I want to follow up real quick on the video that I shot last week. There was one major omission and one significant miscommunication when I talked about my use of AI. I’ll start with the second.
AI in My Design
I said that I use AI for my design work. I want to clarify that only one time have I used it to do creative work. And even then, I had it give me an overall set of ideas, but then I built it. I built the design from scratch in Bricks on WordPress. Other times when I’ve had it do anything like layout or design, I’ve been so unhappy with what it produces that I just turn away in disgust. The time may come when it can do really well with layout and design. But I feel I can instantly recognize AI design when others do it. It’s a major turnoff to me, though I have kept silent until now!
I have never once delivered a website design that was made wholly by AI, only by people. I have used AI to process text and cascading style sheets, which is special web design code. It’s very good at that. And one time I was curious to see if it could produce an HTML page to my specifications. But I used a design tool to dial in the look.
Also, it is incredibly useful to be able to recrop images in Photoshop and let AI fill in some blank areas. I do this on my thumbnails. I do not generate AI thumbnails; I can spot those a mile away. I take images I shot, but in which I need to extend the upper part of the background so that I can have more space for letters, and I let AI do that for me.
I hate AI generated images. They lack a soul. I don’t mean to be offensive, because there are far more important things going on in this world, but I think the use of AI-generated images and design has rapidly become a marker of, well, I don’t know what. Something negative. Like too much clip art used to be in the 1990s, or like a profusion of animated gifs used to be on websites during that time. I don’t like making predictions; this is a strange world; but what I heard about text in the recent past I feel is true of design now: AI is making the real thing more valuable.
Now, I’m sure I can be fooled. When one of the kids in my daughter’s class did a science air project on whether people could spot AI images, I spotted every one perfectly. I’ve spent so much time looking at digital images—for 30 plus years.
Fundamentally, I do feel that design is something I give my soul to. I don’t think I’m that great at design,. I think I’m good enough to do the work I need to do and to be an art director for others. I’m better at judging design than I am at creating design, but I’m good enough that I don’t want AI to do design for me.
AI is a great assistant and a terrible designer. And I intend to keep it that way.
AI in My Research
The other item in that video that was a major omission was this: I said that the TGC statement drawing a line in the sand against AI usage for writing prohibited AI for research, and I said, “There’s the rub.” But I never again talked about the rub.
So let me tell you where I’m at there. The more important something is in my research, the less likely I am to use AI at all. Except in one major way, it’s the best search engine I’ve ever seen. It can find citations for me in real books, better and faster than anything else. So many times I have searched for citations and failed to find them online, even though my skills are pretty good, because I’ve been doing this so often for so many years. AI can find stuff, can find needle tips in whole states full of haystacks.
But when I do use AI to answer questions I have in research, I usually want it to send me to human-created sources. The other day I was writing a chapter in my next book, and I couldn’t remember for sure what the technical term was for a specific grammatical feature of some languages, that expresses, along with first-person plural pronouns, whether or not the speaker, and the addresse were involved in the thing the speaker is reporting.
AI reminded me, after one failed attempt, that it’s called “clusivity,” and I slapped my forehead, and I went to Wikipedia, which is written by humans, at least so far. And I confirmed it: Yes, that’s the term I remembered. And I got some further details and pointers for more reading.
If I need a quick and dirty answer, to, you know, the question of the etymology of some word, which is something I ask AI on a regular basis, I’ll ask AI, but I won’t use that information in public until I’ve confirmed it through another source.
I do find I really love AI within Logos, because it sends me right to human-created sources. And when it gives me text, it’s summarizing and often quoting those sources. So I just haven’t run into it hallucinations (though a friend says he has). This video is not sponsored; I have another video I’m working on that will compare Logos AI to other AI tools for Bible study. That will be sponsored, though I was planning it for a long time before the sponsorship opportunity arose! Logos AI has done an excellent job finding concepts in my library that I simply would never have found through the text-based searching that was previously available to me. That does not mean there was a deficiency in Logos. There simply wasn’t the technology available to search for high-level concepts.
I’m now doing this constantly in Logos. AI there ends up being a glorified search engine, glorified in the same way that my body will be glorified one day: you can still recognize it as a kind search, but it’s also in a different category altogether, far higher than regular search.
For a couple of real-life examples of things that I searched for in using AI in my research, you’ll have to wait for that future video. Here’s just one: I asked Logos AI, “I need to find quotations where Christians assert that New Testament Greek is the most precise language known to man.” It nailed it. It sent me right to some resources I purchased for my library years ago.
I don’t feel that this was cheating. It’s very much comparable to what I did during my dissertation where I, when I was writing about agape. I just searched books for the word agape, and to see if they’d mentioned them.
Would it have been ideal for me to read the entire book and find those references? Well, I suppose, but that’s utterly impracticable. I did a little bit of cherry picking with software tools that weren’t available to my professors when they did their dissertations. I didn’t feel guilty about that, then, though I didn’t raise the question to myself if I ought to feel guilty. And I don’t feel guilty now. Technology changes, gives us new tools. AI is doing something similar for me. It’s searching and finding things.
Where I do confess that I’m a little nervous is in what skills of mine might atrophy, what research skills of mine might atrophy, given the use of AI. But I’m repeatedly finding sources that—I know myself, I’m 46 almost—I wouldn’t have found these things without AI.
I would have found something that would have been good but not as good. So I don’t think my research skills are atrophying. I actually think that they’re growing, having this
powerful assistant beside me at all times.
I do think the fundamental principle is, for me, in research, is that I confirm any judgment AI makes by going to authoritative human sources. Often enough, I am that source. It can suggest something to me, and then I can go look it up in my Bible and say, yeah, I see that, too. Or sometimes, I’ll have a strong idea about some linguistic fact, and I’ll look it up in AI, and AI will confirm that, yes, indeed, I was right, and it’ll put it a little better than I would.
But I never take AI prose and use it. I always write my own prose.
One more thing AI does for me in research: it does a lot of the dirty work I used to have to do myself. One evidence of my being a designer at heart is that I really hate reading documents that are formatted in an ugly way. So one thing that AI does in my research is that real quick grabs a bunch of text and formats it and mark down so I can read it in my own app and not be forced to endure someone else’s awful typographical choices on their horrific website. Or just last night I had it ingest a PDF that was a page scan from a book. It spit out beautiful, perfectly formatted text that I could read easily on my Kindle. It did the grunt work so I could do the brain work.
One commenter on my last video about AI said, “AI levels the playing field for the layman.” And there’s probably some truth in that, and I certainly don’t resent it. Would that all the Lord’s people were biblical scholars. But I wonder if the advent of AI as a research assistant won’t do the same thing for biblical studies that it has done for design. Two things: I think it may make human creativity that much more valuable, and I think it’ll help those who already have skills to do even better work. Theoretically, I can make my own app with AI, and I’ve had a few ideas, but fundamentally, I don’t understand software development well enough to do this kind of work. If you don’t understand biblical studies, I’m not sure AI is going to do it for you in a way that others will find persuasive. The shaping of a human is a mysterious thing. I don’t think deep shaping in a good direction can take place through shortcuts. Instead, I think AI is a fantastic research assistant and a horrible replacement for the researcher.