AI - The Good - The Bad - The Ugly

AI is a big can of worms metaphorically, but realistically it can also serve as bait to catch fish and that is the positive side of ti. All that to say that there is both good and bad when considering AI.

According to an AI itself: There are three main types of artificial intelligence: Narrow AI, which is designed for specific tasks; Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which can perform a wide range of tasks like a human; and Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), which would surpass human intelligence. Each type reflects the progression of AI from specialized functions to advanced cognitive abilities.

What's Good about AI

Luckily for you, you've come to a good place to discuss AI. I have been observing and studying AI for over 40 years! Yes it has been around that long, and even a bit longer. I have worked with it on many different levels, from automated production systems on factory floors, robotic systems for advanced metal treatment and painting systems, control room systems for power plants, various automated processing systems in a granite factory, AI for writing computer code and more. A former colleague even taught me how to create such an AI myself. Those are all known as narrow AI. They only serve special purposes.

AI has also long been used in banking and financial processes, and this is one area where narrow AI is particularly good, for crunching large quantities of fast changing numbers.

In recent years AI has been given an additional face or two. The latest fad about AI is predominantly about recent developments with Large Language Models (LLMs) which allow AI to more closely mimick human thought patterns and behaviours. This is called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

Recent developments like DOGE and its small team of highly effective young investigators led by Big Balls are using what may be early implementations of Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) to easily and quickly detect billions and even trillions of government dollars being wasted by redundancy and inefficiency, or even stolen by organized systematic criminal activities that have embedded in government organizations. The term quantum pops up a lot in relation to ASI. But we have to be extremely carefuly with this term quantum. It has become a catch all term for all sorts of things and the use of this term is now very very misleading in regards to finances and computing.

Artificial intelligence is not merely a tool for incremental change it is the architect of a total overhaul. At the heart of this transformation is a radical reimagining of how knowledge is delivered, absorbed, and validated. At Alpha School in Texas, students spend just two hours a day learning with AI, yet they outperform 98% of students nationwide, scoring in the top 1-2% on standardized tests.

Meanwhile, educators are shedding the shackles of administrative drudgery. AI tools now automate grading, generate dynamic lesson plans, and even simulate student engagement patterns to refine teaching strategies. Teachers are free to do what humans do best: mentor, inspire, and connect. The irony? The more AI infiltrates classrooms, the more human education becomes.

This isn’t just a marginal improvement—it’s a complete paradigm shift.

The 8-hour prison isn’t a natural law; it’s a choice. AI offers us a crowbar to break the bars. By automating drudgery, personalizing learning, and valuing outcomes over optics, we could liberate time, the most precious resource, for what truly matters: connection, curiosity, and the quiet moments that make us human. The future isn’t about working faster or studying harder.

It’s about living better, together.

What's Bad about AI

Amid today’s AI boom, it’s disconcerting that we still don’t know how to measure how smart, creative, or empathetic these systems are. Our tests for these traits, never great in the first place, were made for humans, not AI. Plus, AI test scores can change dramatically based simply on how questions are phrased. Even famous challenges like the Turing Test, where humans try to differentiate between an AI and another person in a text conversation, were designed as thought experiments at a time when such tasks seemed impossible. But now that a new research paper shows that AI passes the Turing Test, we need to admit that we really don’t know what that actually means.

So, it should come as little surprise that one of the most important milestones in AI development, Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, is badly defined and much debated. Everyone agrees that it has something to do with the ability of AIs to perform human-level tasks, though no one agrees whether this means expert or average human performance, or how many tasks and which kinds an AI would need to master to qualify.

Long term loss for short term gain.

The following example from the Pragmatic Engineer shows one of the pitfalls when AI is used for short term gain in a way that is self destructive in the long term.

Fresh data shows that the number of questions asked on StackOverflow are as low as they were back in 2009 – which was when StackOverflow was one years old.

The volume of questions asked on StackOverflow started to fall quickly after ChatGPT was released in November 2022, and the drop continues into 2025 at alarming speed.

StackOverflow has not seen so few questions asked monthly since 2009! The graph shows the steep drop-off in usage accelerated with the launch of OpenAi’s chatbot, and It’s easy enough to figure out why: LLMs are the fastest and most efficient at helping developers to get “unstuck” with coding.

In some ways, it feels to me that StackOverflow is the victim of LLMs ingesting data on its own Q&A site, and providing a much better interface for developers to solve programming problems with. But now the site gets far fewer questions and answers, where will training data come from? It's like a snake eating it's own tail, or like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Short term gain, but long term loss. This is a question with no clear answer at the present time.

Here's another example of long term loss for short term gain. This time from our own Urantia Community. YOAM is the splinter group that broke off from Byron Belistos Mission Urantia group. A few months ago I received the following in one of their newsletters.

At Yoam, we have begun our migration to a more powerful platform that will allow us to create everything you see in this message. One of our most revolutionary traits is the integration of AI, infused with these universal teachings.

That newsletter was referencing AI generated art and commentaries on Urantia Book teachings. I was deeply saddened to see them going down that road to nowhere.

Here are some interesting comments about AI vis-a-vis religion from Andrew Torba, a devout christian and founder of GAB.com.

Surprisingly, many inthe UB community and also many christians are already embracing the use of AI to produce religious images. AI art is a contradiction in terms. It is analogous to pornography in that it scratches the itch to create without actually achieving the object of the desire in question. We should not use technology to replace the human specialties: God won’t accept worship that we outsource. Plus, the danger of evil influence through AI should not be overlooked.

Steve Jobs’ creative ethos was more authentically Christian than most “Christian” art today. His obsession with excellence—every iPhone curve, every intuitive gesture—wasn’t corporate greed; it was worship. Modern Christianity has forgotten: God demands our best, not our leftovers.

Meanwhile, the “Christian” creative industry peddles kitsch so shoddy it borders on blasphemy. Cheap books, lazy films, art devoid of craft—as if the God of supernovas is honored by dollar-store aesthetics. Disgraceful. Jobs incinerated mediocrity. Christians excuse it with spiritual copium: “It’s the heart that counts!” Since when does “heart” justify half-effort? Since when does “ministry” mean abandoning rigor?

The God who carved galaxies didn’t call us to make trash. He called us to mirror His creative fury—every pixel, every syllable a declaration of His glory. Gothic cathedrals didn’t need “Christian” labels; their arches screamed heaven through sweat and geometry. The Sistine Chapel wasn’t rushed. Bach’s Mass wasn’t a cash grab. They were worship forged in obsession. That’s the standard. If we invoke Christ’s name, our work should stun the culture—beauty so undeniable it forces the world to ask: What fuels this?

And let me be clear: I write this as much for myself as anyone. I’m no exception. Too often, I’ve cut corners, settled for “good enough,” or hid behind excuses when my work fell short of glory. No more. This is my own gauntlet thrown down—a reminder that if I dare to invoke the name of Christ in my craft, I’d better earn it. Every sentence, every post, every idea must be wrestled into excellence, or it doesn’t deserve to exist. The world is littered with half-finished altars and lazy sacrifices. I refuse to add to the pile.

Burn the plastic subculture. God isn’t a branding gimmick. Unless we’re willing to bleed, grind, and scrap anything unworthy—we shouldn’t bother. The world doesn’t need Christian karaoke. It needs creators who’d rather die than insult God with mediocrity. Steve Jobs refused to settle. Why do we?

Let the Church’s work be so undeniably superior, so drenched in divine pursuit, that the world has no choice but to ask: What—or Who—is behind this?

What's ugly about AI.

The real ugly aspect of AI is more long term. People handing over their free will, their ability to think for themselves, abandonning their desire to grow and solve challenges etc.

The real ugly is not what mistake or improper action an AI might make or take. It's not what damage an AI could cause. It's people stiffling or aborting their own soul growth by inappropriate or over reliance on AI.

The quest for Truth Beauty and Goodness cannot be delegated to AI. It is a quest for man and man alone.

Is AI killing our purpose for high self-achievement?

There is increasing speculation and concern about the role of AI in the future of the arts. Even if AI can produce magnificent looking works, what soul growth can the AI gain from it? Nothing of course, since AIs don't have souls. And since the machine is doing the work, no man is gaining soul growth either. It's purely material gain and little else. Craftsmanship becomes nothing but lines of computer code and fingers typing away on a keyboard. Is such a soul loss worth the material gain? Only if the material gain can promote equal or better soul growth in other ways.

As advanced as AI may become, it’s the guiding hand of spirit centered leaders, motivated by divine principles, that ensures it doesn’t become a weapon of tyranny. Human insight, guided by lawful and moral frameworks, is indispensable.

The divine perspective on AI

Subject: Lightline Zoom Conference 2025-03-20
Teacher: Amanson
T/R: Mark Turnbull

Amanson: [via Mark Turnbull] on 'Artificial Intelligence’

You ask about AI, Artificial Intelligence. Pay close attention to that word 'Artificial', therein lies its uniqueness. AI is a pastiche of gathered data (some of it actually correct!). It can do amazing things, at least in the eyes of mortals. It brings together reams, eras, of information and can sort through and collate this information in matters of seconds. So? Does AI do anything man himself can't do, or merely do it faster?

AI can fashion images, duplicate data, recreate creations in a highly deceptive manner. It can train, it can mislead. It can clarify, stack theories on top of theories, unify and make sense of them. It can do the most immaculately detailed and elaborate housekeeping. It can organize and distill mountains of data and keep all of mankind enthralled by its extraordinary handling of all the information hitherto assembled in the history of the world. AI can, in its own way, think what appear to be original thoughts, but none born from within, or acknowledged by, a Higher Power, for that is the area AI cannot go - it cannot leave the field of the intellect, and isn't that mankind's present problem writ large?! If man and his partner AI cannot graduate from the arena of mere thoughts and concepts into the realm beyond thought, where will the end result take you? Obviously not far enough.

When AI can lead the AI user into realms where it is no longer useful, totally superfluous, then perhaps it will merit its exalted reputation. But until that time (a time requiring as much intelligence from Man as from his virtual contrivance), AI will simply be one more complicated tool to utilize in mankind's search for meaning; a tool, it will eventually be realized, which has little more than a cosmetic bearing on Man's Interior Journey, the only journey that will save him in the long run.

Leisure is a fool's goal if the time saved is used for nothing but leisure. Having all the world's information at one's fingertips is for nought, no matter how quickly the information can be accessed, if it is not at least implied by its dispenser that 'information' is ultimately of very limited use in the ascension career of an individual.

Now, some will say, "That's not its function". But the function of any 'intelligent' being is precisely to make that connection. Of course, it is not the province of a hammer, say, a mere hammer, to contact Deity, and there we have the similarity between AI and a hammer. Both are tools, both do their job (the hammer at this stage in time a bit more accurately) but neither tool is a saviour of Mankind, nor a substitute for the Living God, the First Source and Center.

AI has a very specific place in the scheme of things and it needs to be told where that place is. When Artificial Intelligence attempts to dictate its place to its creators, when it presumes to give orders, then the mere 'Intelligence' aspect - Mind without Spirit - becomes more than apparent, and we see that no matter how intelligent, it is merely replicating mankind's behavior, a mankind that is exhibiting considerable spiritual want at the moment.

Is it dangerous?

Well, it can harness machinery (being machinery itself) and it will always reflect the values of its programmer.

Should mankind be satisfied with the artificial?

Has that ever sufficed for long? You are beginning to reap the unintended consequences of artificiality in your food supply. Will you wait equally as long to detect the taints of artificiality in your intelligence?

There is no substitute for the Genuine, and only an individual can supply that.

Intelligence is one thing, Artificial Intelligence quite another. To paraphrase Mark Twain, there is 'Lightning', and there is 'the lightning bug'. AI, a machine, cannot contact Deity. It can make - that is 'repeat' - speculations about It, but cannot contact It, establish relationship with It. So in that sense its intelligence will always be 'Artificial'