In recent days, several reports have emerged of artificial intelligence (AI) being used to change the Bible. An unlikely organization for doing that is People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). It is reported that PETA recently used the ChatGPT chatbot to change the book of Genesis and make it “vegan friendly.” The report quotes PETA President Ingrid Newkirk as saying: “The Bible has long been used to justify all forms of oppression, so we’ve used ChatGPT to make it clear that a loving God would never endorse exploitation of or cruelty to animals.” In the vegan version, animals are referred to as beings, instead of creatures or beasts, and the use of animal skins for clothing is replaced by hemp and bamboo. The Genesis 22 account in which Abraham sets out to sacrifice his son on Mount Moriah is revised to make reference to his befriending a gentle lamb rather than sacrificing a ram, thus ostensibly showing his respect for God’s creation.
According to PETA, there is more to come: “It took God only six days to create the entire world, but we realized it would take us years to rewrite the whole Bible, which is why we’ve started with just the first book,” says Newkirk. This AI-developed version of Genesis is already for sale on the organization’s website. Of course, the further they go into the Old Testament, the more they will have to change, especially in the Law of Moses, which prescribes a multitude of animal sacrifices. PETA is not alone in attempting to rewrite Scripture through artificial intelligence. A man named George Davila Durendal has fed the entire King James Version into his AI algorithms to produce dialogue in the style of the Old Testament. He calls it “AI Jesus.” According to the report, Durendal claims that AI Jesus learned and absorbed “every word more thoroughly than all the monks of all the monasteries that have ever been,” offering a little biblical style verse of his own.
He acknowledges a lot of grammatical and syntactical errors, and he says he is working to correct those, but that his efforts are a significant step toward replacing human writing with nonhuman writing. Both the Biden administration and tech billionaire Elon Musk have warned about the rapid advance of AI. Musk cites the concerns of Dr. Geoffrey Hinton (known as the Godfather of AI) that this software can write and run its own code and eventually become smarter than humans. As a result, he worries that the internet will be flooded with false information and that the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.” That, in and of itself, is cause for concern as we see absolute truth being eroded and replaced by all kinds of fakery on the internet. However, AI takes this to a whole new level.
What should concern us even more is that the Bible is in the crosshairs. After all, the Bible is God-breathed — inspired by the One who is Truth. The Bible is the revelation of His character and attributes, His dealings with humanity, His precepts and designs for human life, His thoughts toward humanity, and His plans for the unfolding of history. It leads to salvation; it is living and has a life-changing impact. For that reason, Satan, proudly wearing his badge as “father of lies,” has been at work for thousands of years to twist Scripture. Throughout the Old Testament, there were false prophets. And Satan even twisted Scripture in his encounter with Jesus in the desert, to try and derail the Lord’s mission. And from the Church’s beginnings, there have been false teachers and prophets.
Aside from attacking biblical truth directly, Satan has also been busy blurring the lines between lies and truth in the world. His aim there too is to undermine belief in the existence of absolute truth and to call the credibility of the Bible and the Gospel into question. After all, he wants no one to be able to leave his kingdom of darkness and be saved. We must not overlook Satan’s hand in the use of technology to lead mankind away from God-breathed truth and to usurp worship toward himself, which is his ultimate aim. I had the privilege of being mentored by some folks in the Netherlands who had a ministry of watching trends and falsehoods to then expose those in the light of the Bible. They warned me that the early developments of computer science and the bar code were the first steps in a frog-in-the-kettle approach to slowly bring all mankind under the dominion of the Antichrist using technology.
If you haven’t heard of the frog-in-the-kettle analogy, let me explain. When you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, he jumps right back out because he feels the intense heat and knows it will kill him. But if you put a frog in a pot of cold water and turn the heat up slowly and gradually, he will stay. Eventually, his inner temperature will reach lethal levels, and he will die without jumping out. Why? He slowly got used to the rising temperature without realizing it would lead to his death! Everything my mentors predicted in the late 1970s about gradual tech development has come true so far. From the get-go, man has invented things to make his life easier — some for good, some for harm. But, unfortunately, every invention has led to machinery’s taking over God-designed human functions, making us ever lazier, unhealthier, dumber, and weaker.
We invented conveyances to take us around instead of using our legs. We created machines to calculate for us instead of using our brain’s capacity for maths. We developed navigation systems to replace our sense of direction with talking screens that know precisely where we are, where we need to go, and how to get us there. The list goes on. We have become utterly dependent on technology. And technology is conglomerating into the hands of a small group of influential people we’ve seen collaborating with governments eager for ways to control what people think and believe. All of this moves us closer to what Jesus revealed to the apostle John on Patmos. We read in Revelation 13 of a beast that will rise up out of the sea. The whole world marvels at that beast and worships it — everyone whose name is not written in the Lamb’s book of life. The beast is allowed to make war against the saints and given authority over every tribe and nation.
That beast is then followed by a second beast, one that causes every human being to receive a mark on the right hand or the forehead, without which no one can buy or sell anything. It is too early to tell how everything is going to unfold. But we know that commerce is going digital, that technology has now been developed to replace ID and credit cards with an implanted chip, and that it is almost impossible to function without the internet. Even many of the world’s poorest people, those living in huts and shacks, can be seen carrying smartphones and installing satellite dishes on their ramshackle abodes. We must understand how important it is for Satan to undermine the living truth of Scripture. PETA is an unlikely vehicle, even though this should not totally surprise us — PETA wants to end “speciesism,” which the organization believes elevates humans and harms animals.
The AI Jesus project, however, is another matter. It replaces the living and resurrected Christ with an artificial one who rewrites the God-breathed word in a world that no longer knows what is true and what is fake. Revelation 13:10 states that the vision of the beasts calls for the endurance and faith of the saints. That call is relevant to us as never before, as we see Satan tightening his grip on the digital world and using it to replace the real Bible with a fake one and the real Jesus with a fictitious one. The term “artificial intelligence” is already a clue to Satan’s schemes. The word artificial means “not real.” That is fine if you’re talking about an artificial body part that can help us when we have lost some real one. But when you combine “artificial” with “intelligence,” you cross a line. Intelligence is a God-given faculty designed for perceiving, thinking, solving problems, developing language, and doing countless other things humans need for stewarding His creation.
It was meant to be used in the context of a relationship with God and in accordance with His plans, designs, and precepts for created life. Humanity has turned its back on God and sought to become its own god, and in so doing, people have sold themselves to Satan, who has used our drive for freedom and independence to drive us to this point. What looks good and helpful is actually intended to ultimately enslave and control us. I don’t doubt that the Church is on a collision course with technology. However, we are still at the stage where some of it is very helpful to us, and perhaps, under God’s protection, it will remain so. But the reports of AI’s dominating technology and then being used to create alternative Bibles to reflect philosophies and ideologies that conflict with God’s truth may change all that. Jesus, You are the Truth. Today we pray: Work mightily to protect Your inspired word from attempts to use artificial intelligence to change it.
The call to His Church is to have endurance and faith. The call to His intercessors is to pray fervently.
Here are some pointers:
- Pray for the saints worldwide to know and love their Bibles well, so they can distinguish real from fake.
2. Pray that the Church will recognize Satan’s schemes and pray, prepare, and boldly proclaim God’s truth. We must stay close to the Father, get ready for trying times, and continue to preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth.
3. Pray for steadfast faith and courage to stand up for the truth and expose and oppose fake scripture.
4. Pray that the growing concern about AI would become a hunger for truth that leads people to the Bible.
5. Pray for God’s restraining hand on the development of AI and for it to be exposed to the world by more whistle-blowers like Dr. Hinton as a danger rather than a convenience.
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