AI technology has improved leaps and bounds in the past two years, with applications being proven in thousands of scenarios and industries around the globe. It’s only a matter of time before it becomes even more prevalent within the church; so want to cover a few pros and cons, or potholes and potentials, of integrating AI into your church’s environment.
Potential: Brainstorming Creative Ideas
We know that running kids ministry, tech, worship, or literally any other aspect of your church’s operations requires creativity, mental fortitude, and copious amount of coffee. ChatGPT, one of the most prolific language models for AI, is an incredible repository of information for idea generation. You can ask for ideas for sermon series, activities for kids classrooms relevant to a specific topic, and help with any marketing or language needs for your church. It is incredibly simple to use, which is where a lot of people get hung up. You simply ask it whatever you want. The more specific you are, the better information you will end up getting out of it. So, if your prompt looks like this: “ideas for church lessons”, you will get a widely varied (and less effective) result compared to this: “Five ideas for Christian small group lesson ideas centered around maintaining healthy friendships.” One last pro-tip when using ChatGPT is that after your initial prompt, you can refine it even further or ask for similar/different answers like: “Give me three more ideas for lessons, but make the lesson more fun/engaging”.
Pothole: Over-uitilizing ChatGPT and Losing Voice
One of the major downfalls of using AI is the specific style of writing and voice that AI generated content embodies. Some churches have adopted using ChatGPT content in their marketing, social media, or sermon series and have seen that engagement from their congregation drop as a result. One of the most important things to remember is that AI is a great tool for generating content, but it falls woefully short of spiritually-guided, professional writing. Our advice is to always make sure that any ideas or content you generate using an AI tool are always edited and revised to match your church’s voice, as well as vetted to make sure they align with your church’s goals and vision.
Potential: Generating Unique Visuals to Enhance Presentations
One thing that AI-generated content does really well is draw the viewer’s eye. You can utilize any number of AI tools to create visuals to use for marketing, website, social media, sermon series backgrounds, supporting visuals for kids activities, or even backgrounds for worship. Granted, you might be better served checking out our Premium Media subscription (shameless plug, cough cough), but there are definitely some cool use cases for AI in visual content generation for your church.
Pothole: Maintaining Authenticity
You do have to be very careful and thoughtful when using AI-generated visuals, because a lot of the visual tools that can create content for you don’t look incredibly convincing or life-like. AI tools still struggle in generating very specific things, like human hands, realistic crowds, and animals. Video content, currently, isn’t really in a state where AI tools can do too much for your church, but it isn’t too difficult to imagine that that will be a huge game-changer once the technology continues progressing at the rate it currently is.
