EP355: Can AI Share Jesus? A Digital Mission Conversation with Apologist.ai

all right hey we got episode 356 live recording here episode 356 of the church digital podcast

jeff here excited i you know what i have been wanting to have this this conversation today

i and if i were to say for months like that's not an exaggeration it just seems like every time i

try to schedule a conversation and and the majority of time was my fault like i'm not

i'm i'm not throwing uh jake under the under the bus here like just stuff always seemed to pop up

and uh even today you know some stuff came up and i was like no i am not canceling on jake again we're

gonna make this work and so i'm excited to bring jake carlson into the conversation from apologist

project here in a minute but before i get there everybody quick heads up and this is not a quick

heads up you may have heard of this small little thing we're doing uh called the digital missionary

conference and so we did a conference back in april 1500 people from around the country around the

world came in 85 countries registered to attend this thing was incredible 1100 people showed up day of

we had so much so much success and so much interest and so much excitement in this thing uh we did it

another time we're doing it coming up here in september and october as a matter of fact maybe we went a

little crazy we're doing four conferences in four subsequent weeks yeah okay it is a little crazy but the good

news is you get plenty of insight coming up in september october here's the deal we're doing four

conferences the first one september 17th digital neighborhoods digital discipleship digital church

planting digital cultures in these platforms this is what we're going to get talking about in the

september 17th digital neighborhoods conference digital uh september 24th it's going to be uh control

art recover what is uh what does recovery look like in digital and virtual spaces october 1st is all

about our european friends the european digital missionary summit and then october 8th is going to be

the gaming summit and so everything centered around church inside video games church and discord

being missional in digital excuse me in gaming spaces and using gaming tools inside gaming culture

some really fascinating opportunities coming up listen with the first conference conference we went really

big and we tried to do something for everybody and here with uh with these conferences coming up with these

summits we're making it much more niched much more nuanced to be very specific for individuals so if you're

someone that's that's interested in understanding how to be a digital missionary that's the september

17th one neighborhoods if you're curious um how recovery looks like and and how to do ministry

with people that are struggling with addiction and digital spaces well that's control out recover if you're in on the

24th if you're in europe and are curious what god is doing digitally in europe well you got to come to

the october 1st one and then if you're interested at all in reaching people in gaming spaces come to the

october 8th more information on all of this is going to be on the website missionary dot digital

www dot missionary dot digital so if you haven't registered yet

go register and then the next thing i need you to do real quick go to the website share

s-h-a-r-e dot missionary dot digital we need your help to get the word out on these conferences and

we would love you to grab some graphics uh post them on social media post them in the digital communities

post them in the places where you hang out digitally and virtually and invite people to join you uh for

these conferences what we're discovering more and more is that the the type of people that we're

training to be digital missionaries are not seminary trained they're just normal people and so how many

normal people do you know that might be interested in being a digital missionary and sharing jesus

online what a great concept maybe you can invite someone to these conferences so that they can maybe

discover a digital calling and and start to help you even doing ministry as as god has called you to

as well so more information at the w website www dot missionary dot digital for the conferences and the media

kits where you can share all the graphics at the website share s-h-a-r-e dot missionary dot digital

well i you know what i always hate the uh the announcement part of this because i got to talk really fast get all the

info in because i really don't want to like disrespect the guests and and uh what's coming up here in the

conversation and so i'm excited here to push a button and bring on jake carlson who is the uh founder

of of apologist project and so jake once again thank you for for jumping on the show

yeah absolutely it's great to be here jeff i i gotta tell you just right off the bat i was always

talking to to jake off air and seeing the drum kit right right behind him is is like that is just an

awesome reveal it's an awesome backdrop uh my son last night he was playing his bass guitar through

the bass amp it was kind of reverberating the the windows here and i was i was i was happy i i love me

a subwoofer like that's that's my happy place i'm so happy my son chose on his own to play bass guitar

because it's my favorite instrument by far but if he would have brought home a uh a drum kit and said

daddy i want to play this i think he'd be sleeping somewhere else so is is that is this your drum kit

or is this someone else's like what's the story yeah so this is my kit it's actually um uh not to get

too geeky on it but it's it's basically uh it's an electronic kit but it's meant to look like an

acoustic kit so it's got you know full volume you know uh drums and everything like that and the heads

and all the rest but it's it's fully digital and i can i can play like rhythm games with it and stuff

like that so it's actually awesome yeah i said now that i look i see the brain for the electric drum

kit over you right over your shoulder right there so very cool i i it looks so um authentic i guess

is the right word it didn't even occur to me it was a digital and and i i like i work with that stuff

for like a living and so congratulations you faked me out there a little bit you know i do see some

of the cables coming off like underneath the the um the yeah so okay all right you you you uh you pulled

it over on me very cool well hey jake let's let's let's dig in here uh you know i we do want to get

into apologist apologist ai is doing some uh incredible work sharing jesus online artificial intelligence

like we're going to get into this here in a little bit but jake maybe back up a little bit

apologist project like how did you get here founding this organization what's the calling

what's the story like like give us some background yeah absolutely so um i actually grew up as a

missionary kid in china um and so obviously saw my parents you know kind of witnessing there through

you know english camps and various other means um and so i kind of got the bug early on for for

evangelism um and growing up i went to actually a private christian school over over in china with

american curriculum and um through that you know had you know worldview studies and so forth so got really

interested in apologetics specifically and for uh anyone who's not aware what apologetics is sometimes i

have to explain it but basically it's not apologizing for things but it's it's essentially having a reasoned

kind of defense a rational defense for the christian faith right because i'm sure as uh most of your

listeners are aware um we would say christianity is um is it doesn't conflict with reason right it actually

um has a cohesive um revelation for that for a cohesive kind of worldview and everything like that

so anyway so coming out of uh high school and early college was really interested in apologetics

and way back then and you know kind of 2001 i'm kind of dating myself a little bit here but

um uh nascent stages of the internet saw a lot of philosophical discourse but primarily the earlier

adopters on the internet um with some exceptions were kind of more of a naturalistic philosophy and so

i made myself a promise and also a promise to god during that time uh 20-25 years ago that i would

one day raise on some kind of digital platform for apologetics um so way back then got apologist.com and

kept it to this day you know and um fast forward a little bit i had a career um about 20-25 years

in technology working for a bunch of startups and also some big tech companies like oracle and apple

um and i've been waiting for a chance i shouldn't say waiting i should say uh i've been um a little

derelict in my promise to the lord a little bit and um but back in 2023 i finally you know thought you

know now's the time um i had just left my most recent startup at that point and uh chad gpt was taking

over the world by storm with conversational ai and i thought to myself this is this is too big of a

opportunity to ignore we have to use conversational ai to fulfill the great commission or at least help

fulfill the great commission as a tool and so um in 2023 um started up the non-profit um we did a quick

prototype went to a hackathon that went pretty well um and since then you know we've um i'll get into

kind of the more details of the product and stuff and everything like that a little bit later in the

program but um suffice it to say you know we've been kind of growing and and partnering with various

ministries and and trying to spread the kingdom any way we can by melding kind of my technology

background with my you know desire to see the the great commission fulfilled yeah i i love the line

of being derelict where it's like you were you you had the calling and then it got you know shuffled

under the bed and priorities kind of kicked in i i'm i'm gonna be a little uh aggressive here do you mind

telling this the story or or what that was like what was the wake-up call for you um you know i don't know

there was a there was a moment in time per se that you know i got hit upside the head it was more like

um that was during the the tech layoffs and so um i i think that that timing was uh god kind

of giving me a kick in the butt saying like okay like yeah you're looking for a new job but you know

there's this thing that you've you know i tried to like every decade i would like spin up like a

new like project and like try to start it and stuff like that but something would get in the way

and so i think that that exact timing you know god's timing is perfect and so i think i think

that was his little nudge saying like okay what's your excuse now go do it i love that ran out of

excuses well let's let's dig in here a little bit um talk to us about specifically what apologist

project apologist ai what what are we looking at here yeah so essentially we build conversational

ais for christian evangelism and discipleship um and what that looks like i kind of go through the

history a little bit but but what it initially looked like is hey can we build a conversational ai

that you know somebody could go to just like chat gpt to ask a question and get a response from a

christian worldview rather than you know secular bias um so that's kind of how we started right and then

there's been a bit of an evolution to the point where you know somewhere in 2024 kind of a year

or year and a half into it um we kind of have an epiphany where it's like well you could have one

chat bot and that that's great but that's not how that's not how best to contextualize the gospel you

need you actually need several or you know dozens or whatever um purpose-built conversational ai's

that minister to a particular demographic right so it is very different it's a very different thing to minister to

a you know a western atheist than it is to you know a middle eastern muslim right that's a that's a

completely different kettle of fish and so you know you you hearken back to things like you know paul

at mars hill right like if you if you understand remember that story like in athens like he's he's

talking to the greeks right and he's you know he's using kind of philosophical terms and saying and

you and playing off of their situation and they're kind of um you know their their situation in terms of you

know polytheism and so forth and so you know in the same way we're able to create kind of bespoke

um uh agents that will be programmed in such a way that will minister to a particular people group

and and kind of use language that they would be more familiar with not only when i say language i'm

not just talking about like the spoken language but also the vocabulary itself right so for example

for for a muslim seeker you know we use the word isa instead of jesus right because that's that's the

the muslim term for the prophet jesus right and so um and then in a similar way we're able to kind of

loop in quranic verses by by saying like hey like this is what the quran says about jesus hey check this

out like that actually loops into what the bible says and here's you know here's a comparison or

contrast or whatever and so that epiphany kind of in mid 2024 kind of set us on a course where we're no

people can go to but we're actually a platform whereby missional organizations can create their

own um their own bespoke conversational ai's administered to the people that they that they

want to um and so we can kind of plug in to their their um you know media to movement uh kind of

workflows or or any kind of situation that they want to plug into their their digital strategy we

can kind of plug in with integrations and so forth as well yeah there's i mean there's so much

in what you said right there but let's uh let's back up and and chew chew away at some of it so

you are you've created an ai a specific multiple ai agents that adapt to different global cultures

you know you're talking about the the muslims speaking isa instead of uh in jesus and and using

more language that is more not necessarily um you know dictionary correct but more comfortable in in

the modern cultures of that like um how how was that trying to get the ai to adapt to uh different

cultures shaping away from just you know a lot of times when i work with ai it's it's mostly

general think like from a from a religious standpoint from a practical standpoint from a

language standpoint like you know i know you can can tailor to an individual but you're talking all

all these different cultures and everything and what was that experience like to try to get ai to stay

focused on on a a specific people group culture yeah absolutely so i'll take i'll take our first

example that that you know when in mid 2024 we kind of had that realization our first stab at things

was in fact that that muslim serving uh chatbot and so um what we did essentially was we partnered with

several different ministries that already had content that ministered to the muslim population

and then we um and then we coupled that with a partnership with um several individuals who were

more familiar than i was about ministering to that people group right because i grew up in you know

east coast of china not a whole lot of muslim activity there right so so that's not my area of

expertise but what we'll do is we'll bring in other ministries or even you know just you know people

who are familiar with it to help us frame the prompt engineering for those of you who aren't aware prompt

engineering is basically the instruct like crafting the instructions for a a chat bot so that it will

you know kind of respond the way you want it to and so there's there's two things two key things that

i kind of mentioned there one is what we call the corpus which is a knowledge base of information by which

the the chatbot can draw on that information and the second part is the prompt engineering and that's the instruction set

how do you use that information how do you respond what vocabulary do you use that kind of thing

and so what we have now is is kind of a really broad ranging corpus um that that's backing our

our agents and our agents can then refer to that to that content the way i explain it a lot is you know

nowadays most folks have at least dabbled with you know some form of chat gpt and if you haven't you

should definitely try right but um they're very comfortable with giving say a chat gpt a bunch of

information and just saying summarize this for me i'm too lazy i don't want to read the whole thing right

and and um even though you know these commercial models like open ai's chat gpt or or you know

anthropicus cloud or whatever um they're they're trained to be kind of uh religiously pluralistic

right so they don't want to you know anybody's you know religion or anything like that even though

that's the case they don't really inject their world view when they're just doing a straightforward

task like summarizing text right and so what the the corpus allows us to do is we have that text for it

to summarize somebody asked a question like who is jesus right well we're not just going to go and say

you know a religiously pluralistic answer which is like oh he's one among many you know gods or whatever

right we're gonna completely grab the corpus some really good content from apologetics and evangelistic

you know organizations and we're gonna we're gonna essentially tell the ai hey don't we don't care

what you think right just tell us what summarize this content that we already have right and so

that's how we're able to ground the models in biblical truth is because we're curating these sources and

giving the context to these models and simply giving them a straightforward task just synthesize

and summarize this content that we already have for you and that's where the some of the organization

partnerships which we're talking about with platforms where now you're allowing other organizations to

contribute to the um to the source material to refine and and better align in different contexts right

yeah exactly and so in the in the case that i mentioned with the muslim serving chat bot you know we

partnered with you know some of the authors of answering islam.org in case in case the audience

is familiar with that there's a really good uh ministry out of columbia university actually called

the zwemmer center uh samuel zwemmer was kind of like the the father of um you know mid mid-eastern

muslim missions kind of thing so there's an organization for that and then um a couple other organizations

that kind of had um some some great content online we kind of um got their permission and by the

way just a really sidebar on that like we know that there's it's kind of a hot topic um with regards

to kind of like copyright law and everything like that we get permission from the authors for

everything we use in the corpus um it's it's an ethically kind of gray area um in the in the courts

right now you know anthropics had some pretty good um victories recently but nonetheless we want to

especially given you know the the the manner in which we're trying to promote this ministry we're

trying to be ethically absolutely above board and so we never put anything we don't have permission

to use into the corpus no i i appreciate that and we've we've had conversations about some of legality

and stuff and in previous episodes but that that's good so you're you're you're pulling material from

other places and and getting it into the uh into the ai as source material that it can then regurgitate

and feedback in in a be a conversation prompts and things with with people in different different

contexts by the way how many like i mean we're talking about muslim a lot which is fine but like

how many different contexts are we looking at globally yeah so um during you know that that pivotal

point in 2024 we you know the initial plan was like hey as a first party vendor let's let's actually

create all these worldview specific chat bots ourselves right and so that that was kind of

pivot point where we're like you know what we're not the experts in all this what we really need to

do is come alongside other ministries that have these use cases and use their expertise and content to

produce these chat bots right so now at this point like we have one for uh muslim seekers we have one for

um for kind of uh naturalist uh scientists we have lots of material from like the discovery institute

reasons to believe those kinds of those kinds of folks um and we have um you know ones that are more

using a more like socratic method you know it's actually pretty interesting because there's a lot

of opinions um out there about like what's okay and what's not okay we might get into that later but

um but but the socratic one is more like ask questions nudge don't don't just give an answer

right whereas um some of our smaller ones just kind of give you an answer so we have you know um to date on

our platform i think the count is up to like 120 or so different agents and that's some of them are

our demos but but a lot of them are other ministries either playing around with it or in production

even things like implementing a socratic method that's more um the the tone of the conversation

and the posture of the ai even even adjust based on on the agent that's i didn't realize that uh that's

that's that's interesting so and i'm going to show some ignorance but like you know i know some

languages are right to left versus left to right and in some of that like you're you're adapting for

that how how do you i'm curious how do you like for a a jewish uh someone that's maybe a jew that's

asking some questions uh how how do how would the ai handle something like that yeah absolutely so um so we

actually support um right now 192 languages and and that's that's basically like the base models

um the frontier newest frontier base models like chat gpt5 for example just got released um support

anywhere in the neighborhood of like 50 to 80 languages natively but then on top of that right we also

have a real-time translation module and so that opens up you know some of those less spoken languages

right and i can i can show a demo of that a little bit later um and so um hebrew is one of the

languages that actually is more well supported by by a lot of these and so the native capabilities um

handle it pretty well uh we actually have um a partner ministry i'll give a shout out since he gave

a shout out to me on on a separate podcast humble burger ministries uh where this this guy with you

know a jewish guy or messianic jew i should say um is is currently actively engaged in ministry to to

the jewish people um with with his chat bot he's using our platform to do so as well interesting so

is this are you finding that people i do want to get into the demo here in a little bit are you finding

that people are open to the idea of ai speaking that they're terrified of this idea that they're angry

of at this idea i'm sure you're all over the gamut what what what are you kind of seeing here

exactly yeah all of the above right so um so you know attitudes have changed quite a bit just in the

last you know two years that we've been doing this um you know at the beginning of it i was kind of

scared to bring it up i i kind of use you know different verbiage to to kind of like ease into the ai

conversation with folks because i know there is a lot more opposition especially in christian circles

right and it's a it's a very kind of theological theologically heavy topic um but in the last you

know i'd say year or so it's it's really the exception to the rule now where somebody says oh

like you're doing ai i want to have nothing to do with you in general i think ministries are starting

to kind of wake up to the opportunity and realize and realize starting to realize at least that that

you know this is just another technology with its own unique characteristics but still

a technology it didn't surprise god he knew exactly what was going to happen um and he's sovereign

over it and we can use it to help fulfill the great commission well i i tell you even at a personal

level i i can remember using chat gpt early on and and doing the you know is uh which god of all the

religions which god is real and having an answer the you know a pluralistic or or a general or a pc

politically correct answer and um you know and that was always the the hesitancy for me and not that

i'm i'm not by far i'm not an ai expert but it was always the the difficulty of really utilizing this

because i didn't know how to to to get it down and to aim it but it sounds like you've you've really

developed an incredible method uh to keep it focused um in in such a way to be useful do you mind maybe

taking a minute here and maybe showing us a little bit how it works yeah absolutely love to so um what

i'm going to show you first is um this is kind of our flagship so everything everything that we produce

you know first party we kind of consider more of like a demo now there are quite a few people using

this just to be fair right and also to be fair a lot of them are in north america but i'll but i'll but

given our language capabilities and so forth we actually have pretty high usage uh in other parts

of the world but anyway so this is uh this is at apologist.ai and so if you want to just give it a

try um you're welcome to come here and kind of hit it um recently we passed the threshold where um

one person is using one of our ai agents every minute of the day for every day every day wow so

that's that's thousands yeah thousands of people using it every single day and so we're we're really

excited about kind of the growth there so you'll see you know in this case this this particular demo

has been instructed to give kind of like a one-page essay kind of style so it's a little bit longer

than than say you would want like on a phone or something like that but that's kind of the use case

in this in this one but it kind of goes through an argument i'm not going to kind of belabor it

and then also it'll show some some media so we in addition to our text content we also have

content partners that have you know youtube videos and all kinds of different media podcasts you know

all that all that kind of stuff and then we can expose related media to the to the prompt right so

that's actually what's happening here is prompt gets asked and then behind the scenes our ai

is our our um our platform is going out and getting that related content and then mingling that content

as as a reference point for the ai to answer the question then at the same time it's also searching

our corpus for media related media to that question and kind of exposing that down there and then you can

kind of look here and and and kind of get some more media as well um importantly as well we cite all of

our sources right so not only are we trying to stay ethically above board but actually there's something in it

for in addition to the general you know um good of the kingdom and so forth there's there's actually

something in it for these ministries that give us content as well as they get some exposure right so

we've got all about god and god questions and something from ligonier here right so um so they

and then that link can link off to their you know uh place to either either you know url to read the full

article or or you know purchase a book or what have you right um so that's kind of how it works in a general

sense again this one is is true is is programmed specifically to give kind of one of those lengthier

answers but that's not you know always what we do um we also have let me go over to actually let's see

yeah so i'm going to show you um an example in arabic i'm just going to highlight another

kind of feature that we have so um while this is going so i don't speak arabic by the way so

um i've been told that it does well i'll leave it at that this one is actually we actually support uh

several different models under the hood um this one actually is using the the deep seek model right

so a reasoning model um and it that one happens to kind of perform a little better better in arabic

but you mentioned kind of the right to left jeff sure so that's an example of that going on right

here and the other thing i wanted to highlight here as well is you know it's one thing to get

uh somebody who's curious about you know christianity or just has like a faith-based

question to engage with the chat bot but most of the time what we would say is we really want them

to get in conversation with with a with um a human being right so that's where the digital missionaries

come in right and so and so yes ai can be used to kind of start the conversation knock out some really

good you know answers to questions and stuff like that but the handoff to a human being is very

important to us right and it's very important to our partner ministries and so we have is a capability

of not only letting the ai answer but then also an area kind of below the answer um that we call the

kind of a call to action right so so this can be pretty much anything it's for anybody technical it's

arbitrary html basically so it can be you know a full bleed banner like this is an example of you know

um a banner ad to to send people over to to watch the chosen tv program in arabic it could just as well be

just about anything right so that's that's completely customizable and actually uh recently we released

a change so that you can have multiple different calls to action that kind of spring up at different

points in the user's conversation how many of the people that are using this or the organizations that

are using this are implementing physical where you're it's traffic hopping to some sort of a physical

person or a call center do you have any idea on that um i don't have numbers for you offhand but i

will say that um just this past week we're we're pretty deep in discussions with um with an organization

um i don't know if i should for the sake of the organization reveal who they are but but a major

organization operating in east asia and southeast asia okay what they're doing is they're they're using

these calls calls to action to um we have like a share link here so if you want to so if you click on

this this icon here it'll share the the essentially this um output and then you can send it to somebody

so we're piping that share link through that uh call to action in the link and then it's going off to

facebook messenger where a human chat operator can then um have that link and know what the ai was you

know what the conversation was up to that point and then carry it start to carry on the conversation from

there right so we're we're really focused right now on partnering with ministries to facilitate

those kinds of integrations and interactions where we can you know allow them to to hand off to it to

another human being or sometimes you know especially in more sensitive areas sometimes it's not you know

directly handing off to a human being but maybe it's like scan this qr code or you know contact this

person you know something like that so it's it's really pretty wide open and we've seen a lot of

use cases interesting what is um that that's that's cool uh talk to me a little bit more about the

software what what else are we looking at here sure so um so uh maybe i'll just show another this is i

don't want to geek out too much but i know you know at least part of your audience we're a bunch of geeks

here you can feel free to geek it's okay i give you permission so i'm gonna i'm gonna give a shout

out for our language uh translation capabilities so like i mentioned you know the the base models

depending on which one you pick and we do support you know i think about uh two or three dozen now

but all the latest models we have chat gpt 50 or sorry excuse me chat gpt5 um and and the kind of

the recent ones from claude and a lot of open source ones as well but when we layer real-time

translation on top of that that widens it out to almost 200 languages and so this is an example of

amharic which is the national language of ethiopia so one of the less you know internationally spoken

languages um and so i'll just give an example and i do have um somebody who checked this and said

it's actually pretty good but what's actually happening here it's going pretty fast considering the

fact that basically we're doing that whole you know reference to the corpus coming back and then and

then um generating a response but then we layer on top of that um this real-time translation so so we have this prop this

technical problem where like you know the the ai is outputting content in english right but then we

have to while it's streaming we're chunking it up and paragraph by paragraph sending it out to a

translation service to get back and so that's all happening kind of transparently and so you you saw

it's a little bit slower than maybe english but it's still pretty fast you're seeing it kind of come

down paragraph by paragraph so the user doesn't have to wait for the whole thing before it gets translated

yeah what what is the the global um usage of this compared to the u.s you know i i know u.s is

somewhat more technologically advanced uh but smartphones are all over the place globally and it seems

like a lot of your organizations are more globally based i'm just curious what uh what's uh what's

happening yeah absolutely um and do you mind i'm gonna i'm gonna switch the share to another tab

here are you seeing this okay yeah i'm seeing that country's reached yeah perfect yeah so this is um

this is kind of um and i can show some statistics here but basically this is purposely excluding kind

of the u.s and canada because the truth is right now most of our usage is in in north america to be

fair um but probably um i haven't looked at it recently but probably like at least 25 percent is is

international as well and the more interesting thing about that though is where is happening in the world

relative to other spots you'll see indonesia here so that's that's actually a heavy usage area for us

right now and especially singapore in fact singapore is just absolutely blowing up um and that makes

sense too because if you look at the languages other than english that are that are in use almost almost

half of the non-english usage is in chinese and so of course in singapore you got basically mandarin chinese

and english right kind of the two main languages there um and so you know overall um we're pretty

pleased with that but you know we definitely have a lot of growth to do kind of about in like last six

months or so up until six months we've been more focused on generating the corpus and you know product

development stuff like that and about six months ago we finally said like okay like this is this is

we're good enough we need to we need to focus pivot a little bit and focus on partnering with ministries

getting it out into the field and so we're hoping that you know growth will will definitely um increase

um abroad as well is there any like talking about china um mandarin chinese is there any security

concerns like can they access this um safely or do they have to go through any back channels like what

does that look like yeah you know it's interesting uh last fall um because of my you know having grown up

in china i was invited to like a you know a china missions kind of conference and there was a lot

of discussion about that obviously you know the great you know the great firewall of china they call

it right um and so um there's a lot of ways you can mitigate that through using vpns in some cases

but the most foolproof way um and is is to just smuggle you know offline devices basically and so we're

kind of exploring that a little bit as well because if you think about it like you know the stats show

that like you know probably about 75 percent probably about three quarters of the of the world has is

is connected online through some mechanism but that still leaves a lot of people in you know regions

where there just you know isn't isn't access or to your point jeff like you know closed countries

not only china or north korea but also you know middle east where um there's not as much religious

tolerance as well and so the idea i've been kind of you know experimenting with a little bit and and um

talking with a few folks about is can we train a small language model which is just you know basically

an ai a language um ai um but that's smaller right in a footprint and can we then embed that onto a

device and then just smuggle it in on the device and um to do that you know we would probably use some

sort of like higher powered reasoning model to fine-tune a smaller language model and then find a way to kind of

package at least portions of the corpus that could be representative and then allow the ai to function

in an offline capacity that is fascinating i i did not even know you could do that but uh it's it's

that's that's that's crazy even like you know it's it's you know i hear like the ai wearables and some

of that and so it's almost a precursor to that with the gospel like how do you get um you know a smaller

version of the ai uh that you can you can smuggle across i can remember my uh my parents actually uh my

mom was like smuggling bibles into like you know romania and things like this back in the day and

the church i was a part of was was smuggling bibles into russia and and so now it's hey let's let's

smuggle artificial intelligence like what what is is what i'm just i don't want to get lost in this

because i will but what what is what is a small device that will have artificial intelligence on it

are we talking like a a smartphone uh um like what yeah in fact i've already um in fact a couple weeks

ago i talked to a guy who who has a non-profit who's building um uh android based phones and we

we talked about a potential partnership for that for this exact use case again i don't know anybody

yeah just generally speaking um but there's there's a lot of thought around you know been put around

this as like how do you how do you reach you know unreached countries or or or at least countries that

are closed up and and get get kind of these materials into them yeah you know i know a lot of our people

are um you know obviously in china we chat's a a popular platform but we chat is run by communist

china and so probably not a good idea to uh to you know embed this in in we chat but you know a lot

of our people globally utilize whatsapp a lot here in america are utilizing discord as well for some

asynchronous uh have you guys looked at embedding or creating bots or tools or somehow integrating this

into some of those platforms yeah absolutely so we have uh we have a working whatsapp um integration

right now and actually um one of the volunteers on our team just finished up the uh telegram integration

as well and um most importantly with regards to that is we have kind of the i don't get too technical

but we have kind of like the framework to quickly spin these these kind of integrations up in fact the

individual who um finished up the telegram one spent you know um i i wrote 99 of the code of what you see

right and so another person came in and within a week was able to spin up a whole integration with

telegram um and so we're we're pretty hopeful that you know as you know we meet ministries with

particular use cases we can spin up different integrations in the future very rapidly yeah i'm i'm

curious just as you're talking about this how many people are on your team what what's dev at least

dev wise like how many devs do you have working on this um so it's an interesting question so we're

all volunteer right now right so we're actively fundraising and trying to get you know full time

onto it and so um i do most of the programming but then we also have kind of um a kind of uh misfit

a band of of other volunteers who are kind of helping out and you know people will come and go

as they have time and everything like that but probably on the engineering side you know at any

given point in time we probably have like three or four uh ish um and then you know of course it's

not all just product development it's also marketing everything like that so i we do have a leadership

team again all volunteer um of about uh seven people right now and um who help with kind of

marketing and positioning and business development all that kind of stuff it's incredible product you're

looking at with uh that's 100 100 volunteer based or majority volunteer based that's that's that's

great what's your what's your day job um so i lead a product team for a social media management company

uh okay out of boulder so yeah i'm i'm you know still in the startup world and uh and you know have

that and i bring that ethos to you know the the non-profit so it's kind of a weird thing to treat

a non-profit like a startup but that's pretty much how we operate yeah i mean we are right there with

you 100 and so it's uh it's uh it's a fun road working with volunteers and and remote and and uh

startup like all that all that put together it's challenging but it is it is certainly is fun um

so let's let me ask this question with with the ai oftentimes you'll get into a situation when

you're having a conversation with someone and it's like okay let's just agree to disagree

um like you know i i can no longer have this conversation without shouting at you and and i

feel that you're about to do the same thing with me um how do you handle that in a in an artificial

intelligence situation does does the ai just keep going or like what's what's the deal it depends on

the prompt engineering but one thing i will say is that you know and i didn't really cover this before

but one of one of the advantages to ai is that it doesn't get mad right like so so there's not like

this dynamic where we're like you're gonna feel judged like talking to it and so what we found and

you know frankly all of our usage is anonymous since we don't know who's using it right but we know what

they're saying right and we're logging all of that and so we have all kinds of you know interesting

conversations come across um where people are you know being vulnerable with the ai about things that

they would never talk to another human being about or certainly not a christian right or somebody that

just is an acquaintance and so actually the the anonymous aspect of ai interaction actually lets people

become you know more vulnerable and get kind of into some weighty topics you know for example we have a

you know a really interesting conversation that we saw from from a female in saudi arabia you know

questioning her sexuality and stuff like that like how do you like who would she have talked to in

the middle of saudi arabia right you know what i mean and so and so having those kinds of conversations

without any fear of you know um of you know having judgment late on her or anything like that is is

pretty big factor um but going back to your question you know it really just depends on the prompt

engineering like uh the use case that you just mentioned like you know when when should the ai end

the conversation it's frankly something we haven't really heavily considered but there's no reason why

we couldn't do that you know just in the same way that you can instruct it to you know use a more

socratic method you can easily say like hey if the conversation has gone all along and the person seems

angry just disengaged you know you could you could definitely program that in no problem so but uh the

default right now is you know the ai is just going to keep ai in until the until the person hangs up

that's right that's fascinating what is there if someone does have a conversion if someone does

you know want to take a next step then that's based on the organization that's running the agent at

that at that point they it gets connected to the ministry whatever that looks like okay yeah so for

example you know one of our one of our big partners is uh got questions.org um and then also all about

god.com and i'll actually use all about god.com because i think this is still the case but both of those

organizations have at the end of every one of it's basically question and answer format right on their

web pages and at the bottom it's like hey here's a couple buttons you know you want to find out more

do you want to contact us yes i've accepted jesus you know that kind of thing and so we could use um

what we did actually for all about god is we implemented their exact call to action that they

have on their website um in the planner and so and then they go to the same places so so you know

someone clicks on yes i've accepted jesus they go to the same intake form as they do on the website

that's great do you have any idea uh on on your side what conversion rate meaning marketing not

salvation but maybe i do mean salvation what's the conversion rate of of this stuff yeah it's a

you know it's a funny topic right because like we have all these ministries who are kind of you know

indicated um uh what is it called indicated conversion or whatever is is kind of the term

right or indicated choice or whatever it's right so only god knows people's hearts right so we all know

that but um but yes we are tracking um one of the nice things about our platform is irrespective of

um you know where you send the user in your call to action you can do all the tracking you want on

your site but we're also tracking it as well so we know every time somebody clicks on any part of your

call to action we are tracking that and we will know kind of you know what uh chat conversation they

had that led up to that all that kind of good stuff and then we're going to allow the ministries to

download those conversations and and you know hook them into whatever systems they want so if if somebody

wanted to like get involved or utilize this product like what what are the different ways somebody could

like take a take a step in and and get involved with apologist project yeah great question thanks for

that um so um you know we all we are always looking for more people to volunteer so if you're interested in

helping us in any capacity and again we need help in all kinds of areas not just technical like we'd love

somebody to help with our social media etc if you're a ministry or involved with the ministry or want

to recommend us to a ministry the first next step is just go ahead and book a demo on our website so

there's that you'll see that button kind of plaster all over the place because we like to we like to

get into a conversation with the ministry and really understand their use case and that's also kind of

a mechanism to make sure that you know they're doing it for the right reasons or aligned reasons for us as

well and then what we do is we spin up a uh you know a demo uh conversational ai that they can then just

go and play around with for free um and then you know once the usage starts going or once they once

they you know go into production with it then only then would they start having any kind of fees yeah

and what what are if you don't mind me asking here on air like what what are loose fees for something like

this yeah so really low usage we do have a free tier so um the we have like a credit based system

essentially to kind of abstract the whole token um economy right so um so we basically say um one

credit in our system is one half of one us dollar cent um and so something like a model like chat gpt 4o

costs five credits so that equates to 2.5 cents so a response every response from chat gpt 4o model

would cost 2.5 cents and so we charge uh basically like a platform fee that that you know is determined

by the functionality you you have so if it's like fully white label then you might be on a higher tier

and then we have usage based pricing on top of that um if anybody's interested in learning more

about that you can go to uh apologist project dot org slash pricing and see like all the different

costs and so forth and i'm guessing somehow they can grab a meeting with you and maybe get that

translated into english i followed most of it but at some point i was like i i hope it reads easier than

what i just heard so i might uh i might have to use an ai to help explain it but yes very good i'm sure

you can figure that part out um so and then that that would be embedding on the website or

you're partnering with you at some level to create an agent like if somebody didn't want to go through

the the level of creating an agent but just wanted to get your ai out there as as a chat bot somehow

what would that look like yeah so um you know you know we do support embedding on websites and you

know there are two common ways we do that um people are far familiar with kind of like the customer support

little chat bubble so we do support a mechanism like that where it's like a little chat bubble and you click on

it and opens up a little you know a little uh tiny little you know uh thing in the corner where they

can kind of chat with it right there or a lot of our ministries opt to embed it straight onto their

page for example um we recently did an implementation for apologetics canada where they embedded it kind

of on their page so it looks like integrated with their website more um and then we also do have an api

by the way which i probably should have mentioned before um which means you know if you're a you know if

you're a larger organization that has a an app you know several developers have kind of contacted us

and some major organizations i probably shouldn't mention have contacted us um about just using our

api because they already have the interface they don't want our interface they just want our answers

right or our agent the brain yeah yeah that's incredible like i i didn't i hadn't even gotten to

the place of api and integrating this into a platform or an app or something that's already existing

that's beautiful but i guess if you're if you're doing the work to get it into like whatsapp and

telegram then you're already having some level of an api level uh able for that so that's really cool

show me i'd love to maybe show one or two more uh samples or examples on the ai of some conversations

do you maybe have one or two things you could show in that space sure yeah i'll pull up um i'll pull

up the integration with gotquestions.org um because again like their their corpus like if for those of

you who aren't aren't familiar their their whole website is essentially question and answer format so

it's like match made in heaven right for training in ai right so it's exactly kind of what you want so

don't forget to share the right tab you're on the uh the languages use tab right now thank you for

yeah so this is one uh got questions dot chat right so this is again this is kind of a similar thing to

apologetics canada what they did so they kind of embedded on there so they have their own kind of

website frame and they have you know their little about thing that says you know all that kind of

stuff right so i don't know let's say um uh you know how can a good god allow so much evil in the world

right that's the odyssey stuff um so that that's how it works right and so you can see all this the

entirety of this is completely white labeled they've got you know their own custom footer um they didn't

put a call to action down here but they could they've got their logo up here they got custom information

about their their logo or about their organization and then obviously you know for any language that

that the chatbot supports you can also have all of that information um we have a you know translation

module on our in kind of our back end where you can get all of the you know english uh copy your custom

copy to be translated into all the languages that you support as well um and then i should mention

as well kind of just coming up um we're we're kind of you know you know i already mentioned we're

exploring kind of small language models offline models we're also getting into voice recently as well

um because if you think about it not only you know not only is it convenient to kind of be able to

you know just kind of converse with with an ai back and forth right if you don't you know hands-free

operation but also you know i was reminded recently from from um a brother um who i met about there

there are quite a few languages that don't actually have a written you know a written form right so

they're they're they're oral only and so the idea it kind of fascinates me of of like how can we use

you know um how can we use just oral transmission like right with with with explaining these things

these theological in those languages so that's kind of an area that i'd like to expand in as well so

we're kind of you know we're we're kind of going where god leads but also where the ministry our

ministry partners lead as well so you know we're very open to kind of novel use cases for using ai and

and and kind of spreading spreading the gospel and in um kind of innovative ways very cool i've got a

question here from methos um are you concerned are you at all concerned about people especially new

people getting confused and making mistaking ai for the voice of god that's a great question um so

there's a lot of theology there to unpack right and so um one one thing i'll just uh make a plug for we

have uh we wrote a white paper kind of about about kind of that the theology um aspect of all this um

it's on our website if you go to apologistproject.org um it should be like at a banner at the top and you

kind of click through it but it's it's an extremely important question right so there's there are lines

which we do not cross right we will not cross the line of having the ai pretend like it's a person

right so that means we will not have the ai pray for you right we will give you information through

the ai right but we will not have it pray for you or in any way hopefully kind of you know imply that

it's a human being right and so um now that being said you know you know that's that's our kind of

theology right but we we are very ecumenical in a sense we do let you know other you know any pretty

much any lowercase orthodox um christian denomination uh to to use the chatbot and we'll

facilitate that we go back to the nicene creed for that right so all the three branches of christendom

support that um and so we are you know in spite of my own theology which if you're wondering is protestant

um evangelical but um but but that doesn't mean we we will disallow you know catholic or eastern

orthodox folks from using the chatbot and so forth and so my caveat there is like i have very specific

cross personally for my theology but we leave it open to you know the denominational preferences of

of the folks who are kind of uh using it but i think most people would agree like we don't want

an ai jesus right we probably don't want an ai mary we probably don't want anything that could be

construed as i you know an idol or or some kind of you know uh representation of a deity or anything like

that we really want to we may you know we may have personas right but we're not gonna but those personas

would be more like a helpful teacher not like yeah representation of of uh you know a deity or anything

like that um and in fact this has come up recently because like you know i have to guard myself against

this you know quite quite a bit because the the you know the rate of um innovation in ai is is staggering

right now so like recently for example um since we do have an api and it's actually compatible with

the open ai spec we can now integrate with anywhere that open ai can integrate right and so one of those

places was like you know there's a company that had like uh you know a video avatar right and you could

hook up our llm to that avatar and so and then and so like i did a i did like a prototype of like you

know somebody asking a question we hooked it up to our muslim serving chatbot somebody asking a question

about you know is isa really a god or is he a prophet right and you had this very you know middle

eastern looking man like on video speaking our our the output of our ai right and it's like at that

point it's like okay is that taking it a step too far right because that's that's like representing a

real human being yeah and so kind of pull it back and be like you know what that's that might be a

little bit too far than we're willing to go you know never say never but but that's that that seemed

a little off to me uh whereas like voice you can see that like it's it yes it's kind of in the same

vein but you're not you're not trying to represent some kind of image or anything like that that's

just more of a convenience factor right and so there's a lot of theology to unpack but the short

answer is we try to put guardrails in place that satisfy our conscience about you know this representing

our ai as either human being or some kind of deity and try to prevent it wherever we can yeah i mean

it's it's it's you're keep opening up uh issues and challenges and things that we weren't even talking

about five years ago um at a large scale we we tried some like hey jin stuff where it's like you know

video translation and there's actual videos of me uh speaking in mandarin chinese and and i i speak

really good mandarin chinese like i i've i have a friend that's that speaks mandarin chinese and she

was mad at me because she couldn't believe ai did it that because she thought i learned mandarin chinese

and didn't tell her um but uh you know it's just some some ethical like is this right is this the right

thing yeah and so i think it's good to to question on that you know it's it's i don't know it's the

right answer but i'll often i feel like culturally that may change over time as there's more cultural

acceptance of um what ai is and isn't and what you know fake video or or ai agents video is and is not

what's what's accepted and not accepted you know i don't i don't i don't know that jesus has an

opinion whether or not it's right but there's like a cult and you can at me if i'm wrong but i i just

i think it's more of a cultural acceptance like are we okay using that method or or not but asking

questions and pausing to to evaluate is good i i i would say and it's interesting methods the guy

who asked the question actually says good answer so you you got his you got him happy um but you know

for me it was the hey does this actually feed into like a conversation at some point and you know your

platform putting onus on the um on the uh on the organizations with the call to actions and feed

into their process like i i don't know that i would expect your organization to actually be responsible

for as much as making sure there's opportunities for the organizations that to do what they're doing

and you're just the the gateway to get them uh more connectivity uh methods goes on to say they

will undoubtedly be ai cults soon if there aren't already yeah i don't i don't know that i want to

get pulled into that conversation today but you're you're you're probably not right um you know we it

was funny we uh we just rolled out a couple days ago as a part of our town hall we rolled out our our

ai agent uh through some we've done some stuff with chat gpt uh and then we uh we're working with an

organization called topos that basically encoded all like a thousand blogs 800 blogs almost a thousand

hours of video like just encoded it all on this thing and so we're we're experimenting with them

on it but um jokingly we're calling it lex now i know you said you're not going to put a name on it

we put a name on it um well just to be fair i don't i don't think it's wrong to have a persona right i

just think that if if asked right like an ai should admit that it's an ai kind of thing yeah no that that

that i do agree with but we um we we named it lex uh because after lex luther because at the end of

the world this ai thing is going to try to take over the world somebody's going to try to do something

with it uh but let's let's have fun and use it while we can that's that's all i'm saying and and so um

you know the the conversations about weaponizing and who does what let the ethics and legality

whatever i i that's in my my i am always more uh bull in that situation than bear let's uh let's

let's be aggressive and do whatever we can for the kingdom until we can't do it for the kingdom anymore

and so i i do agree sorry to interrupt go no no please go yeah i want to i want to uh pull on that

thread a little bit because i think there is like this um you know risk aversion right over the top

risk aversion in ministry and i just want to call out you know that i i agree with you on this jeff

like you know the the the early church was not conservative in their you know risk assessment like

they you know martyrs right like they were dying for what you know and i'm and i'm not saying that

we ought to be you know um cavalier or anything like that but it's also i think the opposite extreme

is extremely harmful right like we you know jesus does not call us to be you know risk averse like

the uh the the parable of the talents comes to mind right like the the the servant who buries his

treasure right on the ground like that that was not rewarded by christ right it was it was or the

master in that in that parable right like what was rewarded was like somebody take a measured you

know investment and in in you know in that case financial but but also like i want to encourage

everyone like like take risks for the gospel right like that's that's how the kingdom grows right not

just by keeping it you know to ourselves or or or you know always being so risk averse but but i think

we do need to to within reason take take risks for spreading the gospel i think that's that's how the kingdom grows

yeah and that that surprises me a little bit like if i can just poke that bear a little bit it surprises

me that you have uh more success in the u.s maybe it's based on your exposure than you do globally i i at

a personal level i have found the global audience far more aggressive um than the u.s audience mostly

based because globally we're working with more missionaries and global missions organizations and

and in the u.s we're working with more churches and as near as i can tell uh missiology is far

more aggressive than ecclesiology uh and and as a result of that like the missions organizations

globally are like let's go let's go let's go u.s or u.s churches are like much more um cautious is the

safe word to use there but anyway for what it's worth my uh my uh opinions from the side and once

again if you have hate mail on that you can at andy at the church digital andy would love to hear from

you on that um hey this has been a blast man uh jake i am so glad we got to do that and i was wanting

to crack a joke at the beginning where i would call you jake from state farm and i'm proud that i made it

all the way to the end without making that that inappropriate joke and so not wearing khakis just

in case you're wondering no khakis was it a red shirt that he always wears whatever and so that's

funny awesome well hey this has been a blast um as we're landing the plane here jake any uh any closing

thoughts yeah i just uh i just want to encourage you all i think you know that the the work that

jeff's doing at the church digital is just fabulous right so i think i think you know um you know if i

could leave you with anything um it's kind of our our motto which is meet them where they are and you

know meeting them where they are you know traditionally would mean you know where they are on their spiritual

journey and then sometimes it's taken to mean you know kind of where they are geographically but let's

not forget um i think the the the primary frontier right now is digital and um you know we're working

hard to meet them where they are through wherever they hang out you know in the digital space so i just

want to encourage all of you to to to continue to think through that and and find innovative ways to

minister to folks in digital spaces oh i i love that thank you for that uh jake you can find uh

apologistproject.org and uh apologist.ai to interact directly with the artificial intelligence

jake carlson founder of uh apologist.org jake thanks for coming on man this has been a blast but

uh we're gonna land the plane for jake this is jeff with the church digital thanks for hanging

out with us today on the show we'll see you next time on the stream have a good one

time on the stream have a good one and i'll see you next time on the stream have a good one and i'll see you next time on the stream.