Unveiling the Power and Pitfalls of Artificial Intelligence | Exploring AI's Impact on Society

Hey everyone. Welcome to Made for Mondays with Justin Lester. I'm so glad you guys are tuned in. Today is May 15th and I wanted to begin some time talking about artificial intelligence for the next few weeks. It's become so popular to engage with and think about what artificial intelligence means to us, how it works in our world, what it means and maybe artificial intelligence makes us more intelligent, I don't know. But let's see. Next few weeks I want to talk about artificial intelligence and you give some language, some definitions to it, talk about it, terms of leadership, the church, church revitalization and then also bring in some of my work on gamification as well. I think this will be fun to think about technology, the local church, technology and leadership, technology in the world. Share this with someone like and share it if you're on YouTube and send it out to someone. I think it'll be fun to think about this and ways that artificial intelligence can make us more intelligent. I don't know. Stay tuned. Let's jump into Mate for Monday.

Well, hey, Made for Mondays listeners.

Justin here.

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Let's start with Made for Mondays and let's actually get a baseline. Let's talk about what artificial intelligence actually is. I think that'd be helpful for all of us. So are you ready? So artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science that focuses on creating machines that can perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as learning and problem solving and decision making. Artificial intelligence systems use algorithms and statistical models to analyze large amounts of data, recognize the patterns of the data, and then make predictions or decisions based on that data. The ways that it's already been used, it's been used in a wide range of applications from chatbots that provide customer Service to self driving cars that use computer vision and machine learning to navigate trends. You also see this on your computer when you use Facebook. When you use if you go to Gmail and go into your profile, they put together, based upon artificial intelligence, an entire profile that mocks you. So other examples of AI in the world are Number one, personalized recommendations. Online retailers, streaming services use AI to analyze your data and make personalized recommendations based upon your preferences. Number two is fraud detection. Banks and credit card companies use AI to detect fraudulent transactions by analyzing large amounts of data and identifying patterns that indicate fraudulent activity. Number three is healthcare. Artificial intelligence has also been used in healthcare to assist with diagnosis and treatment planning. For example, algorithms through artificial intelligence can analyze medical images to detect signs of cancer and other diseases that actually happened with my mother. Number four, artificial intelligence is used for language translation. AI powered language translation tools can quickly translate text or speech from one language to another, making it easier to communicate with people from different parts of the world. Then lastly, virtual assistants, assistants like Siri, Hey Siri, Alexa, Hey Alexa, and even Google Assistants use artificial intelligence to understand natural language and respond to your requests. There's a lot of ways that AI has already been a part of the world. There's a lot of ways that AI has already been a part of our lives. The goal of it is for AI to assist our lives by making our daily tasks easier and more efficient. For example, artificial intelligence powered assistance can help manage our schedules, find information, control our smart home devices. AI also helps us make more informed decisions by providing insights and predictions based upon large amounts of data. That's it. Now let's talk about the negative sides of it. Because as much as I get excited about the things that have already gone on with AI and the ways that it's already been used, what about the negative sides? What about the detractors that said we don't need to use this? Well, let's think about it. Some are concerned that AI could lead to job loss as machines become increasingly capable of performing tasks that we do. Think about it. When you think about self checkouts, when I Even put into ChatGPT about Write a sermon on this scripture, it said it couldn't write a sermon on it, but it gave me an entire commentary on a set of scripture ways to apply it to different generations. It's amazing, the work. But now it's the loss of jobs, it's the loss of engagement, it's the loss of human connection. The schools. If some friends of mine that are in higher education have already mentioned how Academic affairs offices and us as a professors have had to place it on our syllabuses for our ch, for our students to not use ChatGPT that we literally have to take the questions our students ask and place them into OpenAI and different accounts to ensure they didn't copy and paste that into their essays, into their papers. So we can see how AI not only is used in ways like that, but also AI can be used in malicious ways, like cyber attacks. We've seen this occur when it comes to money issues in our community. We've seen this occur with hacking different accounts. We've seen how artificial intelligence, because it's written by humans, has a way of doing things that humans do because we're literally creating another world, like Second Life, creating another world based upon our mathematic predictions that produce something in artificial intelligence. And then not just that, but there's potential for bias and discrimination. I was watching a show on Netflix that talked about when it came to artificial intelligence, how it's innately racial racist simply simply because the people that are creating it are white. When you have people from certain backgrounds creating things, their implicit and explicit bias is going to be a part of the cultivation because it's still made by humans, as great as it is, is still made by humans. It's only as good as the data they're given. And if that data is biased, it's going to have that data. If that data is incomplete, it's going to have that data. For example, I was playing around with an app on my phone that was creating artificially intelligent images and I described my wife, described my son, and it gave me back two people that looked, did not look like African American individuals because the people who wrote the algorithms aren't, but their bias in terms of what we do look like came out. So it perpetuates these things. And facial recognition has been shown to be less accurate for people with darker skin tones. So I believe there's a lot of benefits to artificial intelligence. But then we have to be aware of some of the negative sides of artificial intelligence and risk to artificial intelligence. And that's what we're going to talk about the next few weeks. We're going to talk about infusing it into black churches. We're going to talk about what it means for have a Christian love ethic as it relates to artificial intelligence. We're going to talk about all those different ways the artificial intelligence can be positive, but it also has some concerns. But I think your infusion and your knowledge of it and your participation in the work of artificial intelligence will take AI to the level. That thing could be really engaging for us in the future. That's made for Mondays. Today, let's say our affirmations. Repeat after me, if you would. I am me. I can be me, and no one will stop me from being me. And artificial intelligence probably accelerate that a little bit. Have an amazing day. You were made for Mondays. Mondays don't own you. You own your Mondays. Now go forth and prosper. Have an amazing day.