Religious communities around the US are getting hit with AI depictions of their leaders sharing incendiary sermons and asking for donations. Father Mike Schmitz, a Catholic priest and podcaster, addressed his congregation of more than 1.2 million YouTube subscribers in November with an unusual kind of homily. You couldn't always trust the words coming out of his mouth, Schmitz said, because sometimes they weren't really his words--or his mouth. Schmitz had become the target of AI-generated impersonation scams . "You're being watched by a demonic human," said the fake Schmitz in one video that the real Schmitz, wearing an L.L. Bean jacket over his clerical suit, included in his public service announcement as an example.

Pastor and Project H.O.O.D. founder Corey Brooks says the'honest work' learned through trade schools could be the key out of poverty for many struggling in today's job market wanting to'improve their lives.' The crime of post-60s liberalism is that it created permanent Black underclasses all over America, including on the South Side of Chicago where I live. The schools here are poor. Opportunities have been replaced by government handouts. Violence robs far too many families of their loved ones.

There are not one but two dimensions of bias that can be revealed through the study of large AI models: not only bias in training data or the products of an AI, but also bias in society, such as disparity in employment or health outcomes between different demographic groups. Often training data and AI output is biased for or against certain demographics (i.e. older white people are overrepresented in image datasets), but sometimes large AI models accurately illustrate biases in the real world (i.e. young black men being disproportionately viewed as threatening). These social disparities often appear in image generation AI outputs in the form of 'marked' features, where some feature of an individual or setting is a social marker of disparity, and prompts both humans and AI systems to treat subjects that are marked in this way as exceptional and requiring special treatment. Generative AI has proven to be very sensitive to such marked features, to the extent of over-emphasising them and thus often exacerbating social biases. I briefly discuss how we can use complex prompts to image generation AI to investigate either dimension of bias, emphasising how we can probe the large language models underlying image generation AI through, for example, automated sentiment analysis of the text prompts used to generate images.

A New York Rabbi recently went viral for delivering a sermon written by ChatGPT to his congregation, causing many to question the humanity in such an act. Think of ChatGPT as a far more sophisticated version of Google. It's an AI language model designed to generate human-like responses to various questions, from recipes to historical context to computer code and much more in mere seconds. CLICK TO GET KURT'S CYBERGUY NEWSLETTER WITH QUICK TIPS, TECH REVIEWS, SECURITY ALERTS AND EASY HOW-TO'S TO MAKE YOU SMARTER It's surpassed the million-user marker in about a week of its introduction. For context, it took companies like Facebook several months to achieve the same success.

As technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, it threatens to eclipse society's reverence and worship of God -- a looming reality that has severe ramifications for the Church, theologian and bestselling author Wallace Henley has warned. "We are all made for transcendence, God's overarching glory," Henley told The Christian Post. "As Solomon said in Ecclesiastes, God has put eternity in our hearts. St. Augustine said, 'The human heart was made by God for God and only God can fill it.' And if we don't fill it with God, we fill it with whatever else we can find … that's what all idolatry is about. The idolatry of the future is going to be the worship of these machines, which has already started, either tongue-in-cheek or some people literally and very seriously worshiping the works of their hands."

Last Sunday we reported on the computer program that inventor George Davila Durendal, hoped (or so he said) would--for millennia--be a sort of Scripture for robots and people. The program constructs "prophecies" from the text of the King James Version, a translation of the Bible into English completed in 1611, which has remained influential for centuries. Will the A.I. Jesus version do so well? Not if you go by prophecies like this: "And he shall come against him, and said, As the LORD liveth, that he might be fulfilled which was spoken, he said, Thou are the spirit of your good works that ye have not seen, nor any thing of the service thereof, and a certain censer, and the sin offering, and the posts thereof were displeased with the dead of her father's house." If this is the best AI can do in 2020, you do not need to fear the Omega Point in your generation!

The woman startled at the blessing. In English: "I have called you by name; you are mine!" It may not have been the words themselves that caused her to jump. The blessing, taken from the biblical book of Isaiah, has comforted many for thousands of years. It may have been the source of the benediction: A robot built on the body of an ATM machine, whose plastic fingers sprung open and palms lit up as it raised its mechanic hands in blessing, brightening an otherwise gray, rainy day in mid-June.

MANILA – Job opportunities in Japan's health industry continue to attract Filipinos a decade since it started accepting candidate nurses and caregivers under a bilateral economic agreement. Earlier this month, a new group of Filipino health workers who aspire to work as nurses and caregivers here began preparatory training in the Japanese language and culture in two centers in Manila. The 341 applicants comprise the 12th batch of candidate nurses and caregivers under the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement forged in 2008. Japan accepted the first batch of Filipino health workers in 2009. And I think I will broaden my experience and learn more there.

On a recent Sunday at the Queen Anne Lutheran Church basement, parishioners sat transfixed as the Rev. Dr. Ted Peters discussed an unusual topic for an afternoon assembly: "Can technology enhance the image of God?" Peters' discussion focused on a relatively new philosophical movement. Its followers believe humans will transcend their physical and mental limitations with wearable and implantable devices. The movement, called transhumanism, claims that in the future, humans will be smarter and stronger and may even overcome aging and death through developments in fields such as biotechnology and artificial intelligence (AI). "What does it mean to be truly human?" Peters asked in a voice that boomed throughout the church basement, in a city that boasts one of the world's largest tech hubs.

As followers of Christ, we are called to engage the world around us with the unchanging gospel message of hope and reconciliation. Tools like technology are able to aid us in this pursuit. We know they can also be designed and used in ways that dishonor God and devalue our fellow image-bearers. Evangelical Christians hold fast to the inerrant and infallible Word of God, which states that every human being is made in God's image and thus has infinite value and worth in the eyes of their Creator. This message dictates how we view God, ourselves, and the tools that God has given us the ability to create.