When AI burst on the scene less than a year ago, people began to ask a lot of questions, like “Is AI going to destroy us all?” or “Isn’t AI a force for evil?” At 100fold we have always worked to redeem technology and we asked a different question: “Can AI be used to advance the gospel?”
We knew that people already asked Google medical questions and spiritual questions, so we expected that they would do the same with AI. We started asking different AIs spiritual questions and found the answers were often unhelpful. So we set about making an AI gospel app, but it had to be accurate and trustworthy. To accomplish this, we trained the app on thousands of gospel questions and answers. After a couple of months of work, we started to ask people to test the app and give us feedback. Within a few days we received the following testimony from a woman testing the app:
“I was talking to a man at work about my hope in Jesus and he asked me, ‘Why didn’t God just delete sin when Adam and Eve fell?’ I had been testing your app and thought that he would be interested in an answer from an AI. So we asked the app his question and got the following answer:”
… her colleague felt the AI had given a good answer and he opened up to receiving Christ
“God did not simply ‘delete’ sin when Adam and Eve fell because sin has serious consequences. Sin is a rebellion against God’s perfect, holy nature, and it separates us from Him. God is just and righteous, and sin cannot go unpunished. However, out of His great love and mercy, God provided a solution for sin through Jesus Christ. Jesus, the Son of God, came to earth, lived a perfect life, and willingly died on the cross to pay the penalty for our sins.”
The woman went on to say that her colleague felt the AI had given a good answer and he opened up to receiving Christ. Please pray for this man as he is reading the Bible and learning what it means to be a Christian by talking with his coworker who is a believer.
When we heard this account, it struck us that this was similar to a tool that has been used by generations of Christians to share their faith – the gospel tract. However in this case, it turns a smartphone into a “smart tract” that can provide an answer to very specific questions.
Another tester commented “I just tried it with three of the most difficult questions my middle kid asked me on his way to non-faith, and the answers were excellent! I wish I’d had this tool then.”
“I just tried it with three of the most difficult questions my middle kid asked me on his way to non-faith, and the answers were excellent!”
To think that this AI app could help people share their faith with greater clarity and assurance – that it could be a tool to help people, not something to replace people – was exciting and humbling. So our answer to the original question of whether AI can be used to advance the gospel is: “Yes, if we build this app carefully, it could be useful in this way.”
We are continuing to work on the app to make it more useful. You can give it a try at questionbot.org or you can call +44 7360 536695 and ask a question directly. Both are still a work in progress, but we would welcome your feedback so that we can improve the app and make it more reliable.
Ed and Kate serve in a digital publishing and internet ministry