American Family Radio thanks sponsor Preborn for supporting pro life advocacy
Dr. Jessica Peck: We would like to take a moment to thank our sponsor, PreBorn. When a mother meets her baby on ultrasound and hears their heartbeat, it's a divine connection and the majority of the time she will choose life. But they can't do it without our help. Preborn needs us, the pro life community, to come alongside them. One ultrasound is just $28. To donate, dial pound 250 and say the keyword BABY or visit preborn.com/AFR hello and welcome to the Dr. Nurse Mama show prescribing Hope for Healthy Families here on American Family Radio. Here's your host, professor, pediatric nurse practitioner and mom of four, Dr. Jessica Peck.
Dr. Jessica Peck: Well hey there friends and welcome to my favorite time of day, getting to spend time with you prescribing Hope for Healthy Families.
Artificial intelligence is increasingly shaping how people learn, work, communicate
And listen, I want you to buckle in because today we've got something really important that we are talking about, something that everybody is talking about everywhere you go and people have feelings about this topic. I am talking about nothing other than artificial intelligence. Now I always say this, but I'll say it again, that artificial intelligence is AI. That's a capital A, a capital I. Now my mother in law, she calls it AI because it looks like a lowercase l. And so when it first started coming out, I know, I hear my guests started laughing about that. She's like, who is this guy Al who is like all of a sudden in charge of everything everywhere? Well, that's what we're talking about, AI or Al. It is absolutely here. And just a few years ago, AI felt like science fiction. But today it is ingrained in everything we're doing. Writing emails, translating languages, creating images, answering questions, helping students with their homework. But most importantly, the thing we need to realize, it is increasingly shaping how people learn, work, communicate, and even explore spiritual questions. Now, for Christians, this creates extraordinary opportunities and some serious concerns. Both of those things can be true. Can AI help advance the Great Commission? Can it expand access to the gospel for people who maybe are never going to darken the doors of a church? What happens when people begin seeking spiritual guidance from chatbots rather than pastors or parents or scripture? Where's the line between using technology as a tool and allowing it to become a substance? Institute for human discipleship well, listen, I've got a guest today who is going to help us think through those tough questions. Really from the front lines of global missions.
Don Barger leads AI strategy for one of the world's largest missions organizations
I'm welcoming Don Barger. Today he serves as Director of Innovation and Artificial Intelligence. Yes, there is such a position for the International Mission Board, the imb. Now, before leading AI strategy for one of the world's largest missions organizations. He spent more than two decades serving on on the mission field, and today he is helping churches and ministries and organizations thoughtfully engage emerging, technologies while remaining faithful to their mission. Don's a writer, a speaker, a consultant, one of the leading Christian voices, helping believers understand how AI is already reshaping ministry, work, culture, and the future of human interactions. And if that sounds a little bit scary, hang on and hang in there with us. Dawn, welcome to the program. I have set you up for world peace, man. We have a tough task ahead of us, but I'm confident you're up to the task.
Don Barger: I'm a little worried after that intro. I don't know that, I don't know if I can live up to it. And I. Yeah, well, we're gonna, we're
Dr. Jessica Peck: gonna have more questions than answers, but these are exactly the kinds of questions that we should be discussing. And, you know, I think that many Christians, when I am having conversations, Don, they still think of AI as like, oh, this is kind of, something optional, and I'm not going to engage in that. Like, it doesn't impact my life. But really, a. Already here. The. The question is not are you going to encounter it? But how you're going to encounter it. And you recently wrote that 2026 may be remembered as the year that AI really became normative.
Don Barger says AI is already becoming normative, even if we don't know it
I've been talking about this a lot. I want to give the soapbox to you for a little while and tell us how you're already seeing AI as here.
Don Barger: Well, I think it's interesting. I, do think it's. It is already becoming normative, even if we don't know it. And I frequently talk to people who are kind of scared of AI or they're anti AI or they're all in on AI. Everybody's all over the map. And so if you're listening, you're probably one of those already, or you're just confused and say, I thought this was a steak sauce and not Al or A1 or whatever. But the reality is, we've been using AI for much longer than we've been talking about it. I mean, if you watch Netflix, Netflix is using AI to feed you the next show, or YouTube, or if you're using Google Maps or Waze or any of those things that kind of feed you information. I mean, there's a reason why people sit and watch two hours worth of cat videos on YouTube. Nobody sits down and goes, I think I'm going to watch the Cat videos for the next two hours. And if, if the algorithm knows that that's the kind of thing that you want to watch, or for me it's not cat videos, but it'll feed that to you. And so you just keep watching it. And so we've been using AI. We use AI, I think chat, GPT kind of made it where it became accessible to the masses. Before that we were using it, but you didn't, you weren't really interacting. You didn't know you're interacting with it now people are using it much, more openly and it affects, I mean, so medical, professionals are using it to help them chart and AI scribe, that's taking notes in an exam. Or you can use it for all sorts of ways to use it, in the medical profession, in our homes, in churches, it shouldn't be any different. So, one of the concerns I hear a lot from leaders is, hey, I know a lot of pastors who are just going to ChatGPT and basically writing the sermons, which obviously, before we started building things, we looked at this as what are the things that we believe about AI? We set our beliefs, belief system around what we, what we believe about it. And it kind of helped us create barriers. And so for me, if it's soul care, which I would certainly think that preaching and counseling and those types of things are things that I would not want to relegate over to an algorithm. Those are human to human activities. But in the preparation, in the research phase, you may spend a lot of time using AI that could help gather resources for you and help you do the research that normally would have taken you hours to, to do. So I don't know that, there's a easy answer as to whether or not we should use it or how we should use it, but you have to think about it before you get those questions. So for us, we don't use it for counseling, we don't use it for. I would never want to replace a human activity that is person on person with an algorithm. But if we're talking about renaming computer files automatically, I'm all in on something like that.
Dr. Jessica Peck: You know, Don, I remember the first time that I ever encountered a smartphone. I was teaching nursing in a hospital. I was at a bedside with a patient and a student. And at the time we used this, this drug book, an actual physical book. It was called Harriet Laine. And it was the guide for everything that we use, right, for everything that's medications. And one of my students pulled out a smartphone. I'd never seen it before. And I was like, what is that? And he told me it was a smartphone and he was going to look up the medication in there. And I said, oh, no, no, no, no, no, we use this. And he asked me if I wanted to race. And I'm like, yes, absolutely. I will find this drug in this book that I know like the back of my hand way faster than you as a student will find it on that. Whatever little square that is. And we raced, and Don, I lost. And my husband got a bill that day for a smartphone because my student looked at my phone and said smartphone. And looked at my phone, which was a flip phone. It said dumb phone. And you know, I remember thinking in that time, like, wow. Like, this is really. This is really, It's unsettling. I just felt like it was unsettling because here it was. And it wasn't something that I felt like I needed to use, but here it was. It was here. Now, I'm. I'm ashamed to say that I actually learned from a student about Chat GPT, a student who had been watching the Kardashians. Now, I want to be very clear. I do not watch the Kardashians. Okay, but they were talking about seeing this. Yeah, they were talking about chat, chat, chat what it. What it is.
Don Barger is the director of Innovation and AI at The International Mission Board
And I think it's interesting, Don that, you know, here you are. I already talked about your, The International Mission Board being, the director, the director of Innovation and AI. It is already here. This position is there with the imb. That may be really surprising to people. I want you to talk more about just the impetus for why you are there. I introduced you as one of the leading voices here. Why do we need this? Why is it a reality? Why do we need to wrestle with this and have somebody who's on the forefront of that looking at some of the ethical tensions. You've already previewed. Yeah.
Don Barger: So I think it's. Before I get into that, I think it's interesting that now nobody would ever question whether or not you would be carrying around a, Harriet Laine book with you. I mean, you have up to date now and you're looking up stuff instantly, and that's happened in our lifetime. And what we're seeing right now is this acceleration of change. So that's. We're talking 15 years ago, something like that was happening. Now we're seeing that amount of change happen, but not over a 15 year period of time, but compressed into one or two years. And it's for many people, they can't imagine the time. There are certain people, they can't imagine remembering how we did things before. We were using the stuff that we have today. So, yeah, it's interesting. So why do we have, this position of AI and innovation? So I was Director of Innovation before the AI got tacked on to that role. And I think it's really important for any organization to always be innovating and to be thinking about how might we do something. So we're not, we're not just out trying everything that's possible, but we are exploring and we're saying, okay, what, what's changing? We're trying to look into the future and say, okay, how, how is ministry in our case, how's ministry going to be looking in the future? How can we get ahead of that? What are the things that we need to be prepared for so we need to be thinking about from an ethical side of this? What are the things we are not going to do? What are the things that were the barriers that we're going to draw? And if we're not thinking about it, those things will just happen. And if you're not prepared for that, if you're not, in my case, I like to be the person who is exploring how we can do things better and how we can be more effective and how we can have more of an impact. Can we do 10x20 times what we're doing with fewer people and fewer personnel? And so how do we do that in an age without compromise? So if you're not proactively thinking about it, what will happen is it'll sneak up on you and you'll, you'll either compromise or in the case of AI, you know, we would never, allow anybody to bring your own computer. I don't know of a hospital or a, university that would say, yeah, you can use your own computer and you can teach and you can keep all your patient notes or you can teach every. No, I mean, it's been years since we've allowed stuff like that, but yet we will allow people to bring their own AI. And so the reason why we kind of protect those computer systems and phone systems is for security and privacy. And we want to make sure that we're controlling access to sensitive data. But AI people are just giving away their data as, you know, freely, and they'll put stuff in and they don't realize that you've just fed really sensitive information into a system that who knows what, how it's being protected or if it's being protected or if they're using your data that you shared to train on that. So we want to be able to proactively think about that, not reactively think about it. And so I think it's important for Christians to be involved in this. So, you know, the Pope had his encyclical on AI, about two weeks ago, and it's. It was a big deal that, that he. Some of the things that he said, and I've written on my substack a few articles about the things that are. That he said. And we've. It's not new. We've been saying this, some of the same things that he said for the last few years. So either Christians be involved in what AI, how AI is shaped, or we're going to leave it to people like Sam Altman or Elon Musk. And they certainly will shape it, and it will not reflect the worldview that we would want reflected in those. And so we want to make sure that AI is ethical. We want to, eliminate bias as much as possible, because AI is biased. If you, if you just use it without any guardrails, it will sometimes reflect us, and we're biased. And I will reflect the bias that we bring to it.
Dr. Jessica Peck: You know, I actually just saw a news article this week, Don, that was some researchers from universities across the country who looked for bias against religion and AI and looked across all platforms, and we're talking about how AI is biased, like against. There was some bias against Protestants, there was bias against Jehovah's Witness, there was bias against, you know, particular denominations. But you. You really kind of explained it a little bit and previewed that the bias comes from what is fed to it, because that's how it's learning from humans. And one of the things that is a real reality is I am shocked, Don. I really am shocked by the rapid uptake of AI, how people are just using it everywhere. And I think there's a lot of people who think that they're not using it, but it's being used on them. And even when I work with young people, you know, I'm a pediatric nurse practitioner. I'm around kids all the time. And where we turn Google into a verb, like, Google it, they've turned chat into a verb. They say, oh, just chat it. Like, just put it into chat. And that's how they use it. And even, you know, I was looking at my little nieces and nephews who were using AI for play. They had it generate a script for them for all of these things. The way that it is shaping our worldview, feeding us videos to watch without even thinking about it. We have got to have Christians on the forefront because we know that people are going to AI now and asking questions. That's one of the things I saw in this research study was asking like, should I become a Catholic, Should I believe in God? And AI is there and we've got to meet people where they are in the moment, but with wisdom and discernment. And dawn, we're already up against our first break, but when we come back, we'll talk about something called Faithbot and what it's what's going on. Looking forward to it. All right, see you on the other side of this break. Right.
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Graves Into Gardens by Brandon Lake and Elevation Worship: But it couldn't fill me. And treasures, they fade are never enough Then you came along and put me back together Every desire is now satisfied Here in your love. Oh, there's nothing better than you there's nothing better than you Lord, there's nothing nothing is better than m. welcome
Dr. Jessica Peck: back, friends that is graves into gardens by elevation worship. And there is nothing better than God. There is nothing better. Although man in our own wisdom may think that we are more wise. There is nothing better than the living word of God, not even AI. That's what we're talking about today. Or as my mother in law calls it, Al or Don, as you have taught us. A1. It is not a future issue though it is something that is here. I've been talking about this for months now, saying AI is in your home, it is in your children's toys, it is in the platforms that they use, it's in the school search engines that they're using. It's a present reality. But for Christians, the challenge isn't simply understanding the technology, it is learning how to engage with the technology, which is completely unavoidable. But how do we engage it faithfully without surrendering our what makes us uniquely human and while being true to biblical standards and values. And I'm talking today to Don Barger, who is Director of Innovation and Artificial Intelligence at the International Mission Board, the imb.
Faithbot is an evangelistic chatbot that was developed through the imb
And what we're going to talk about now is really something fascinating that's happening in Christian ministry today. It's something called faithbot. Now this is an evangelistic chatbot that was developed through the imb. And last I saw. Don you can update me on this. I saw 600,000 people and probably that is even more have already interacted with it, asking spiritual questions and exploring Christianity in multiple languages. But faithbot is raising some important questions. Don, is it pointing people to Christ? Like what role should technology play in evangelism? Where are the limits? So talk to us about faithbot. 600,000 is an eye popping number to me for sure.
Don Barger: So it's bigger than that. So this morning just before I logged in to this, I checked and it was up to 888,000. So I was hoping to hit a million by the end of May, but it looks like it'll have to be the end of June that we'll hit a million. So yeah, 888,000 people have used it.
Don Barger: it's been around for just about a year and two months. So we started it in April, kind of released in April of last year. It took us a lot longer than that to build it. But so this is, ah, it came out of a need. So we do. One of the things that the innovation team, leads the IMB with is something called digital engagement. So we'll run ads on social media all over the world in different languages and trying to engage people to get them to engage with us about the gospel. And I think, I don't remember the stats from last year. I think we were just over 80,000 conversations that we had with people using the digital engagement. Over 3 million videos, watched to completion, like evangelistic videos. So lots of different call to actions that people do. But in the conversations you can imagine having to have people ready to respond to 80 plus thousand people is kind of a challenge, especially if some of those people who are writing you are just wanting to yell at you or send you nasty stuff and really aren't interested in having a gospel conversation. So with this idea, could we build a tool that would be kind of as, a triage of stuff is coming in and then what is the likelihood that this is a true gospel conversation? And so then we would prioritize those conversations to go to humans. And if somebody's just yelling or sending you bad stuff, then the AI would interact with them and engage with them. And so it works really well. And so it helps us to prioritize human to human contact when people really are wanting to talk. The problem was we didn't have anything. And so we, we built this chat bot, kind of prototyping it. And then I was in a small group and someone said something in the small group that I was like, I'm not really sure that that's true, but I don't want to be the guy in here and going, I don't think, I think you're saying something heretical. But I remembered that I built this tool so I put it into faithbot. It wasn't named that at the time. And it came out and it gave me all this information. Oh, this is really cool. So afterwards I went up to him and I showed him, hey, you know, actually when you said this, you know, here's a tool you ought to look at. Well, he loved it. And so then that kind of was the idea of faithbot. So we built it for one purpose, use it for this other thing. So we started releasing it, after a lot and a lot of testing. So the premise is that whatever you ask faithbot, it will always respond from a biblical worldview and it's always going to ground those responses in a biblical narrative, if it can. So it's going to try to find scripture to talk about, the, the question that you're asking it now, if you ask it a common, you know, a modern, you know, who's going to win the, the Auburn baseball game, it probably is going to tell you something, but it's going to also try to share a Bible story with you as well. So that just was kind of an idea. I went to a big conference in Dallas, last April. I gave out a few hundred of these little NFC cards that you tap to your phone and it opens up on your phone. And within a few weeks, we had had tens of thousands of users just growing globally. And then we continued to just grow. And so we've continued to tweak the. Actually, it's been probably six or eight months since we made any changes to it because it responds really well. It created a whole series. So now faithbot is in multiple languages, and we've created some other tools. We call it like the Engage series. So let's say that you would. Would want to engage with someone from another faith and you would like to share your faith with them. Then this Engage tool will take on the Persona of that other worldview. And as you share your faith with that Persona, it will push back or ask questions relative to how someone from that worldview would respond. So it kind of gives you a trial run and a practice, and at the end, it'll give you an evaluation to say, hey, you know, when you said this, this is how someone from that faith actually would hear what you're saying. So it actually will become kind of a coach for you to be able to share your faith more naturally in other worldviews. So that's also. The website you can go to is faithbot Tools, just Faithbot Tools. If you go there, you can open up a plethora of tools that we've shared and we've created for Christians to be able to use AI in an ethical way. So, yeah, Faith Bot has been really, really well received.
Dr. Jessica Peck: You know, Don, I just. I continually think about the ethical tension here, and I want to be really candid and say that I'm sure as you're talking, there are people who are thinking, oh, my gosh, this is making me so uncomfortable. I don't know, like, should we be doing this? Should. This just sounds really foreign. It sounds really like the Jetsons finally coming to life in our lifetime. But I think at the same time, you can't ignore the fact, dawn, that you just said almost a million people you will pass million people who have engaged with faithbot and people are engaging with AI and asking it spiritual questions. And in open systems, much like the research that I talked about looking at, you can get there. There is no. There are no guardrails. There are, There is no developer who's sitting there thinking, okay, I want to make sure I'm really protecting your spiritual formation. And one of the differences with Faith Bot is you're thinking, okay, we're engaging people where they are, but with some safety and ethical guardrails. Can you speak more into that? Yeah.
Don Barger: So I, I think you just, you answered the, the concern because a lot people are using this, the same technique, but they're going to Gemini or Chat GPT or Grok or Claude, and they're saying, hey, I've got this question about something and they'll ask it. So that's where people are going. we could, if it would be possible for all of us to have access to a theologian who could sit down with us and talk to us and spend time with us, that would certainly be preferable. But the reality is most of us, most people don't have access to that. And most people who are teaching a small group, don't have the theological training that maybe I've had the, the privilege of having. And so one of the things that, several people, I mean, lots of people have said, man, this has helped me so much in preparing my small group discussion because I can put in there all the stuff I was thinking about saying, and it'll give me feedback and it'll help me. Sometimes it'll point them to say, you know, actually what you're saying is not true or is, is you're misinterpreting. And so we've, we've grounded it with scripture. We've helped people to kind of narrow the focus so that you're not going to ChatGPT and getting it to create those tools or create your lessons for you. And just, just to be honest, when we are, I hear testimonies of people from overseas who are working in other parts of the world, and they will go and they will share with someone from another faith. And more and more people who they're being shared with are opening up ChatGPT and putting in, you know, this Christian is telling me this, I'm a Muslim. How should I respond? And that is happening frequently. And so I don't look at this as taking the place of us humans proclaiming, that's not the purpose of this. The purpose is to help me be as best prepared as I can when I share. And so a lot of the ways that I use AI would be like this. So faithbot, tools provides access to Christians to go and learn about and better be better prepared to defend the faith.
Dr. Jessica Peck: Well, one of the, the really the opportunities that's coming with AI that I'm seeing is people are calling it a, a great kind of equalizer, having access to tools that you didn't have access to before. And we've seen this happen before. I think that's kind of reassuring to think about because we think about, you know, the Renaissance and the invention of the printing press that allowed Bibles to be printed. And for the first time people kind of have access to the word of God. They could learn to read, they could read it themselves. And the same with the Internet. You know, the, the Bible app is like extraordinary in its reach and giving people access to the Bible. And now just as you talked about having access to theology, whereas other people may be well intentioned but ill informed and not have access to some of that theological training, they don't have, you know, the, the benefit of some of those, those tools and things like that that are there before. I think that's really encouraging to see that, that and to engage people where they are. I mean again, I don't think you can ignore the fact that people are going to other open AI platforms and you've had nearly a million here on faithbot. And I want to know, dawn, what kinds of questions are people asking faithbot? Because another thing that we see is that people will ask a chatbot something they may be too shy or too embarrassed or too afraid to ask another human being.
Don Barger: So it's the really cool thing about the way that we've set up faithbot for now is that it's all anonymous. So I don't know who's asking what, I don't know. and when you have nearly a million people, it's impossible to go and audit and to read every. I don't spend any time reading chats. Occasionally I will have gone in and looked at something. We do have certain topics that would be flagged and so those are where I spend most of my time. So like if someone is chatting with this chat bot about abuse or self harm or any, anything that you would look at and go, oh my goodness, we've really got to get this one right. and I, I feel like that about everything on there, but like there are certain things that we really don't want it messing up on. So those are flagged and then I will get a notification and there's just certain topics that I will go look at. And so one of the things that it's not going to counsel you on this, it would say, you know, we encourage you to go find someone to talk to. If you need prevention hotline, you know, here's a number, here's someone. If you're being abused, we encourage you to reach out for help. But it is, it's all over the map. I don't have the stats in front of me. We just wrote an EMS paper about this, this topic about the number of people who are using it and how it's being used. The English versions, the people who are interacting with, in English mostly it's significantly two or three things. One would be people who are preparing a small group lesson or they're wanting to do research on a topic and they'll do a lot of that research. The others would be people who are struggling and I'm at my wits end, I don't know what to do. and they will seek, you know, I, I, what does the Bible say about this? What does the Bible say about suicide? What does the Bible say about staying with someone who is abusing me or something like that? And it's really sad to, to see those types of chats, but they, they're more prevalent than, than you would imagine. And I think you're right. I think people are much more willing to say something to the chatbot than they would to a human. This is yet again one of the reasons why I really advocate for using the anonymous versions that we offer rather than like signing into ChatGPT and putting all that in there. And then all of a sudden those are guarded or they're saved and they're discoverable by court and it can know who said what because it's in your account. So there's all sorts of challenges that I see in there. The other pieces that we've seen a good bit, overseas we see a lot of people asking about the difference between Christian, Christianity and maybe the majority religion where they are. so there's, there's, it's all over the map. I mean when you have, and when I say the 888,000, that's just the English chats. So if we were to pull in the other languages that are included, we're well over a million and a half users around the world.
Dr. Jessica Peck: Wow. You know, I think one of the other big differences is just motivation because when you think about these, mainstream, you know, the, the big name open AI platforms, generally speaking their motivation is marketability, influence, you know, being able to buy and sell information, to commodify attention and market it and sell it. And we hear all of these conversations about advertising now coming to AI, you know, you put into AI, oh, I'm having this problem and it's going to suggest a product placement for you. Right. See those in movies. But now it's going to be like, oh, have you tried this? And here's a link, you can buy it. And all of those things really the, the, the bottom line of any business like that is going to be profit. That's very different than what you're doing at the imb, right?
Don Barger: Yeah. And these are expensive. So I mean it is, it is not cheap to run an AI system like this. And so fortunately for us, we're donor driven. And so we, we are given people, people give to these type of initiatives so we don't charge. So when we run these, when we offer these services, like anybody can use them. And, and I mean, I don't know who you are and I don't know if people want to give, they can. And fortunately for us, we've had enough people use the service, find value in it and say, yeah, we would like to, we'd like to give to that. We want to donate to make this possible. And so what I love about that
Dr. Jessica Peck: is I have I. What I want to know what you love about that. We're going to find out right after the break. We'll continue talking.
Don Barger talks about how Christians should engage with AI
The break is back. Radio is so rude. And we'll be right back after this break talking more about how Christians should engage with AI with Don Barger See you in a minute.
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Jesus Over Everything by Andrew Holt and The Belonging Company: Jesus over everything here. Praise Forever More, A song for all eternity. Jesus Christ is Lord
Dr. Jessica Peck: Welcome back, friends, that is Jesus Over Everything by the Belonging Company. And you know, when I hear songs like that, I, I think about how convicted I am and how easy it is just to sing a lyric like that, Jesus over everything. But if you really stop and think about that, that is a pretty powerful and bold statement. And do you really mean it? Do you really put Jesus over everything? Well, there are a lot of people who are going to AI right now instead of going to places of spiritual wisdom and discernment. And I'm talking today to Don Barger, the Director of innovation and AI with the International Mission Board. And we've been talking about faithbot, which is an AI platform that is being used to engage with right now. Over a million and a half people worldwide, over almost nearing a million English, English language conversations where people are asking spiritual questions. And I think back to the scripture that says the harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. This is one of the challenges that we have is that there's a lot of people asking questions. There's not enough humans to engage. So how do we use AI ethically and responsibly? And I've been saying this AI is a reality. It is here. And I firmly believe that Christians should be on the leading edge of this conversation looking at how do we engage ethically. Because every transformative technology has opportunities and challenges, temptations, even. AI can do a lot of things in assisting missionaries, much as dawn has already described. Accelerate research, expand access to information, help provide sound theology to Bible teachers all over the world. But it can also spread misinformation and diminish that human connection, create dependency and blur the line between authentic wisdom and machine generated answers. So how do we navigate that tension? I'll tell you, Don and I are not going to be able to answer all of that question and give you something nice and tidy that you can take away. But we are being brave enough, I think dawn, to engage.
What opportunities do you see for AI in Kingdom work and gospel centered efforts
And so you, you've described yourself as optimistic and cautious, cautiously optimist, mystic. What, what opportunities do you see that are most exciting to you for the potential for AI, for kingdom work and gospel centered, gospel centered efforts?
Don Barger: I think, I think Christians engaging in this conversation is, is very important that we can't sit on the sidelines because this is, it's not that we engage it because it's inevitably going to happen. But you brought up earlier the the, the printing press and I think we're in a very similar role. I think we're in a world that's very similar to that time where before the printing press, very few people have had access to scripture, many priests didn't have Access to scripture and so the post printing press. Then all of a sudden it was the democratization of information. And I think that AI is kind of the modern day version of the democratization of information where all of a sudden we have access to every amount. We've kind of had that with Google in the past, but it's really hard to get information out of Google. There was so much. And what AI can do is it can narrow that down really quickly and give us really good insights. And so I think that using AI ethically, not using it for bias and not using it for discriminating against certain peoples or are abusing people or trying to manipulate people, but to truly help us use that AI, use tools like faithbot to help us be better prepared, to help free us up from the mundane work that we're doing. That sometimes, would have taken a long time to do analytics on data or on, I mean just in general in the public, like understanding large data sets of information and then pulling the value out of that. Whereas in the past we probably just couldn't have done that. We recently did something where we had 9,000 minutes of interviews of talks that we were doing. 9,000 minutes. It would have taken months for us to go through and actually do some analytics on those conversations. And I was able to do that relatively quickly. So every morning I wake up and as there's more of those conversations happening I just get, get new updated information of those analytics and I can go back and spot check it, make sure it's accurate. But that is the type of thing that I don't think most of us, I think people are either really a negative or they really don't think about the consequences. Very few of us in the middle who are saying, yes, I'm very optimistic, but I'm also very cautious and how we use that data. So if you're on either one of those extremes, try to put yourself on the other side just for a moment and think about how we might. If you're on the negative side, you can think how might we use this, to use it for good. And if you're on the, you know, there's no limits. You may want to think, well, what would happen if, you know, and put in the worst case scenario, you know
Dr. Jessica Peck: Don I can share a story where I was thinking exactly like this. So recently I was in Kenya and I was part, I went on some visits to mothers who were expecting babies. We went and visited this teenage girl who was expecting her first baby and let me Tell you, Don, like her home was not very accessible. We went on a road that. I've never used the word road so loosely in my life. Like we went as far as we could on the bus and then we had to kind of climb down this ravine, cross a creek, climb a mountain, get up to this home. And when I walked into the home, it was like a combination of plywood and corrugated metal, you know, that was just kind of cobbled together. But when we walked into to this woman's home, to this girl's home, she had scripture written all over the walls of her house. And they had a Bible. I'll use the term Bible loosely too because I'm talking about a crumpled pile of papers. Like it was water damaged, it didn't have a binding on it, but it was in a place of honor in her home. Like it was, it was very important to her. So I'm looking at this place and all of a sudden dawn, her cell phone starts ringing. This, this girl had a cell phone. She had access to a cell phone and they had a very strong signal out there, there. And I'm thinking, what kind of access, what kind of, of discipleship, of connection, of gospel sharing could happen with this girl who was so hungry to learn about the word of God, but is very physically isolated. And I think about you, you know, being with the International Mission Board. This is exactly the kind of work and vision that you are doing. And so as you're having these conversations, as you're saying, envision the opportunities and also watch out for the pitfalls here because you know, we may think AI interactions are imperfect, but human interactions are also imperfect. What kinds of questions should churches and ministries be asking as they're looking to engage in this space? Like you've got some who are saying, hey, we're all in, we'll jump in. And some saying, we're not touching that with a ten foot pole. There's, there's, that's just normal human response. What questions should they be asking? Yeah.
Don Barger: Ah, so I mean, I love your story about being in the place where the, there's, there was. You would not expect a cell phone signal. But in many cases that is the case where you're finding that, that is. I was recently on a flight, in another part of the world and I sitting next to a person for 16 hours and was able to share with him for many hours. And he said, well, I really like this. I really wish there was a way for me to know more. but I cannot go to the country that he is in. And so I gave him a version of faithbot in his language, and he was able to take that back into his country, where he could access that. And I did the same thing in another country as a taxi driver was sharing with him. And at the end of that conversation, he asked, boy, I really wish you could just stay here and share with me. And so I took out my little NFC card, this little card right here, and I said, hey, have one of these. And you can just tap your phone and you can ask it anything you want. And in that case, he actually can WhatsApp me. And so he's WhatsApp me back and forth. But the first person. There was no way for me to ever communicate with this person again. So it's not like this is. Well, there's so much of a better way. What this has offered me is there was no other way for me to give him anything else for him to take back in with him. There is no way for me to continue contact with this guy. And he was able to take faithbot in. And I can see chats in that language. And I know that that person has shared that with other people in that language because it grew in that part of the world. So I think the other. For a church that would be questioning this. One of the questions I would have is, if you're going to work with a people group and you had a cultural insider who could tell you information that you may not have even been willing to ask if would you not take up, take that person up on it? And so one of our church partners that we. I was doing some training with was working with a refugee population here in the United States. They've been going time and time again to this city in the US where there's a certain refugee population. And when I had shared with them, they took the Engage Lostness, which is on the faithbot Tools site, and they actually put in that people group, the language and the. The culture that they're working with. And then they were like, oh, my goodness, what we. Everything that we've been saying, we were thought we were communicating clearly the gospel. But whenever we went into this tool, it helped us understand that things that we were saying, we were thinking were very clear. I was saying, you have encoding and decoding of information whenever you communicate. I was encoding my information one way, and the decoding, the interpretation. And we're not talking about English to another language. We're talking about understanding. And so the AI was actually able to help them say hey, when you say this, they hear this. And I know that you're trying to say this. If you want to say this, here's a better way to say it. So AI gave them a cultural insider, option that they previously never had.
Dr. Jessica Peck: That, that's amazing to hear. And I can, as we're talking, I mean, we're just back and forth, dawn, back and forth with the messiness of it. You know, I mean, there's such great opportunity and also such great challenge, and I think it's important to acknowledge that. But I'm so grateful that people like you are on the forefront of that because that's where people already are. They are engaging. We've got to go where the people are. And when we look at AI and the, the, the advances that happen, I mean, all of a sudden, Don, I feel like I'm living in dog years. You know, when you look back, it's not a period of years, it' of months. When you look and see how much the world has changed, how quickly AI, is happening, it's hard to say. But if you look back, say five years from now, and you look back to this moment where the church is engaging in these conversations about technology, what do you hope that we get right? What are your, what are your hopes for what could be a vision for how AI is used as a kingdom tool? Tool?
Don Barger: Yeah, I think five years is like asking 20 years ago. I mean, it is. Five years is, is so long in AI years. I really hope that we're able to see one of my dreams and I'm working with Baylor University on this is, I would love to see us be able to do a better job of communicating with people who can't hear. And so like a text to sign and assign to text. I would love to see our speech to sign and, and sign to speech. Like imagine if all of a sudden you went in and you were meeting with someone who could not hear and they, they could sign and as they signed, you could hear what they signed and as you speak, they could see what you are saying. That would be, we, I like to talk about moonshots, like getting our loon shot. This was a loon shot. This is one that is so complicated. And you know, we take for granted because text to speech and speech to text is so easy. I mean it's, it's, it's happened in the last two years where I can just drop a four hour conversation and AI can just transcribe it really quickly and give me feedback that's one thing, but to go. Sign language is way more than the hands. So people assume, oh, you can just do the hands. No, it's. It's leaning in, it's leaning back, it's emotion, it's big, big, it's small. There's so many different things that play in. So that would be one of the things I would hope that we could, we could make advancements on. I think that Bible translation is benefiting greatly from science, from. From AI. I think that's going to only continue. That doesn't mean that humans aren't involved in the Bible translation. It means that the very tedious parts of comparing what's said here and said there, humans are still doing translation, but the checking and the testing, a lot of that can be flagged. Imagine if all of a sudden the AI could just flag and say, hey, you might want to check this, you might want to check that so we get faster and much better translation. I've already seen AI translation grow just in regular translation. It's so much better today than it was even a year ago. text to video, creating videos. Ah, creating. One of my favorite things I recently did was created a series of Bible stories using, you've seen the Lego movies, but this is like AI generated Lego movies or AI generated, cartoons or that, that it just. They look awesome. And you look at it and go, I could have never done this in the past.
Dr. Jessica Peck: Well, that is so encouraging to me. And Don, I know that you are in a space that is really high stakes because people's souls are at stake and what are at stake here. And I think it's encouraging to hear about your motivation, about the people that you've surround, surrounded yourself with, about the ethical guardrails that you're putting in place, but also the potential to reach people with theology with the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to be able to fulfill the Great Commission. Those things are really exciting.
AI can help us communicate and translate and organize spiritual conversations
Tell us one more time where people can find faithbot.
Don Barger: So faithbot.tools So if you just go to that website, you can find several of the tools that our team has developed on that website.
Dr. Jessica Peck: There you go. faithbot.tools AI can help us communicate and translate and organize and even initiate spiritual conversations. But it can't replace the work of the Holy Spirit, the authority of Scripture, the wisdom of godly mentors, or the transformative power of walking in person with real people in authentic Christian community. The future belongs to those who are engaging faithfully and seeing ways that we can use technology as you do that as you wrestle with this, as you pray over it, I pray the Lord will bless you and keep you and make his face to shine upon you. And I'll see you right here next time.
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Jeff Chamblee: The views and opinions expressed in this broadcast may not necessarily reflect those of the American Family association or American Family Radio.
American Family Radio thanks sponsor Preborn for supporting pro life advocacy
Dr. Jessica Peck: We would like to take a moment to thank our sponsor, PreBorn. When a mother meets her baby on ultrasound and hears their heartbeat, it's a divine connection and the majority of the time she will choose life. But they can't do it without our help. Preborn needs us, the pro life community, to come alongside them. One ultrasound is just $28. To donate, dial pound 250 and say the keyword BABY or visit preborn.com/AFR hello and welcome to the Dr. Nurse Mama show prescribing Hope for Healthy Families here on American Family Radio. Here's your host, professor, pediatric nurse practitioner and mom of four, Dr. Jessica Peck.
Dr. Jessica Peck: Well hey there friends and welcome to my favorite time of day, getting to spend time with you prescribing Hope for Healthy Families.
Artificial intelligence is increasingly shaping how people learn, work, communicate
And listen, I want you to buckle in because today we've got something really important that we are talking about, something that everybody is talking about everywhere you go and people have feelings about this topic. I am talking about nothing other than artificial intelligence. Now I always say this, but I'll say it again, that artificial intelligence is AI. That's a capital A, a capital I. Now my mother in law, she calls it AI because it looks like a lowercase l. And so when it first started coming out, I know, I hear my guests started laughing about that. She's like, who is this guy Al who is like all of a sudden in charge of everything everywhere? Well, that's what we're talking about, AI or Al. It is absolutely here. And just a few years ago, AI felt like science fiction. But today it is ingrained in everything we're doing. Writing emails, translating languages, creating images, answering questions, helping students with their homework. But most importantly, the thing we need to realize, it is increasingly shaping how people learn, work, communicate, and even explore spiritual questions. Now, for Christians, this creates extraordinary opportunities and some serious concerns. Both of those things can be true. Can AI help advance the Great Commission? Can it expand access to the gospel for people who maybe are never going to darken the doors of a church? What happens when people begin seeking spiritual guidance from chatbots rather than pastors or parents or scripture? Where's the line between using technology as a tool and allowing it to become a substance? Institute for human discipleship well, listen, I've got a guest today who is going to help us think through those tough questions. Really from the front lines of global missions.
Don Barger leads AI strategy for one of the world's largest missions organizations
I'm welcoming Don Barger. Today he serves as Director of Innovation and Artificial Intelligence. Yes, there is such a position for the International Mission Board, the imb. Now, before leading AI strategy for one of the world's largest missions organizations. He spent more than two decades serving on on the mission field, and today he is helping churches and ministries and organizations thoughtfully engage emerging, technologies while remaining faithful to their mission. Don's a writer, a speaker, a consultant, one of the leading Christian voices, helping believers understand how AI is already reshaping ministry, work, culture, and the future of human interactions. And if that sounds a little bit scary, hang on and hang in there with us. Dawn, welcome to the program. I have set you up for world peace, man. We have a tough task ahead of us, but I'm confident you're up to the task.
Don Barger: I'm a little worried after that intro. I don't know that, I don't know if I can live up to it. And I. Yeah, well, we're gonna, we're
Dr. Jessica Peck: gonna have more questions than answers, but these are exactly the kinds of questions that we should be discussing. And, you know, I think that many Christians, when I am having conversations, Don, they still think of AI as like, oh, this is kind of, something optional, and I'm not going to engage in that. Like, it doesn't impact my life. But really, a. Already here. The. The question is not are you going to encounter it? But how you're going to encounter it. And you recently wrote that 2026 may be remembered as the year that AI really became normative.
Don Barger says AI is already becoming normative, even if we don't know it
I've been talking about this a lot. I want to give the soapbox to you for a little while and tell us how you're already seeing AI as here.
Don Barger: Well, I think it's interesting. I, do think it's. It is already becoming normative, even if we don't know it. And I frequently talk to people who are kind of scared of AI or they're anti AI or they're all in on AI. Everybody's all over the map. And so if you're listening, you're probably one of those already, or you're just confused and say, I thought this was a steak sauce and not Al or A1 or whatever. But the reality is, we've been using AI for much longer than we've been talking about it. I mean, if you watch Netflix, Netflix is using AI to feed you the next show, or YouTube, or if you're using Google Maps or Waze or any of those things that kind of feed you information. I mean, there's a reason why people sit and watch two hours worth of cat videos on YouTube. Nobody sits down and goes, I think I'm going to watch the Cat videos for the next two hours. And if, if the algorithm knows that that's the kind of thing that you want to watch, or for me it's not cat videos, but it'll feed that to you. And so you just keep watching it. And so we've been using AI. We use AI, I think chat, GPT kind of made it where it became accessible to the masses. Before that we were using it, but you didn't, you weren't really interacting. You didn't know you're interacting with it now people are using it much, more openly and it affects, I mean, so medical, professionals are using it to help them chart and AI scribe, that's taking notes in an exam. Or you can use it for all sorts of ways to use it, in the medical profession, in our homes, in churches, it shouldn't be any different. So, one of the concerns I hear a lot from leaders is, hey, I know a lot of pastors who are just going to ChatGPT and basically writing the sermons, which obviously, before we started building things, we looked at this as what are the things that we believe about AI? We set our beliefs, belief system around what we, what we believe about it. And it kind of helped us create barriers. And so for me, if it's soul care, which I would certainly think that preaching and counseling and those types of things are things that I would not want to relegate over to an algorithm. Those are human to human activities. But in the preparation, in the research phase, you may spend a lot of time using AI that could help gather resources for you and help you do the research that normally would have taken you hours to, to do. So I don't know that, there's a easy answer as to whether or not we should use it or how we should use it, but you have to think about it before you get those questions. So for us, we don't use it for counseling, we don't use it for. I would never want to replace a human activity that is person on person with an algorithm. But if we're talking about renaming computer files automatically, I'm all in on something like that.
Dr. Jessica Peck: You know, Don, I remember the first time that I ever encountered a smartphone. I was teaching nursing in a hospital. I was at a bedside with a patient and a student. And at the time we used this, this drug book, an actual physical book. It was called Harriet Laine. And it was the guide for everything that we use, right, for everything that's medications. And one of my students pulled out a smartphone. I'd never seen it before. And I was like, what is that? And he told me it was a smartphone and he was going to look up the medication in there. And I said, oh, no, no, no, no, no, we use this. And he asked me if I wanted to race. And I'm like, yes, absolutely. I will find this drug in this book that I know like the back of my hand way faster than you as a student will find it on that. Whatever little square that is. And we raced, and Don, I lost. And my husband got a bill that day for a smartphone because my student looked at my phone and said smartphone. And looked at my phone, which was a flip phone. It said dumb phone. And you know, I remember thinking in that time, like, wow. Like, this is really. This is really, It's unsettling. I just felt like it was unsettling because here it was. And it wasn't something that I felt like I needed to use, but here it was. It was here. Now, I'm. I'm ashamed to say that I actually learned from a student about Chat GPT, a student who had been watching the Kardashians. Now, I want to be very clear. I do not watch the Kardashians. Okay, but they were talking about seeing this. Yeah, they were talking about chat, chat, chat what it. What it is.
Don Barger is the director of Innovation and AI at The International Mission Board
And I think it's interesting, Don that, you know, here you are. I already talked about your, The International Mission Board being, the director, the director of Innovation and AI. It is already here. This position is there with the imb. That may be really surprising to people. I want you to talk more about just the impetus for why you are there. I introduced you as one of the leading voices here. Why do we need this? Why is it a reality? Why do we need to wrestle with this and have somebody who's on the forefront of that looking at some of the ethical tensions. You've already previewed. Yeah.
Don Barger: So I think it's. Before I get into that, I think it's interesting that now nobody would ever question whether or not you would be carrying around a, Harriet Laine book with you. I mean, you have up to date now and you're looking up stuff instantly, and that's happened in our lifetime. And what we're seeing right now is this acceleration of change. So that's. We're talking 15 years ago, something like that was happening. Now we're seeing that amount of change happen, but not over a 15 year period of time, but compressed into one or two years. And it's for many people, they can't imagine the time. There are certain people, they can't imagine remembering how we did things before. We were using the stuff that we have today. So, yeah, it's interesting. So why do we have, this position of AI and innovation? So I was Director of Innovation before the AI got tacked on to that role. And I think it's really important for any organization to always be innovating and to be thinking about how might we do something. So we're not, we're not just out trying everything that's possible, but we are exploring and we're saying, okay, what, what's changing? We're trying to look into the future and say, okay, how, how is ministry in our case, how's ministry going to be looking in the future? How can we get ahead of that? What are the things that we need to be prepared for so we need to be thinking about from an ethical side of this? What are the things we are not going to do? What are the things that were the barriers that we're going to draw? And if we're not thinking about it, those things will just happen. And if you're not prepared for that, if you're not, in my case, I like to be the person who is exploring how we can do things better and how we can be more effective and how we can have more of an impact. Can we do 10x20 times what we're doing with fewer people and fewer personnel? And so how do we do that in an age without compromise? So if you're not proactively thinking about it, what will happen is it'll sneak up on you and you'll, you'll either compromise or in the case of AI, you know, we would never, allow anybody to bring your own computer. I don't know of a hospital or a, university that would say, yeah, you can use your own computer and you can teach and you can keep all your patient notes or you can teach every. No, I mean, it's been years since we've allowed stuff like that, but yet we will allow people to bring their own AI. And so the reason why we kind of protect those computer systems and phone systems is for security and privacy. And we want to make sure that we're controlling access to sensitive data. But AI people are just giving away their data as, you know, freely, and they'll put stuff in and they don't realize that you've just fed really sensitive information into a system that who knows what, how it's being protected or if it's being protected or if they're using your data that you shared to train on that. So we want to be able to proactively think about that, not reactively think about it. And so I think it's important for Christians to be involved in this. So, you know, the Pope had his encyclical on AI, about two weeks ago, and it's. It was a big deal that, that he. Some of the things that he said, and I've written on my substack a few articles about the things that are. That he said. And we've. It's not new. We've been saying this, some of the same things that he said for the last few years. So either Christians be involved in what AI, how AI is shaped, or we're going to leave it to people like Sam Altman or Elon Musk. And they certainly will shape it, and it will not reflect the worldview that we would want reflected in those. And so we want to make sure that AI is ethical. We want to, eliminate bias as much as possible, because AI is biased. If you, if you just use it without any guardrails, it will sometimes reflect us, and we're biased. And I will reflect the bias that we bring to it.
Dr. Jessica Peck: You know, I actually just saw a news article this week, Don, that was some researchers from universities across the country who looked for bias against religion and AI and looked across all platforms, and we're talking about how AI is biased, like against. There was some bias against Protestants, there was bias against Jehovah's Witness, there was bias against, you know, particular denominations. But you. You really kind of explained it a little bit and previewed that the bias comes from what is fed to it, because that's how it's learning from humans. And one of the things that is a real reality is I am shocked, Don. I really am shocked by the rapid uptake of AI, how people are just using it everywhere. And I think there's a lot of people who think that they're not using it, but it's being used on them. And even when I work with young people, you know, I'm a pediatric nurse practitioner. I'm around kids all the time. And where we turn Google into a verb, like, Google it, they've turned chat into a verb. They say, oh, just chat it. Like, just put it into chat. And that's how they use it. And even, you know, I was looking at my little nieces and nephews who were using AI for play. They had it generate a script for them for all of these things. The way that it is shaping our worldview, feeding us videos to watch without even thinking about it. We have got to have Christians on the forefront because we know that people are going to AI now and asking questions. That's one of the things I saw in this research study was asking like, should I become a Catholic, Should I believe in God? And AI is there and we've got to meet people where they are in the moment, but with wisdom and discernment. And dawn, we're already up against our first break, but when we come back, we'll talk about something called Faithbot and what it's what's going on. Looking forward to it. All right, see you on the other side of this break. Right.
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Graves Into Gardens by Brandon Lake and Elevation Worship: But it couldn't fill me. And treasures, they fade are never enough Then you came along and put me back together Every desire is now satisfied Here in your love. Oh, there's nothing better than you there's nothing better than you Lord, there's nothing nothing is better than m. welcome
Dr. Jessica Peck: back, friends that is graves into gardens by elevation worship. And there is nothing better than God. There is nothing better. Although man in our own wisdom may think that we are more wise. There is nothing better than the living word of God, not even AI. That's what we're talking about today. Or as my mother in law calls it, Al or Don, as you have taught us. A1. It is not a future issue though it is something that is here. I've been talking about this for months now, saying AI is in your home, it is in your children's toys, it is in the platforms that they use, it's in the school search engines that they're using. It's a present reality. But for Christians, the challenge isn't simply understanding the technology, it is learning how to engage with the technology, which is completely unavoidable. But how do we engage it faithfully without surrendering our what makes us uniquely human and while being true to biblical standards and values. And I'm talking today to Don Barger, who is Director of Innovation and Artificial Intelligence at the International Mission Board, the imb.
Faithbot is an evangelistic chatbot that was developed through the imb
And what we're going to talk about now is really something fascinating that's happening in Christian ministry today. It's something called faithbot. Now this is an evangelistic chatbot that was developed through the imb. And last I saw. Don you can update me on this. I saw 600,000 people and probably that is even more have already interacted with it, asking spiritual questions and exploring Christianity in multiple languages. But faithbot is raising some important questions. Don, is it pointing people to Christ? Like what role should technology play in evangelism? Where are the limits? So talk to us about faithbot. 600,000 is an eye popping number to me for sure.
Don Barger: So it's bigger than that. So this morning just before I logged in to this, I checked and it was up to 888,000. So I was hoping to hit a million by the end of May, but it looks like it'll have to be the end of June that we'll hit a million. So yeah, 888,000 people have used it.
Don Barger: it's been around for just about a year and two months. So we started it in April, kind of released in April of last year. It took us a lot longer than that to build it. But so this is, ah, it came out of a need. So we do. One of the things that the innovation team, leads the IMB with is something called digital engagement. So we'll run ads on social media all over the world in different languages and trying to engage people to get them to engage with us about the gospel. And I think, I don't remember the stats from last year. I think we were just over 80,000 conversations that we had with people using the digital engagement. Over 3 million videos, watched to completion, like evangelistic videos. So lots of different call to actions that people do. But in the conversations you can imagine having to have people ready to respond to 80 plus thousand people is kind of a challenge, especially if some of those people who are writing you are just wanting to yell at you or send you nasty stuff and really aren't interested in having a gospel conversation. So with this idea, could we build a tool that would be kind of as, a triage of stuff is coming in and then what is the likelihood that this is a true gospel conversation? And so then we would prioritize those conversations to go to humans. And if somebody's just yelling or sending you bad stuff, then the AI would interact with them and engage with them. And so it works really well. And so it helps us to prioritize human to human contact when people really are wanting to talk. The problem was we didn't have anything. And so we, we built this chat bot, kind of prototyping it. And then I was in a small group and someone said something in the small group that I was like, I'm not really sure that that's true, but I don't want to be the guy in here and going, I don't think, I think you're saying something heretical. But I remembered that I built this tool so I put it into faithbot. It wasn't named that at the time. And it came out and it gave me all this information. Oh, this is really cool. So afterwards I went up to him and I showed him, hey, you know, actually when you said this, you know, here's a tool you ought to look at. Well, he loved it. And so then that kind of was the idea of faithbot. So we built it for one purpose, use it for this other thing. So we started releasing it, after a lot and a lot of testing. So the premise is that whatever you ask faithbot, it will always respond from a biblical worldview and it's always going to ground those responses in a biblical narrative, if it can. So it's going to try to find scripture to talk about, the, the question that you're asking it now, if you ask it a common, you know, a modern, you know, who's going to win the, the Auburn baseball game, it probably is going to tell you something, but it's going to also try to share a Bible story with you as well. So that just was kind of an idea. I went to a big conference in Dallas, last April. I gave out a few hundred of these little NFC cards that you tap to your phone and it opens up on your phone. And within a few weeks, we had had tens of thousands of users just growing globally. And then we continued to just grow. And so we've continued to tweak the. Actually, it's been probably six or eight months since we made any changes to it because it responds really well. It created a whole series. So now faithbot is in multiple languages, and we've created some other tools. We call it like the Engage series. So let's say that you would. Would want to engage with someone from another faith and you would like to share your faith with them. Then this Engage tool will take on the Persona of that other worldview. And as you share your faith with that Persona, it will push back or ask questions relative to how someone from that worldview would respond. So it kind of gives you a trial run and a practice, and at the end, it'll give you an evaluation to say, hey, you know, when you said this, this is how someone from that faith actually would hear what you're saying. So it actually will become kind of a coach for you to be able to share your faith more naturally in other worldviews. So that's also. The website you can go to is faithbot Tools, just Faithbot Tools. If you go there, you can open up a plethora of tools that we've shared and we've created for Christians to be able to use AI in an ethical way. So, yeah, Faith Bot has been really, really well received.
Dr. Jessica Peck: You know, Don, I just. I continually think about the ethical tension here, and I want to be really candid and say that I'm sure as you're talking, there are people who are thinking, oh, my gosh, this is making me so uncomfortable. I don't know, like, should we be doing this? Should. This just sounds really foreign. It sounds really like the Jetsons finally coming to life in our lifetime. But I think at the same time, you can't ignore the fact, dawn, that you just said almost a million people you will pass million people who have engaged with faithbot and people are engaging with AI and asking it spiritual questions. And in open systems, much like the research that I talked about looking at, you can get there. There is no. There are no guardrails. There are, There is no developer who's sitting there thinking, okay, I want to make sure I'm really protecting your spiritual formation. And one of the differences with Faith Bot is you're thinking, okay, we're engaging people where they are, but with some safety and ethical guardrails. Can you speak more into that? Yeah.
Don Barger: So I, I think you just, you answered the, the concern because a lot people are using this, the same technique, but they're going to Gemini or Chat GPT or Grok or Claude, and they're saying, hey, I've got this question about something and they'll ask it. So that's where people are going. we could, if it would be possible for all of us to have access to a theologian who could sit down with us and talk to us and spend time with us, that would certainly be preferable. But the reality is most of us, most people don't have access to that. And most people who are teaching a small group, don't have the theological training that maybe I've had the, the privilege of having. And so one of the things that, several people, I mean, lots of people have said, man, this has helped me so much in preparing my small group discussion because I can put in there all the stuff I was thinking about saying, and it'll give me feedback and it'll help me. Sometimes it'll point them to say, you know, actually what you're saying is not true or is, is you're misinterpreting. And so we've, we've grounded it with scripture. We've helped people to kind of narrow the focus so that you're not going to ChatGPT and getting it to create those tools or create your lessons for you. And just, just to be honest, when we are, I hear testimonies of people from overseas who are working in other parts of the world, and they will go and they will share with someone from another faith. And more and more people who they're being shared with are opening up ChatGPT and putting in, you know, this Christian is telling me this, I'm a Muslim. How should I respond? And that is happening frequently. And so I don't look at this as taking the place of us humans proclaiming, that's not the purpose of this. The purpose is to help me be as best prepared as I can when I share. And so a lot of the ways that I use AI would be like this. So faithbot, tools provides access to Christians to go and learn about and better be better prepared to defend the faith.
Dr. Jessica Peck: Well, one of the, the really the opportunities that's coming with AI that I'm seeing is people are calling it a, a great kind of equalizer, having access to tools that you didn't have access to before. And we've seen this happen before. I think that's kind of reassuring to think about because we think about, you know, the Renaissance and the invention of the printing press that allowed Bibles to be printed. And for the first time people kind of have access to the word of God. They could learn to read, they could read it themselves. And the same with the Internet. You know, the, the Bible app is like extraordinary in its reach and giving people access to the Bible. And now just as you talked about having access to theology, whereas other people may be well intentioned but ill informed and not have access to some of that theological training, they don't have, you know, the, the benefit of some of those, those tools and things like that that are there before. I think that's really encouraging to see that, that and to engage people where they are. I mean again, I don't think you can ignore the fact that people are going to other open AI platforms and you've had nearly a million here on faithbot. And I want to know, dawn, what kinds of questions are people asking faithbot? Because another thing that we see is that people will ask a chatbot something they may be too shy or too embarrassed or too afraid to ask another human being.
Don Barger: So it's the really cool thing about the way that we've set up faithbot for now is that it's all anonymous. So I don't know who's asking what, I don't know. and when you have nearly a million people, it's impossible to go and audit and to read every. I don't spend any time reading chats. Occasionally I will have gone in and looked at something. We do have certain topics that would be flagged and so those are where I spend most of my time. So like if someone is chatting with this chat bot about abuse or self harm or any, anything that you would look at and go, oh my goodness, we've really got to get this one right. and I, I feel like that about everything on there, but like there are certain things that we really don't want it messing up on. So those are flagged and then I will get a notification and there's just certain topics that I will go look at. And so one of the things that it's not going to counsel you on this, it would say, you know, we encourage you to go find someone to talk to. If you need prevention hotline, you know, here's a number, here's someone. If you're being abused, we encourage you to reach out for help. But it is, it's all over the map. I don't have the stats in front of me. We just wrote an EMS paper about this, this topic about the number of people who are using it and how it's being used. The English versions, the people who are interacting with, in English mostly it's significantly two or three things. One would be people who are preparing a small group lesson or they're wanting to do research on a topic and they'll do a lot of that research. The others would be people who are struggling and I'm at my wits end, I don't know what to do. and they will seek, you know, I, I, what does the Bible say about this? What does the Bible say about suicide? What does the Bible say about staying with someone who is abusing me or something like that? And it's really sad to, to see those types of chats, but they, they're more prevalent than, than you would imagine. And I think you're right. I think people are much more willing to say something to the chatbot than they would to a human. This is yet again one of the reasons why I really advocate for using the anonymous versions that we offer rather than like signing into ChatGPT and putting all that in there. And then all of a sudden those are guarded or they're saved and they're discoverable by court and it can know who said what because it's in your account. So there's all sorts of challenges that I see in there. The other pieces that we've seen a good bit, overseas we see a lot of people asking about the difference between Christian, Christianity and maybe the majority religion where they are. so there's, there's, it's all over the map. I mean when you have, and when I say the 888,000, that's just the English chats. So if we were to pull in the other languages that are included, we're well over a million and a half users around the world.
Dr. Jessica Peck: Wow. You know, I think one of the other big differences is just motivation because when you think about these, mainstream, you know, the, the big name open AI platforms, generally speaking their motivation is marketability, influence, you know, being able to buy and sell information, to commodify attention and market it and sell it. And we hear all of these conversations about advertising now coming to AI, you know, you put into AI, oh, I'm having this problem and it's going to suggest a product placement for you. Right. See those in movies. But now it's going to be like, oh, have you tried this? And here's a link, you can buy it. And all of those things really the, the, the bottom line of any business like that is going to be profit. That's very different than what you're doing at the imb, right?
Don Barger: Yeah. And these are expensive. So I mean it is, it is not cheap to run an AI system like this. And so fortunately for us, we're donor driven. And so we, we are given people, people give to these type of initiatives so we don't charge. So when we run these, when we offer these services, like anybody can use them. And, and I mean, I don't know who you are and I don't know if people want to give, they can. And fortunately for us, we've had enough people use the service, find value in it and say, yeah, we would like to, we'd like to give to that. We want to donate to make this possible. And so what I love about that
Dr. Jessica Peck: is I have I. What I want to know what you love about that. We're going to find out right after the break. We'll continue talking.
Don Barger talks about how Christians should engage with AI
The break is back. Radio is so rude. And we'll be right back after this break talking more about how Christians should engage with AI with Don Barger See you in a minute.
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Jesus Over Everything by Andrew Holt and The Belonging Company: Jesus over everything here. Praise Forever More, A song for all eternity. Jesus Christ is Lord
Dr. Jessica Peck: Welcome back, friends, that is Jesus Over Everything by the Belonging Company. And you know, when I hear songs like that, I, I think about how convicted I am and how easy it is just to sing a lyric like that, Jesus over everything. But if you really stop and think about that, that is a pretty powerful and bold statement. And do you really mean it? Do you really put Jesus over everything? Well, there are a lot of people who are going to AI right now instead of going to places of spiritual wisdom and discernment. And I'm talking today to Don Barger, the Director of innovation and AI with the International Mission Board. And we've been talking about faithbot, which is an AI platform that is being used to engage with right now. Over a million and a half people worldwide, over almost nearing a million English, English language conversations where people are asking spiritual questions. And I think back to the scripture that says the harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. This is one of the challenges that we have is that there's a lot of people asking questions. There's not enough humans to engage. So how do we use AI ethically and responsibly? And I've been saying this AI is a reality. It is here. And I firmly believe that Christians should be on the leading edge of this conversation looking at how do we engage ethically. Because every transformative technology has opportunities and challenges, temptations, even. AI can do a lot of things in assisting missionaries, much as dawn has already described. Accelerate research, expand access to information, help provide sound theology to Bible teachers all over the world. But it can also spread misinformation and diminish that human connection, create dependency and blur the line between authentic wisdom and machine generated answers. So how do we navigate that tension? I'll tell you, Don and I are not going to be able to answer all of that question and give you something nice and tidy that you can take away. But we are being brave enough, I think dawn, to engage.
What opportunities do you see for AI in Kingdom work and gospel centered efforts
And so you, you've described yourself as optimistic and cautious, cautiously optimist, mystic. What, what opportunities do you see that are most exciting to you for the potential for AI, for kingdom work and gospel centered, gospel centered efforts?
Don Barger: I think, I think Christians engaging in this conversation is, is very important that we can't sit on the sidelines because this is, it's not that we engage it because it's inevitably going to happen. But you brought up earlier the the, the printing press and I think we're in a very similar role. I think we're in a world that's very similar to that time where before the printing press, very few people have had access to scripture, many priests didn't have Access to scripture and so the post printing press. Then all of a sudden it was the democratization of information. And I think that AI is kind of the modern day version of the democratization of information where all of a sudden we have access to every amount. We've kind of had that with Google in the past, but it's really hard to get information out of Google. There was so much. And what AI can do is it can narrow that down really quickly and give us really good insights. And so I think that using AI ethically, not using it for bias and not using it for discriminating against certain peoples or are abusing people or trying to manipulate people, but to truly help us use that AI, use tools like faithbot to help us be better prepared, to help free us up from the mundane work that we're doing. That sometimes, would have taken a long time to do analytics on data or on, I mean just in general in the public, like understanding large data sets of information and then pulling the value out of that. Whereas in the past we probably just couldn't have done that. We recently did something where we had 9,000 minutes of interviews of talks that we were doing. 9,000 minutes. It would have taken months for us to go through and actually do some analytics on those conversations. And I was able to do that relatively quickly. So every morning I wake up and as there's more of those conversations happening I just get, get new updated information of those analytics and I can go back and spot check it, make sure it's accurate. But that is the type of thing that I don't think most of us, I think people are either really a negative or they really don't think about the consequences. Very few of us in the middle who are saying, yes, I'm very optimistic, but I'm also very cautious and how we use that data. So if you're on either one of those extremes, try to put yourself on the other side just for a moment and think about how we might. If you're on the negative side, you can think how might we use this, to use it for good. And if you're on the, you know, there's no limits. You may want to think, well, what would happen if, you know, and put in the worst case scenario, you know
Dr. Jessica Peck: Don I can share a story where I was thinking exactly like this. So recently I was in Kenya and I was part, I went on some visits to mothers who were expecting babies. We went and visited this teenage girl who was expecting her first baby and let me Tell you, Don, like her home was not very accessible. We went on a road that. I've never used the word road so loosely in my life. Like we went as far as we could on the bus and then we had to kind of climb down this ravine, cross a creek, climb a mountain, get up to this home. And when I walked into the home, it was like a combination of plywood and corrugated metal, you know, that was just kind of cobbled together. But when we walked into to this woman's home, to this girl's home, she had scripture written all over the walls of her house. And they had a Bible. I'll use the term Bible loosely too because I'm talking about a crumpled pile of papers. Like it was water damaged, it didn't have a binding on it, but it was in a place of honor in her home. Like it was, it was very important to her. So I'm looking at this place and all of a sudden dawn, her cell phone starts ringing. This, this girl had a cell phone. She had access to a cell phone and they had a very strong signal out there, there. And I'm thinking, what kind of access, what kind of, of discipleship, of connection, of gospel sharing could happen with this girl who was so hungry to learn about the word of God, but is very physically isolated. And I think about you, you know, being with the International Mission Board. This is exactly the kind of work and vision that you are doing. And so as you're having these conversations, as you're saying, envision the opportunities and also watch out for the pitfalls here because you know, we may think AI interactions are imperfect, but human interactions are also imperfect. What kinds of questions should churches and ministries be asking as they're looking to engage in this space? Like you've got some who are saying, hey, we're all in, we'll jump in. And some saying, we're not touching that with a ten foot pole. There's, there's, that's just normal human response. What questions should they be asking? Yeah.
Don Barger: Ah, so I mean, I love your story about being in the place where the, there's, there was. You would not expect a cell phone signal. But in many cases that is the case where you're finding that, that is. I was recently on a flight, in another part of the world and I sitting next to a person for 16 hours and was able to share with him for many hours. And he said, well, I really like this. I really wish there was a way for me to know more. but I cannot go to the country that he is in. And so I gave him a version of faithbot in his language, and he was able to take that back into his country, where he could access that. And I did the same thing in another country as a taxi driver was sharing with him. And at the end of that conversation, he asked, boy, I really wish you could just stay here and share with me. And so I took out my little NFC card, this little card right here, and I said, hey, have one of these. And you can just tap your phone and you can ask it anything you want. And in that case, he actually can WhatsApp me. And so he's WhatsApp me back and forth. But the first person. There was no way for me to ever communicate with this person again. So it's not like this is. Well, there's so much of a better way. What this has offered me is there was no other way for me to give him anything else for him to take back in with him. There is no way for me to continue contact with this guy. And he was able to take faithbot in. And I can see chats in that language. And I know that that person has shared that with other people in that language because it grew in that part of the world. So I think the other. For a church that would be questioning this. One of the questions I would have is, if you're going to work with a people group and you had a cultural insider who could tell you information that you may not have even been willing to ask if would you not take up, take that person up on it? And so one of our church partners that we. I was doing some training with was working with a refugee population here in the United States. They've been going time and time again to this city in the US where there's a certain refugee population. And when I had shared with them, they took the Engage Lostness, which is on the faithbot Tools site, and they actually put in that people group, the language and the. The culture that they're working with. And then they were like, oh, my goodness, what we. Everything that we've been saying, we were thought we were communicating clearly the gospel. But whenever we went into this tool, it helped us understand that things that we were saying, we were thinking were very clear. I was saying, you have encoding and decoding of information whenever you communicate. I was encoding my information one way, and the decoding, the interpretation. And we're not talking about English to another language. We're talking about understanding. And so the AI was actually able to help them say hey, when you say this, they hear this. And I know that you're trying to say this. If you want to say this, here's a better way to say it. So AI gave them a cultural insider, option that they previously never had.
Dr. Jessica Peck: That, that's amazing to hear. And I can, as we're talking, I mean, we're just back and forth, dawn, back and forth with the messiness of it. You know, I mean, there's such great opportunity and also such great challenge, and I think it's important to acknowledge that. But I'm so grateful that people like you are on the forefront of that because that's where people already are. They are engaging. We've got to go where the people are. And when we look at AI and the, the, the advances that happen, I mean, all of a sudden, Don, I feel like I'm living in dog years. You know, when you look back, it's not a period of years, it' of months. When you look and see how much the world has changed, how quickly AI, is happening, it's hard to say. But if you look back, say five years from now, and you look back to this moment where the church is engaging in these conversations about technology, what do you hope that we get right? What are your, what are your hopes for what could be a vision for how AI is used as a kingdom tool? Tool?
Don Barger: Yeah, I think five years is like asking 20 years ago. I mean, it is. Five years is, is so long in AI years. I really hope that we're able to see one of my dreams and I'm working with Baylor University on this is, I would love to see us be able to do a better job of communicating with people who can't hear. And so like a text to sign and assign to text. I would love to see our speech to sign and, and sign to speech. Like imagine if all of a sudden you went in and you were meeting with someone who could not hear and they, they could sign and as they signed, you could hear what they signed and as you speak, they could see what you are saying. That would be, we, I like to talk about moonshots, like getting our loon shot. This was a loon shot. This is one that is so complicated. And you know, we take for granted because text to speech and speech to text is so easy. I mean it's, it's, it's happened in the last two years where I can just drop a four hour conversation and AI can just transcribe it really quickly and give me feedback that's one thing, but to go. Sign language is way more than the hands. So people assume, oh, you can just do the hands. No, it's. It's leaning in, it's leaning back, it's emotion, it's big, big, it's small. There's so many different things that play in. So that would be one of the things I would hope that we could, we could make advancements on. I think that Bible translation is benefiting greatly from science, from. From AI. I think that's going to only continue. That doesn't mean that humans aren't involved in the Bible translation. It means that the very tedious parts of comparing what's said here and said there, humans are still doing translation, but the checking and the testing, a lot of that can be flagged. Imagine if all of a sudden the AI could just flag and say, hey, you might want to check this, you might want to check that so we get faster and much better translation. I've already seen AI translation grow just in regular translation. It's so much better today than it was even a year ago. text to video, creating videos. Ah, creating. One of my favorite things I recently did was created a series of Bible stories using, you've seen the Lego movies, but this is like AI generated Lego movies or AI generated, cartoons or that, that it just. They look awesome. And you look at it and go, I could have never done this in the past.
Dr. Jessica Peck: Well, that is so encouraging to me. And Don, I know that you are in a space that is really high stakes because people's souls are at stake and what are at stake here. And I think it's encouraging to hear about your motivation, about the people that you've surround, surrounded yourself with, about the ethical guardrails that you're putting in place, but also the potential to reach people with theology with the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to be able to fulfill the Great Commission. Those things are really exciting.
AI can help us communicate and translate and organize spiritual conversations
Tell us one more time where people can find faithbot.
Don Barger: So faithbot.tools So if you just go to that website, you can find several of the tools that our team has developed on that website.
Dr. Jessica Peck: There you go. faithbot.tools AI can help us communicate and translate and organize and even initiate spiritual conversations. But it can't replace the work of the Holy Spirit, the authority of Scripture, the wisdom of godly mentors, or the transformative power of walking in person with real people in authentic Christian community. The future belongs to those who are engaging faithfully and seeing ways that we can use technology as you do that as you wrestle with this, as you pray over it, I pray the Lord will bless you and keep you and make his face to shine upon you. And I'll see you right here next time.
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Jeff Chamblee: The views and opinions expressed in this broadcast may not necessarily reflect those of the American Family association or American Family Radio.
Jessica talks to Don Barger, Director of Innovation and Artificial Intelligence for the International Mission Board. Barger shares about the IMB's AI platform FAITHBOT.
Chapters:
(00:00) American Family Radio thanks sponsor Preborn for supporting pro life advocacy
(00:50) Artificial intelligence is increasingly shaping how people learn, work, communicate
(02:41) Don Barger leads AI strategy for one of the world's largest missions organizations
(04:16) Don Barger says AI is already becoming normative, even if we don't know it
(08:54) Don Barger is the director of Innovation and AI at The International Mission Board
(15:24) This year so far, Your partnership with Preborn has saved 50,000 babies and moms from abortion
(19:04) Faithbot is an evangelistic chatbot that was developed through the imb
(33:38) Don Barger talks about how Christians should engage with AI
(37:23) What opportunities do you see for AI in Kingdom work and gospel centered efforts
(50:03) AI can help us communicate and translate and organize spiritual conversations
(50:57) Preborn has rescued over 400,000 babies from abortion
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