Mini: Robots Revisited — Part 2

PODCAST
Written by Ryan Joy & Bryan Schiele
 

302 | Geektober | “Right Into the Nerd”

Put AI to Work as Your Servant

Put down the pitchforks — the old men yelling at clouds are having a change of heart! For our Bible Geektober finale, we're flipping the script on part one with a mini-episode all about our favorite ways to use AI responsibly. How can a digital assistant act as a brutally honest sounding board, a glorified research librarian, or a custom study notebook without stealing the sweat of your own study? Why does Bryan listen to a robot preach his own sermon manuscripts back to him while walking the dogs — and why did Ryan actually clone his own voice? Most importantly, how can we use "the distance test" to tell when a shortcut is clearing busywork off our desks versus stepping between our hearts and the people we love? Hit Command-Option-Shift-V and join us for a super nerdy, practical wrap-up on redeeming our time without losing our humanity!

Takeaways

The Big Idea: AI assistants — when used as tools — can help overcome friction in our research and administrative tasks so we can invest our hearts in deep study and human relationships.

This Week's Challenge: Intentionally spend the time you saved using digital assistants in unhurried prayer or intentional conversation.

  • Welcome and Recap

    Ryan: It's Command, Option, Shift V on a Mac, uh, which

    Bryan: just dumping right into the nerd here, like right off the bat

    Bryan: Well, hello everyone, and welcome to the Bible Geeks podcast. I'm Bryan Schiele.

    Ryan: I'm Ryan Joy

    Bryan: And thanks so

    much everyone for tuning in. In part one of our discussion, we started right into the dark side of automation, the danger of synthetic worship, dodging the sweat of personal study, and trying to preach without eating the scroll

    first

    Ryan: So today we wrap up our Bible Geektober for the year with a mini episode on our favorite things about using AI responsibly. Today, the old men yelling at clouds get excited about how simple digital assistants can clear off our desks, eliminate busy work, and free us up to invest our hearts in deep study and face-to-face community

    Bryan: So I think it's important for us to, uh, I don't know, walk back is not really the answer here, but to clarify maybe some, uh, some of our hot takes or some of our discussion that we had in our f- uh, part one episode of, uh, of our robots discussion.

    I thought it was really good. I, I was really happy with the way that we covered everything, but we definitely did take sort of a negative spin on some things. Um, And so this episode really is on the positive side of AI as a tool.

    Icebreaker Tech Shortcuts

    Bryan: so let's kick this thing off with an icebreaker here. Ryan, what's your handiest non-spiritual keyboard shortcut or tech hack that you refuse to live without?

    Ryan: So very specific keyboard shortcut that I can't imagine how much, uh, work I would have to do without is, um, It's Command, Option, Shift V on a Mac, uh, which

    Bryan: just dumping right into the nerd here, like right off the bat

    Ryan: y- keyboard shortcut, come on. It's so specific, but, like, if I had to reformat my text every time I pasted something from my notes into, uh, my PowerPoint or my, um, you know, whatever document that I'm working on, the website, uh, that would be harder.

    But that- that's very specific. There are lots of tech hacks I use all the time, but that's a keyboard shortcut that I, I... It would make my life harder. What about

    Bryan: You know, you really surprise me in the depth that you go, and I, I think you and I are cut from the same cloth with the, uh, the way we use keyboards and, and technology in that way. It is, you?

    know, shocking to me, even in my own family, that I have to tell my lovely wife to use uh, Command-C to copy something. And like, she... it it blows her mind just to even think about like, you know, some of these keyboard shortcuts that she's so not familiar with.

    Uh, You know, I really appreciate it, like when I'm at the computer, um, you know, doing Command-Tab to like move through Windows and through applications and things. And uh, I think I've, the first time I ever saw that, like in high school, somebody doing that on their computer with Alt-Tab at the time, you know, uh, on a on a Windows machine, I was just, my mind was blown, just did not understand what was going on here. And it unlocks a whole new thing.

    Once you start realizing that there are some cool shortcuts or little keyboard things you can do, uh, it definitely opens up a lot of options. And that really is, you know, kind of the genesis here of a conversation that we'll have about our favorite things with tools like AI. Um, I think there are so many ways that we can use these tools and in positive ways that don't really make me overly concerned about spiritual things, uh, leaning on them in some of the ways that we talked about in our last conversation.

    What are some of the ways that you like to use these tools? just give me one, and then we can kind of go back and forth with some of our favorite things.

    AI for Thought Processing

    Ryan: So y- I like to use it... One thing I was thinking of is just external processing and then getting some analysis on my processing. So like,

    Bryan: Uh, t- say more about external processing. What on earth do you mean by That

    Ryan: yeah, yeah. Well, um, that's a way that, uh, Adrian and I talk about just like getting your thoughts out of your head to figure out what you actually think, you know? So

    Bryan: a lot less robotic than external processing.

    Ryan: Yeah.

    So like you and I, often we come onto these podcasts with, uh, our thoughts about 50% formed, and then we work out the rest of it in conversation with each other, and sometimes I don't even know what I think until I write it out or I say it, and I'm thinking, "Wait, does that actually work? Does that make sense?"

    And, uh, there is-- AI is not a su- substitute for human thinking partners, you know? I wanna, like, note that. We wanna talk to each other. We wanna get feedback from other people. But it is helpful sometimes to have... You don't have to ask somebody to, like, give up an hour of their time to help you think through a project you're working on or, you know, y-you're uploading.

    A lot of times, like, I'll upload my sermon manuscript after I've, or, uh, not my manuscript, my transcript, after I've preached it to say, "Okay, you know, here's what I was trying to do. Here's what I said. Here's how long it went. Here's how long I wanted it to g-go." And I'm using it to capture my debrief of how it went, and then, you know, I ask for it to be, this is a trick you taught me, to be brutally honest and to take its time thinking, which is another trick that is helpful to me.

    Like, "Take your time. Don't give me the easy answer." And then to, to just give me, "Hey, what could have improved this? You know, give me, give me honest critiques and feedback as I try to think about the next sermon, how I can, can do something like this better." Or again, if I'm thinking through a project and I'm, I'm working on it, it forces me to get all my thoughts out about it, collect all my data, all my notes, and then organize it or start to organize it and ask AI to, to help me organize it, and then ask for honest analysis.

    And I don't take it as a replacement for my brain. I'll often disagree with what it says, but it gives me another kind of free and easy data point and analysis that gets me deeper into deep thinking quickly with, um, some s- something that pushes back against me, and it's not just me talking into an echo chamber about my own thoughts.

    You know what I mean?

    Bryan: Organization is helpful. I mean, it's definitely good at that, at, like putting information together, finding patterns between them, comparing one thing to another thing is often like o- one of the best tools that you can use.

    So like, if you have a, like, let's say your your sermon transcript that you wanna throw at it, and you also throw at it your notes that you went into your sermon with, like it can, you know, go back and compare, like, where you said you wanted to go and where you actually went and kinda help you see where you might be diverging from what you had intended to do.

    Um, So stuff like that seems like super helpful. And obviously, yes, all of this with caveats applying that you uh, you don't let it replace your thinking, for sure.

    AI as Research Librarian

    Bryan: Um, I was actually thinking for my first pick was something that we find difficult to do is to look at large amounts of data and come up with some kind of uh, thought about it as a s- as a whole or as a summary. And um, sometimes it's like, okay, well, yes, you could go read a book about that, or I could go read a bunch of stuff online about it, but I so often just don't wanna spend the time.

    I, I'm not that interested in it. So like, as, as an example, I uh, ran across this uh, guy on YouTube that was talking about some interesting ways of, of viewing various scholarly reports that he was reading, and he was talking about some interesting details about passages that I found fascinating, so I was watching him.

    And at some point, I was like, who is this guy, and what is he all about? And so I just started asking like, Gemini to go off and like, kinda give me a give me a sense of like, what this guy believes, what he teaches, what his whole shtick is, Like, what's what's going on with this guy? And uh, I mean, I could have like, you know, cruised around every one of his YouTube videos and, and tried to learn as much as I could. I didn't really care, Like, I was just mostly interested in like, getting a sense for who this person is.

    And also, like, where do other people tend to disagree with this person, or you know, on what on what grounds does this person seem to have um, you know, consensus with modern scholarship, or whatever? And so it was, it was more like if I could Google search i- in some sort of really deep way, like the intentions behind something, Uh, that's kinda what I was using it for, was just give me sort of a sense of this person and what they believe, and what they teach, and what they're talking about in these videos.

    And that's harder to do when it's like uh, you know, a modern person that you just don't have a lot of books about that you could go read in the library.

    Ryan: It, it's really helpful, you know, if you're, if you're hearing a perspective or reading a perspective by, say, a commentator on a book, just to have a summary of, A, you know, you're, you're studying Revelation. Here is their background.

    but having a background on where someone is coming from then gives you a little more insight into your conversation partner, if you, if you wanna call it that, that you're interacting with on a subject. And also, like I, I love your point about synthesis of ideas. I used to pay for a service years ago called Blinkist.

    Have you

    Bryan: Yeah. W- uh, that's the, uh, the service that?

    would... It's like audiobooks, right? But it condenses them down into something like short, like the essence of a book,

    Ryan: Yeah, like here's 10, 10 short things about this book and, you know, like, man, that, that became not needed instantly. I mean, there was a human obviously writing those out and talking and everything. But, um, you know, if you're gonna read 10 different books on a subject, uh, you're gonna take-- that's gonna, that's gonna take a long time for me.

    You know, if I'm working on, uh, something, prepping for a class or a study, I might instead want to figure out what are the three books that I'm gonna engage. But also to get to that, I wanna have, okay, here are 10 different books that I'm interested in on this subject. Give me a summary of this, and I, I have a project actually in, in, uh, my AI system that like tells it, "Here's all the things I want you to do about this book.

    Here's how I want you to break it up. Here's how I want you to say, um, you know, if I could only read three chapters based on these criteria, here's the three to read." You know, all of these different things, and then I'm looking at it and I'm gonna choose from that what I'm gonna read. I still wanna interact with primary source material, but like you said, the limitations being what they are, you're just trying to get a bigger body of information digestible and then get you to the right resource quickly.

    Bryan: So your, your second option here is basically like a glorified librarian, in a, in a sense.

    like that's, that's absolutely one of my top r- uh, ways of using these tools. Also, I just did it last night. I was asking for like four books on the Pentateuch and like, f- you know, what are some of some options that help me like take this angle and really dig into it more.

    And it do- it does absolutely surface a lot of these uh, resources i- in my Logos library, in my, you know, just books I can buy off of Amazon or whatever, um, without a lot of extra work having to sit down and read every single one of these from cover to cover so I know what I'm actually, you know, getting out of them. -

    Building Study Libraries

    Ryan: Yeah, we talked last time about the Logos study assistant and being able to say, "I only want my books, and then I want you to get me to the right resource," and, and being able to ask a specific question and then another specific question. I, I don't-- I wanna read in my book, but I want to get to it, to the right book and the right paragraphs in the, in the book about this, rather than having to read, you know, the, this giant tome about it before I can find where it is.

    And, um, you got me turned on several years ago to Notebook LM,

    or now it's Gemini Notebook, um, where you can input and, and create the library you specifically want to interact with on a particular subject. So like whenever I did my, uh, series on atonement, I was really digging in. You and I had conversations about it.

    You know, how should I view penal substitution? How should I-- how does it interact with other atonement models and, and that kind of thing. And so I built out a giant library of hundreds of, you know, over 100 resources, whether it was text I pasted in, links to websites, YouTube videos, you know, things that I had put together myself, all, all different.

    I copied and pasted from my Logos library certain sections of a chapter of a book or whatever. And so now I've got this collection, and I wanna ask this collection

    what... you know, a question very specifically about this thing, this angle that I'm struggling with, and then I want a follow-up question. So that's really helpful.

    Again, disclaimers, but that's really, that's really a, a, a dream come true in some ways for me.

    Bryan: It's one of the things that we talked about a year ago, which we-- which I was using, uh, these tools for back then, and I've really just continued to ramp up and found them valuable in that way.

    Um, They are great at finding information. Um, They're great at helping you summarize information and trying to get you right to where you need to go and saving you time that way.

    Transcription and Text to Speech

    Bryan: Um, My last pick here in our favorite things is, um, r- I would say it's kind of a weird application of AI, but definitely it it comes from the large language model family um, which is transcription and speech to t- and text-to-speech. Um, So having the ability to transcribe um, what you've actually said into text and then having uh, the ability to take text and speak it to you in a meaningful way.

    So I use uh, I use a, an app on my uh, Mac called Whisper, Mac Whisper, and it, uh, you know, I just throw it a bunch of audio files and it exports all of the, uh, the transcriptions for free for me right on my machine, which is really super helpful. I do it with my sermons. Um, I do it with all of our podcast recordings. Um, Anything that I'm doing that that relates to audio, I pretty much throw it at it and get a text out of it that I can search for later.

    But then another part of that is I use uh, Eleven Labs. I use the ability to uh, generate speech from the text that I write. So when I'm in my sermon writing process and I'm I'm like building out my full-on manuscript of the things that I wanna say, um, you know, it's, it's helpful for me to just throw that in there and then throw my headphones in and go for a walk and just listen to, uh, an, of course, a, a robotically generated voice uh, preaching my sermon at me.

    And just to hear it in someone else's voice and to hear it kind of the cadence and whatever it is you know, that this that this tool is generating, is helpful to be like, yeah, that doesn't land or that doesn't make sense or I zoned out about this point and I need to you know, kinda change it and work it, work it a little bit. It's kind of a tool that helps me uh, use time more efficiently than just sitting there and you know, myself going through multiple run-throughs of a sermon.

    If I could just you know, drive around and, and pick up my daughter or go for a walk with the dogs and l- be listening to this kind of in the background, it really helps kinda solidify it in my brain a little bit more. But also, you know, just other text and other kinds of things that I wanna read, but there's no audiobook for, like you were talking about Blinkist. If I just have like a, a digest of something and I want it to read it to me while I'm out and about, super helpful for that kinda stuff.

    So um, yeah, that's definitely not thinking for me. Uh, And it would take me a very long time to sit down and hand write uh, everything

    out based on a a transcript I was trying to create for myself. So uh, I like these tools for that also.

    Ryan: you said in somebody else's voice. It's interesting. I actually had ElevenLabs create a version of my voice,

    Bryan: that's... I, I couldn't do that. That'd be

    Ryan: it's, uh, you know, hearing, the spoken word rather than just reading, it's a different experience.

    Bryan: and so, you know, some of these uses that we have, these are helpful, positive uses.

    Discernment and Distance

    Bryan: How do you know, like when you're coming up to something... So we've talked in our past episode about these ways that tools like this can take over what we should be doing for us.

    Like, how do you know when a tool is helping clear the way for you versus when it's starting to do your thinking for you? Like what, how do you navigate that for yourself?

    Ryan: o-one thing for me is distance, like, uh, I... is how I experience it. D- and that can show up in, um, an email from someone to me or from me to someone. I don't like using it to generate, you know, a, a email or an idea, and I feel that distance when I f- I feel someone else has done that to me.

    But it also can be experienced as distance from my own study or distance from the text of the scriptures or a book I'm reading or, you know what I mean? A subject matter. Like, I feel like there's somebody in between me and this that is shortcutting me to it, it's just, um, intimacy with the project, the content.

    This is mine, and I am interacting with it

    Bryan: So, so maybe thinking about it this way, like if I have, you know, you're gonna feel a certain amount of distance as these tools do things for you.

    But what I think you're saying i- is more helpful for me is like that it's not distance in terms of like everything is distance, but there are certain things that I don't want distance from. I don't want distance from the human connection of writing an email to this person.

    Now, if I'm just responding to a robot on the other end, like I don't care, it doesn't matter to me, right? So yes, uh, offload that, absolutely.

    Ryan: yeah. I mean,Is this a tool that's helping me show up better in this thing that's mine to do?

    but yeah, you're exactly right. It's about discernment. It's about what is, what is mine to do, what is n- needed here, how do I serve the Lord best in this? And sometimes it's like me not using this tool doesn't seem like me being maximally fruitful for the Lord because this is something, you know... Well, no, I feel like I have to walk everywhere because using a car is using the...

    You

    Bryan: Oh, right.

    Ryan: a nonsensical example, but, you know, whenever it's just doing something that is perfect for a robot to do for me,

    that's great. But, um, it is, it's just a discerning process, and we could probably put together a whole list of, you know, I don't know, half dozen principles, but I, I think you're right.

    It's like about what is mine to do and am I showing up i- in whatever it is, loving people the way I need to love them, um, thinking through what I need to think through, that kind of thing.

    Bryan: Yeah

    and we talked on the last conversation about eating the scroll and, you know, the importance of bringing ourselves to human work.

    Yes, you can drive wherever you wanna go, but once you get there, make sure you're using the time well. So,

    Ryan: Right. Yeah.

    Unity and Closing Thoughts

    Ryan: And, y- you know, there is... I found myself, after our last conversation, mostly thinking of more concerns and negatives rather than positives, but there are really great positives. But o- one negative that we don't want to become or, or for even us to be exacerbating here, is for this to be another thing for God's people to fight over, or for people to have str- such strong takes that we have a hard time having harmony.

    So if you disagree with all of these things, you would never use it or you would use it for more things, we are not trying to create an issue here. We're trying to think through. This is real stuff that everybody's gotta use.

    We're just entering the conversation

    Bryan: I think that's well said, and, and maybe that's a great place to wrap this up. It's just a, you know, definitely not another source of division, Definitely not something that, like, you have to use or you should never use.

    Like, figure out where you land with it. If it's something that you want to use, use it intentionally. And and anything that we do, just being intentional about it and understanding that if it's ever taking away our humanity or ever taking away our worshipfulness or the work that we do, then absolutely, like, push back against it. And maybe one person will have a problem with that, but somebody else won't have a problem with it in that same way.

    You know, just, again, use discernment, uh, understand what, what you're doing, and go in eyes wide open, like, like we talked about in the last conversation. Um, So this wraps up our Bible Geektober uh, conversation set. I I thought this was fun. A lot of nerdy things. You know, we've talked all about archeology and and into revelation and robots for a bunch of time and just so many cool discussions here.

    And, uh, you know, just enjoy these, these opportunities to nerd out with you. And uh, on the next episode, we're gonna get into some political discussions, which, uh, I don't know, that's uh, that's gonna definitely be an interesting one to tackle. Uh, There's a lot to be said about politics and uh, how should we relate to it as exiles here in this world. That'll be our conversation in the next episode.

    So thanks everyone for tuning in. Until the next one, may the Lord bless you and keep you.

    Ryan: Shalom

 
Ryan Joy & Bryan Schiele
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