AI Within Your Theological Library

If you’re regularly conducting serious Bible study, or you’ve taken a formal theology course in the last decade, you’re likely familiar with Logos Bible Software. Actually, chances are you’re one of its two million users. If you’re not familiar, here’s the deal: Logos is basically a digital library of Bibles and around 250,000 Bible-related reference works. The selling point is that a few strokes of your keyboard produces the kind of research that once took hours, to days, and untold miles of travel.

By now, it goes without saying that any business that depends on electricity is rolling out something with — or at least labeled with — artificial intelligence. Logos is no exception. Yet the stakes — and opportunities — seem different for a tool in many cases accessed for the spiritual growth of users and those they influence, don’t they? The addition of AI at least presents new questions about what happens when technology mixes with Bible study.

In December, I posed some of these questions to Logos’ chief product officer, Phil Gons.

You’re a tech company just as much as a research company. How do you evaluate technologies for use?

Everybody wants to talk about AI. It’s the latest and greatest thing, and it deserves to be talked about. But to me, AI is just the next form of technology. AI is not unique. There are certain things about it that may be unique, but by and large it is the application of our God-given skill and ingenuity to solving problems — just like we’ve been doing for centuries.

And you’re integrating AI functions into your search?

Search is one of the most important parts of Logos. And in the past we had what was called lexical search, a search is basically just for finding terms. If you search a term like “wind,” it could mean the verb “wind” or it could mean “the wind,” and this lexical search doesn’t know the difference between those two. It’s just going to find that term, then you’ve got to go sort through and find what you’re looking for.

But lexical search is different from semantic search. Semantic search is interested in meaning not in terms. That’s what Google’s been doing for a long time. People have been criticizing us for not having a Google-quality search. Well, Google has thousands of engineers and makes orders of magnitude more money; it’s hard for us to keep up with the technology in that respect. But AI has really changed the game, because people are opening up access to their APIs [“application programming interface, a software that allows different applications to communicate. Think like a weather app]. We can now finally move into the realm of semantic search. So I could ask a question that I might have as a curiosity about the Bible or theology and get results back regardless of the particular terms I used.

Is there a part of integrating this technology into your product that concerns you?

A risk that comes with AI is the risk of plagiarizing, stealing from other people. That’s not unique to AI: Plenty of people have plagiarized other people’s work, taking credit for it and using it as their own. Sometimes it happens accidentally, sometimes it happens on purpose. AI just gives another way to take the work and thought of somebody else and present it as your own.

We’re still working some of this out, but we want to make it easy for users to cite their sources and acknowledge appropriately when they utilize AI in some form.

Can you say more about that?

We know how to footnote someone else’s work. Do we yet know how to cite help we get from AI? With text, generative AI is an advanced form of auto completion. When you now use just about any editor, like an email editor or a word processing editor, it’s going to try to complete your phrase or your clause based on patterns. That’s a large language model making predictions based on the words you just typed. If you hit the “tab” button and accept an auto completion, do you need to cite that or risk plagiarizing? There’s not an easy answer to that question yet. But if you prompt AI to generate a sermon on this or that topic, and then you copy and paste it, you’ve probably crossed a line.

We want to help people take thoughtful, cautious steps in using AI primarily in places where it’s safe, which is helping people find information, learn, and then create something from what they’ve learned.

And then there’s the issue of study habits, of making Bible study something just to knock out. Could there be a threat there, too?

As with all forms of technology, it can promote laziness. One of the benefits of technology is that it saves us time. What do you then do with that saved time? Do you go watch more Netflix or flip through TikTok videos, or do you take that saved time and engage more deeply and thoughtfully with Scripture? Or do you use that to go minister to people, to spend time with your family? If you’re a busy pastor, do you have more time to counsel and visit people, or do you have more time for the golf course?

One of the concerns I’ve heard from ethicists is the inability for most people to factcheck AI functions, or even fully understand some of what these algorithms do. How do you mitigate that?

We’re making no claim that we caught them all and we do disclaim results that were generated by AI, may not be comprehensive, accurate, or relevant. Always use good judgment when relying on AI results. Our hope is that this is going to get you started in a really great direction faster than you could have otherwise. And when you search across your digital library, footnotes are there so that you can go actually look at the sources. We highlight the section in the book from which that sort of synopsis was extracted.

Now, obviously you have that same issue with the author. How do we know what an author said is true? Human authors aren’t inerrant anymore than machines are. One of the things that we try to do is encourage people to be Bereans, the example of the Berean Jews in Acts who questioned Paul and searched the scriptures daily to see if the things Paul was saying were true. Don’t take AI’s word for it. Dig in and validate for yourself.