most of into the search bar, to get my corrections from.
What happens next doesn’t happen in the search bar. The Bible verse I get is almost always from the NIV but my writing requires me to use the KJV because I don’t want to deal with copyright issues and what not. KJV is in the public domain, so I use it for most of my writing now. I don’t know the KJV enough to quote it. Even though I like it when reading and writing about it. But when someone asks me to quote scripture from memory, they never get my approximation of the KJV. They get my best crack at the NIV. My search terms, once corrected, generally lead me in the first few results to biblegateway.com where I check the verse and switch the translation, before a copy and a paste into whatever article I am working on.
Here’s where the A.I. stepped in, and instead of giving me the NIV, gave me the KJV with no extra steps.
Now I could go on a conspiratorial bent on how it knew that. But the truth is I know how it knew that plainly. I know the A.I. built into MS copilot can get any web history I have and any temporary internet files I have out of the browser for its work as an A.I. The issue this raises is the joint practice I was guilty of, and the vulnerabilities that a culture that practices that practice, might have in a world of genuinely helpful but wisdom-less A.I.'s. Because not everyone who types a half-recalled bible verse is looking for biblical clarity. Some of them are trying to see what they want the Bible to say. And the A.I. is not equipped with the “Thou Shall Not’s” to deal with that kind of thing.
At least not yet.
When I was in Bible college, I had a unique front row viewing of this kind of thing happening, sans A.I. if you will. I was enrolled in a class about the gospels, taught by one of the smartest people I have ever met. He read from a Greek New Testament, which he had memorized and knew enough about the translation techniques of Bible translators to know if you were reading from an NIV or a NKJV or even, as one poor freshman found out as inadequate for proper biblical study, the Message.
But it was when I replied with a verse from my Bible (A thrifted NASV from 1979) that he gave me a quick puzzled look and asked me what Bible I was reading from. I showed him and he explained that the NASB had been updated in 1995 and that the older version caught him off guard. He knew about the change but was only familiar enough with the 1995 version to know it as the accepted NASB. With his party trick adequately demonstrated, we proceeded to learn about the bible. The hole was in the ground and the green grass grew all around all around.
But that man didn’t trace a probable course through likely data, and then change his output to suit the user. He saw an otherwise mundane anomaly in a set of things he intrinsically knew and corrected the adjacent user.
That’s what the Bible for, dontcha know?
All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.
2 Timothy 3:16-17 KJV
What A.I. is at least capable of doing, is correcting the use of our correcting tools to fit with the use of them by ourselves. It did not profit the misguided Message user to look for original meaning of the text as she received it via Petersons paraphrase. But that’s okay. Someone who knew better because he actually knew the original text, stepped in and corrected the use of that paraphrase in biblical study. He did so by knowing what the text was to define what the text wasn’t. And A.I. could and would do that too. But to ask it to do that, we need to ask it to do things on behalf of abstracted unknown people and not specific engaged users. That professor learned Greek because he knew he would need Greek for the unlearned students he would teach.
The worry is that A.I. does the same kind of thing, so well mechanically, that it will get placed in the professor's place because it can be bought for a much lower price than the tenure. Because technology never wants you to do the work so you can be useful elsewhere in abstract. It only ever does work for you so it can be useful in practice immediately. You don’t vibe code to learn how code properly. You vibe code to offload the skills of a proper coding to desire and little else. The same way, guilty as charged, a guy could of load knowledge of the scriptures he reads and writes from to a search engine. Yeah, it gets the job done, but see how slow my writing gets the second my omnipresent concordance isn’t there for me and the lights go out? All it took was a solar flare, A power outage. A long list of fragilities growing longer by the second, as if they weren’t by design.
I know another brilliant mind who knows how to code and uses A.I. to code all the same. And the only difference between him and the pure vibe coders are he can make his way back out of that cave when the lights go out. He knows how, and knows how much work it is, because he’s done it. And is fully capable of doing it the hard way, but has paid enough dues and attention to know what to look for when the A.I. cuts the wrong corners. He sees, as a growing number of actual technicians see, that offloading our mental capabilities to a machine is nothing more than vulnerability as a service. VaaS if you will.
And VaaS does not just apply to code it applies to anything needing technique via language. Like knowledge of the bible.
For as much wisdom as us theologians claim to have, we didn’t notice that offloading when we asked Goggle to start doing it for us biblically. Or when that offloading itself got turned into a service and we started paying for Logos. Which is a powerful tool, but not a great tool. A great tool showcases talent and skill and knowledge through its use. A powerful tool approximates all three by technique and technology. A paint brush gets paint on the roof of the Sisteen chapel only by the hands of Michelangelo. And a Paint sprayer does it all the same via power and a tradesman.
But don’t believe random myths about technology you see on the internet. Believe the Mythbusters instead.
Is that painting great or powerful? What are the throngs of tech enthusiasts in the crowd cheering for? The approximation Leonardo da Vinci’s work? Or the Powerful GPU and air pressure that accomplished it?
When art becomes nothing more than the application of paint, study nothing more than the application of search terms, and programing nothing more than the ctrl-V of stack overflow, these things lose their meaning. And their purpose hot on meaning’s heels will follow. Purposeless coders would be a devastating end to the use of A.I. to code. Hundreds of thousands of men and women’s livelihoods lost to nothing less that technological progress and profit. A sad reality, at the very least on the horizon if we’re being honest.
But that honesty in being will also have us look at the purposeless pastors. Made as nothing more than stewards of RigthNowMedia, The GPT sermon, and search terms. It may not bother most that their pastor may not know Greek or Hebrew, but knows how to find out about Greek and Hebrew words via technological advancements. Even ones as old as books like a concordance. But it does bother some of us who know biblically accurate sermons and discipleship rest on some teachers, in inexorable ways. But not most teachers in anything close to inexorable ways. There isn’t a soul in the world that could take the intimate knowledge of Greek away from that gospel class professor. But just about anyone could take mine away. With a push of a button and the theft of a few large books from my bookcase.
See how smart ignorant people sound?
Makes you wonder, huh.