CRCC Affiliate Ken Chitwood hosted a zoom session on best practices for using generative AI tools as a preacher — how to think about artificial intelligence, write prompts, verify information and other key skills.

This session was hosted as part of the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture’s Compelling Preaching Initiative. Ken Chitwood also moderated a conversation, “How Then Shall We Live? When AI Takes Over” and you can read more about religion and AI here.

The Zoom presentation preceded a conversation among participants in which they could share hesitations about artificial intelligence, as well as their own experience using AI tools. Below are some notes from that conversation.

Ethical considerations for using AI 

• AI will only enhance your own personal practices and ethics – you can lie, or skip the prayer/contemplation part of creating a sermon with or without AI. 
• Understand AI’s limitations 
• Understand how information you input is used/stored.
  • You may want to avoid adding specific personal information with prompts or private conversations to AI transcription services.
• Create an ethics document/committee within your congregation or denomination for how to use. Recognize, however, that ethics will need to evolve with technology. 
• AI replicates biases existing in society. Your role is to help ennoble your culture. Especially if you’re coming from a marginalized community, don’t let AI erase or commodify your culture. 
• Think of ethics in terms of your responsibility to create deep meaning, community, creativity.
• You may have deep theological problems with AI answers – just as with other humans. Think about using AI as a dialogue. 

AI Prompts

• “Sandbox” – play around with it by asking different questions, ask follow up questions
• Change words to see how it affects answers (i.e., Biblical, Christian, Lutheran)
• Ask it to help you find scholarly articles, books or podcasts on a subject for research
• Ask AI for specific types of results (i.e., 4 themes, an outline)
• Include demographic and contextual information for better results
  • Could be helpful for relating to people not like you (examples: what are some ways that parents think about peace; how teenage gamers relate to Biblical stories)
  • Due to biases in AI’s data, you may need to include your own demographic information in prompts to get more culturally relevant responses (i.e. “I am a Black female”)
• Break your requests down into steps. Instead of “write a sermon,” ask it to:
  • Give me examples of heros/villians in video games
  • Give me examples of heros/villians in the Bible
  • Write a sermon comparing video game and Biblical heros/villains
  • Make the sermon shorter
  • Make the sermon funnier
• Use AI for editing:
  • Ask AI to shorten a sermon
  • Ask AI to summarize the sermon’s main point (to make sure what you’re saying is what you intend to say)
  • This requires you to upload your own text, so consider how it is being stored/used

Writing with AI

• Above step example resulted in a sermon enjoyed by gamer youth
• AI does not do well with creating pathos or emotions
• AI can create a message, but can it make meaning? Next step is to add a focal message to it. How can you bring ultimate concern, deeper significance, communal reflection around it?
• Listen to the Holy Spirit
• Consider how to make something “incarnate”

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