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With Jake Carlson
294 Plays30 days ago
Down through the ages, the Christian message has been shared via new technology, from Gutenberg's Bible to TikTok. But with recent advancements in AI, what would it look like to share the gospel with a chatbot? Today on PEP Talk, Andy and Gavin find out about one project to explore the possibilities and challenges.
Try it out now at apologist.ai or try bots focussing on Islamic or scientific backgrounds.
Jake Carlson is the founder of The Apologist Project, a nonprofit that develops conversational AIs for Christian apologetics and evangelism. Jake grew up as a missionary kid in China, where he first became interested in apologetics and Christian worldview study. He has over 25 years experience in software product development, leading product and engineering teams in both small startups and Big Tech companies. Jake founded The Apologist Project two years ago to develop digital products to further the Kingdom. The Apologist Project recently won 1st place at the Indigitous #HACK event — as well as 2nd place in challenge at the Gloo AI & the Church hackathon — for its work developing a Muslim-serving chatbot.
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Transcript
Introduction to Pep Talk Podcast
00:00:10
Speaker
Well, hello everybody and welcome to Pep Talk, the persuasive evangelism podcast from Solus. Every fortnight we are talking about how we share the gospel of Jesus in a world that needs him so much. I'm Gavin Matthews from Solus and I'm joined by my co-host, Dr. Andy Bannister. Andy, how are you?
00:00:25
Speaker
I am doing a great. Gavin, we're shivering slightly. This is a not a good season of the year to have a garden office made of wood, um but sir but there we go.
Technology in Evangelism
00:00:34
Speaker
And so who do we have on the podcast today?
00:00:37
Speaker
Well, we've got someone coming to us from the other side of the Atlantic, and I will introduce him just a second. But we're going to be talking this week about technology. We're we're all about sharing the gospel. But technology is a you know is it a friend, is it a foe? How are we going to use that?
00:00:51
Speaker
And helping us to discuss some of these issues is Jake Carlson. Jake, how are you? I'm doing well. Thank you very much, Evan. And where are you coming to ah coming to us from today?
00:01:03
Speaker
I'm from Austin, Texas, which is experiencing its own cold front at the moment. Really? you think I think of Texas and I think of the desert and the sun and the the heat when I visited. i can't imagine you with snow.
00:01:15
Speaker
You said you had snow yesterday.
Conversational AI for Gospel Sharing
00:01:16
Speaker
Is that right? Yep, that's right. That is not how I picture Texas, but you're very welcome. Thank you for joining us. on Pep Talk this week. And you're involved in the whole world of technology and and the gospel. tell Tell us a little then about your use of technology in sharing the gospel and some of the the ways you try and do that.
00:01:34
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So two years ago, I started a nonprofit called the Apologist Project, and we make digital products for Christian evangelism. And recently, we've been focusing on conversational AIs to do so, or more ah commonly known as chatbots.
00:01:51
Speaker
So how what does that look like in in practice? Yeah, so ah most most folks are familiar with ChatGPT or something similar where um you can kind of go in and ask the chatbot questions and get answers. um It has a vast knowledge base, and it's kind of trained in um just about everything on the Internet. Now, we want to use that technology to spread the gospel.
00:02:12
Speaker
We want to use that same kind of interface for nonbelievers to come and ask their difficult questions and get them answered in an easy-to-digest format.
00:02:22
Speaker
Yeah. One of the things that strikes me, um Jake, is that throughout history, Christians have always figured out ways to use tech, right? Whether it was yeah right back to Gutenberg's printing press, and one of the first things that came off there was the Bible, whether it's radio, television, the internet. So in one sense, you stand at the kind of yeah the sort of pointy end of ah of a trend that goes back a way. So perhaps the the the the first thing I would want to sort of ask you is how have you...
00:02:50
Speaker
How have you found getting others excited about this? When you try and describe to people what you're doing, do people get it or do you have to do a bit of sort of explanation for why, you know, chatbots and evangelism kind of kind of fit together? How how rap how how easy is it for to get other Christians to see this is a potential for ah for evangelism?
00:03:08
Speaker
Well, I will say that it's easier today than it was even just a year ago. um You know, I think a lot of Christians approached AI originally with some amount of
The Apologist Project and Chatbots
00:03:17
Speaker
trepidation. And I think it's just ah been a matter of, you know, letting them know that, you know, anyone who's been using technology in the last, you know, 20, 30 years has actually been using AI.
00:03:28
Speaker
It's only recently through conversational AIs that it's become kind of a more of a mainstream kind of, uh, ah cognition that that we're actually interacting with AI, but underlying a lot of the technology that you've used for years, such as you know algorithms for search engines, um you know shopping on Amazon, all of those things have always been powered by some sort of AI or machine learning.
00:03:51
Speaker
yeah I think the other thing as well, it's interesting you say that to go as someone with a kind of computer science background, I think for me, it was almost like the other mistake I made. I i think I checked out ChatGPT a couple of years ago when it was very early iteration of it and was not that impressed and then sort of put it on the shelf as like, well, that's not worth playing with.
00:04:11
Speaker
And it's only the last couple of months gone back to it and been blown away. Because if you, if folks who know anything about IT, t of course, Moore's law, this idea that, you know, computing power doubles every 12 to 18 months, it's staggering and and and it's only going to improve.
00:04:25
Speaker
So I think it excites me, first of all, that we've got Christians like you in the in the field where did the inspiration come from though just so that before we dig into some of what you're doing and and the and what you're finding but where did the idea first enter your head of going do you know what there's ah this great technology that works we're we're seeing someone needs to use this for engaging questions around faith Yeah, well, not to go too far back here, but um in high school, I became fairly interested in um in in Christian apologetics and also evangelism. i was a missionary kid myself.
00:04:55
Speaker
And um I've been looking for opportunities ever since then to use technology for the kingdom. And, you know, in the last couple years, obviously, ChatGPT kind of took the world by storm.
00:05:07
Speaker
And, you know, I had a bit of an epiphany where i where I thought to myself, you know, this is a chance for a dispassionate entity to ah convey the gospel, right, um with clarity and conviction understanding.
00:05:23
Speaker
Moreover, it's a resource to people that's available It's not beholden to schedules of pastors and so forth. And so I thought to myself, this this actually um is is much better than doing a ah Google search for answers to your questions because will answer them directly and conversationally.
00:05:41
Speaker
yeah and What's your chatbot called and and how far through the development process are you at the moment? When will people be able to actually find it and and use it? Yeah. So ah yeah anyone could go on to apologist.ai right now. um We are released.
00:05:57
Speaker
And recently we've actually been creating worldview specific chatbots. So we have many different variants of it as well. And when I say variant, what I mean is we're feeding ah particular chatbots um a corpus of information that's pertinent to that particular worldview. So, for example, we have a Muslim serving chatbot available at Alim, that's A-L-I-M dot apologist dot A-I.
00:06:21
Speaker
And that one specifically has access to materials written for a Muslim audience or Christians who are engaging with the Muslim audience. So you say you've got those different um variants, again, without sort of mercy realizing we've probably got a relatively non-technical, but, you know, smart kind of audience.
00:06:38
Speaker
how How do you go about training something like that? What what what does it look like? Do you just sort of throw lots of stuff at it? Is there a particular process that you you go through to shape something that in this case is really good with engaging Muslims? How do you how do you do it?
00:06:52
Speaker
Yeah. So again, I'll try to be um as as least technical as I possibly can explain this. but But there are actually several different terms that are distinct related to this. Right. So training is actually just what you said, Andy, where you throw a bunch of information at it, let it learn and find patterns linguistically in the materials it's it's given. Right. But you're not giving it any kind of targeting feedback, targeted feedback or anything like that. Right.
00:07:16
Speaker
Now, fine-tuning is the process by which you actually give it um information and give it feedback or or patterns to recognize um rather than like leaving it to its own devices a bit.
00:07:29
Speaker
So in our case, we did fine-tune our own model. However, we're always experimenting with um with other models as well, seeing which which ones of them give better answers. And and it's you know fascinating to see the the variation in the different models to see what they're good at and what they're not good at.
00:07:47
Speaker
For example, we recently had um you know an experiment with a model that was particularly poor at follow-up questions. right It did pretty well at answering the initial question, but then when a follow-up came, it kind of got confused about the previous conversation and so forth. So we're constantly testing you know which which particular models do better at certain aspects and how they incorporate the materials that we're feeding them.
00:08:12
Speaker
and How do you direct the user to the right worldview? you know If they're asking a question, how do they get channeled into the right bot and the and the right answers? because you know Obviously, they're asking questions from a Buddhist framework.
00:08:23
Speaker
that They're going to expect slightly different interactions from ah an atheist or apathetic or Muslim background. How do they find their way to the right kind of user interface? because Obviously, if you're speaking to someone in person, yeah it's fairly easy to sort of gauge with a couple of questions.
00:08:38
Speaker
where someone's coming from, how how do they find the right part of your infrastructure to engage with? Yeah, it's a great question. So um we do have a generalized chatbot that kind of has ah a cursory knowledge of you know the the the vast panample of world views.
00:08:54
Speaker
um And so we're we're experimenting with the concept of letting the user first upfront choose you know where they're coming from, like, oh, I'm an atheist, therefore I want to go this direction. or Or maybe even more specifically, I'm a naturalist, I believe in science, but I don't you know i don't believe in this you know Christian mumbo jumbo or whatever.
00:09:12
Speaker
And so we'll kind of funnel them to um a variant of our chatbot that specifically has ah ah Christian apologetics in
Balancing AI and Human Interaction
00:09:21
Speaker
its corpus. So it's ah it's ah it's an area that we're definitely experimenting with.
00:09:25
Speaker
um We may in the future as well, um ah you know, kind of funnel people via advertisements and so forth to the correct chatbot as well. ah One of the questions I had as well that intrigues me, is how so then do you balance, um Jake? Obviously, there's some things I think a chat bot does really, really, really well. I mean, theres so i've yeah I've really come to appreciate that with ChatGPT. There are other things it doesn't.
00:09:49
Speaker
do very well and obviously one of the things it doesn't do very well is that is that sort of you genuinely human connection the relationship the pastoral stuff how do you figure out you know when to try and i suppose don't know a handoff is the right word you've got someone engaged in the conversation there's going to come a point isn't there where you're going it want to say hey be really good if you talked to to to a christian how are you figuring out that process of getting somebody from the chatbot into engaging with a human what does it look like Yeah. So right now our chatbot is not only is it fully white labelable so that other ministries can kind of utilize it for their own purposes, but we also allow um to have custom messaging at the end of responses. And not only that, but we can customize how many responses down it starts surfacing that. So maybe you want to make sure that the
00:10:38
Speaker
a user is actually engaged before you hit them with a message that says something like, hey, are you interested in talking to a human about this or a pastor or whatever, or even just like, you know, um an advert to send them to more resources online or or to connect with other human beings. So we do support that as well. We we do believe that human connection is vital um to to to catch the folks who are at first intrigued, but really would benefit from from talking to a human being about about their faith.
00:11:06
Speaker
yeah That's really interesting. AI is interesting because it mimics humanity, but the machine is not a human. I'm wondering about the spiritual dynamics of that, because obviously a human being made in the image of God, if they're a Christian, they're filled with Spirit of God.
00:11:20
Speaker
and So when they're speaking, there's there's a spiritual dynamic. and you know like The writers of scripture are carried along by the Spirit, so what they wrote was what God wanted to say. The Spirit doesn't inhabit a machine in the same way. so Apart from passing on raw theology and raw information, you know someone becoming a Christian is is not just receiving and believing. They also need to be you know born again by the power of the Spirit.
00:11:44
Speaker
How does that work when the gospel is being transmitted by an a personal machine and and that's a genuine question because i don't understand how that would work yeah exactly so so um what i would uh liken it to is an author writing a book right so um if you think about it in that way the author doesn't have a personal or relationship with the reader either right and you know while you know i agree with you that the holy spirit you know um ah that the authors of the of the ah ah books of the Bible were imbued with the Holy Spirit when they authored their their materials.
00:12:18
Speaker
That doesn't change the fact, however, that when the recipients of a lot of these letters that were circulated in early Christianity didn't have a personal relationship with the author, right? They just saw words on a page, right? And then the Spirit moved through that communication method, right?
Spiritual Implications of AI in Evangelism
00:12:32
Speaker
And so similarly with with the chat bot or search results in Google or or any Web page. Right. We're not trying to indicate that the the machinery itself has any kind of spiritual significance. It's just ah a means of communicating a message. And the message is what the Holy Spirit uses to work in our lives.
00:12:55
Speaker
Hmm. I suppose a not an unrelated question as well that I find fascinating. described some of the sort of training, if that's the right word, you used no process for the bots that building. Presumably, Jake, how do you figure out also where to put the guardrails? Because, you know, with chat GPT, of course, you know, it does some occasionally feel like the old Wild West days of the internet, that you get quite strange answers. Obviously, presumably for your building, you've had to work hard, but, you know, the bot doesn't accidentally say, well, are the world views available? Have you considered Buddhism? yeah, that's the...
00:13:25
Speaker
That's a fail. So how do you ins ensure, you know, sort of this far and no and no further while retaining the balance of flexibility so the user feels they are, you know, having a conversation and not just being preached at?
00:13:36
Speaker
Yeah, and and the answer is its it is you know quite difficult to strike that balance, right? So um we have kind of operating, for lack of a you know ah a less technical term, we'll call it operating instructions kind of underlying the chatbots that we have that stipulate, hey, this is the persona you're going to take on. Your goal is this. And so whenever you give a response, you need to keep this in mind, right?
00:13:59
Speaker
And that actually goes a long way because the the technology underlying these chatbots have gotten to the point where we're usually they'll pretty faithfully convey that. Right. Um, but also we have, um, what we call, um, well, I talked about the corpus of it, right? So, um, what we do is we hand information to the chat bot and say, look, this is the information that you're going to convey in a conversational tone. Right. So what I, what I like to liken it to is, um,
00:14:27
Speaker
A lot of folks use ChatGPT now, and what they'll do is they'll kind of paste in um some information and say, like, summarize this or rewrite this or something like that. And ministries and and other Christians right now all over the world are doing that. Right.
00:14:41
Speaker
And there's not too much of a worry that it's going to get it wrong. right It's not going to it's generally not going to change the nature of that content. If you're handing it that content to summarize or paraphrase or whatever, it it it usually can faithfully conveys that back.
00:14:55
Speaker
And so under the hood, what we're actually doing when I talk about the corpus is exactly that. Somebody asks a question about a topic. We go find relevant information that's pertinent to that topic from a curated Christian source.
00:15:08
Speaker
And then we just tell the chatbot, look, draw from this information and kind of summarize it for the user. And so in that way, it's it's called grounding the model in context, basically.
Global Reach and Tech Engagement
00:15:20
Speaker
that's That's one of the mechanisms as well that we use to to make sure that ah the responses have some guardrails.
00:15:27
Speaker
By the way, one of the things I was quite impressed with actually when when playing with the the, you know, when you first contacted me, we I played with things a bit, Jake. I was actually quite impressed how well it integrates scripture into its answers too, because you've trained obviously part of that that that that background database is the Bible.
00:15:42
Speaker
I was really impressed. This is great. It's actually in its answers weaving in ah pieces, which is, you know, it can do that really well. and And to that point, you know, it's not an accident. it's not just that we gave it scripture to reference. We literally told it, you will you will reference three Bible verses in every response.
00:16:00
Speaker
And so it's it's no you know accident or or happenstance just based on the materials, but it's actual instructions that we've given to the chatbot. Yeah. and Presumably non-Christian folks are starting to use it and interacting with it. how How's that going on, sort of not in the lab, but in real-world context? What sort of responses have you had?
00:16:19
Speaker
Are there particular questions that are being asked more than others that are maybe surprising? How's it working in in the real world? Well, one of the very interesting things about using a chatbot is people kind of open up, right? It's not a human being. There's no judgment. and And of course, you know, as Christians, we would say we shouldn't judge and so forth. But there's still some amount of um guardedness that people approach a conversation with a person that are they they completely are left uninhibited when talking to a chat bot right because it doesn't you know there it doesn't feel or judge right and so um we've we've um we're logging all the all the messages coming in for our own purposes of course your privacy is guaranteed we're not like you know getting information about you so it's it's anonymous but we are logging the the questions and answers coming in for later evaluation and one of the things that we've been astonished with is
00:17:12
Speaker
um the parts of the world that are using it you know we we support Indonesian for example which um as as you both are probably aware is the largest population Islam Islamic country in the world and nobody tends to think about that but um we've had a tremendous usage from from um from Muslims in Indonesia asking you know hard questions about um both Islam and Christianity for example and we've been extremely pleased with that fact
00:17:39
Speaker
The other thing, as we are running rapidly out of time because there's so much weer we could talk about, I'd say the other thing I found fascinating in all this, Jake, is that so one of the communities that I think the church doesn't always do the best job of reaching are, I suppose to put it bluntly, how do you reach the geeks and the nerds and the science-y people?
00:18:02
Speaker
type sometimes i think in our more traditional apologetics we we miss that whole community and partly as i was playing around with your stuff i was like this is brilliant because actually showing that we're engaging with this that's a yes another tribe that i think who need the gospel and to have folks like yourself blazing a trail and going yeah we get you we speak your language or playing the things that you're playing with and through that can talk to you about the gospel just ah what's your reflection on that in terms of that that that that community and how we can reach them Yeah, that's a great question. So thinking back to, you know, I guess it's 25 years ago now that I originally had an idea of raising up ah an online community that kind of defended the faith.
00:18:42
Speaker
um The reason I was was thinking that and made a promise to myself and God to do that in my future was um during the nascent stages of the internet as a communications tool back in say, the late 90s, early 2000s, I had noticed that the the the tech community had obviously embraced it, but their conversations were more of a a secular, atheistic kind of bent.
00:19:04
Speaker
And so um I have a tremendous heart for my fellow techies. ah Because I think it is to your point, an often neglected segment of the population where, you know, kind of we can dismiss them as, you know, futurists and and all that kind of thing. But um absolutely, i think i think building...
00:19:22
Speaker
you know, ah competently built and attractive from a user experience standpoint, digital products for the kingdom in and in and of itself is a means to um at least get the attention of the online communities and and the the techies and the geeks.
00:19:41
Speaker
um Do you think there is a danger for Christians that we will hide behind technology because it might be easier for the bot to get the abuse than us going out and sharing the gospel with people who might not want to hear it? Do you think there's a danger that some of us might hide behind the technology when the world is hostile?
00:19:59
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. There's a danger in that. And, you know, and I think with with anything, you know, the question is, I would ask the same question of of authors, right? Are they actually, you know, going out and preaching or they are they, you know, quote unquote hiding behind? But I don't i don't view it as hiding. I view it as as as using the tools at our disposal to disperse the gospel, which we're commanded to do in the Great Commission. Yeah.
00:20:21
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a great way of – that's a really great way of of looking at it. And like you say, I think you know every medium right has its pros and cons and using them all for for God's glory. So look, we've hit 20 minutes. It's gone – boy, has it gone quickly. But well perhaps finally, ah Jake, you know one last perhaps perhaps question to you. What would you say to people listening to encourage them to check this out and where can they – Where can they find this? We'll put links in the show notes, but feel free to plug it to you know plug it to death, tell it give it give it a good advert, so and then hopefully people listening will go and check it out. So, um yeah, why should people give this a try, even if they're not techies, and where's where's where' does the place to find you again?
00:21:00
Speaker
Yeah, we we find our place in the market as a alternative to searching thousands of Google results, basically. um And moreover, the the content which the chatbot uses as context to answer um is curated and guaranteed to be kind of an orthodox, lowercase orthodox Christian message.
00:21:20
Speaker
ah source. And so you can go to Apologist.ai is our main chatbot. There's a Muslim serving chatbot that specifically has a corpus geared toward the Muslim community. That's Alim, A-L-I-M,.Apologist.ai.
00:21:34
Speaker
Our science-based chatbot that focuses on on secular scientists is available at Isaac.Apologist.ai. Or um We also have an apologetics directory available at Apologist.com. And that's more of just, you know, resources for apologetics. And we try to suck in kind of all of the, um you know, world of of apologetics materials, be they YouTube videos, um articles, web pages, books, all, you know, all the all that genre.
00:22:03
Speaker
Fantastic. Well, Jake, it's been an absolute privilege talking to you and and and fascinating. I can safely say this been probably one of the most unique episodes of of Pep Talk in in doing this about six years.
00:22:13
Speaker
We will put, for listeners, we will put links to all of those places, that are links that are but Jake mentioned into the show notes. So do encourage... you to to have a go don't spend the entire of your life talking to jake jake's chatbot but um it's it's fascinating i really enjoyed playing around with that so anyway jake thank you once again and for all of you listening at home or in the car wherever you're catching your podcast hope you've enjoyed this episode of pep talk and uh i uh and gavin will be back in a couple weeks time uh with another episode and another guest so do catch us wherever you get your podcast from goodbye for now