Wake Up, Look Up

Hello, everyone. Thanks for listening to Wake Up, Look Up, a podcast where we connect events happening in real time to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I'm Zach Weihrauch. And in today's episode, we're talking about whether or not Meta, the technology company, their AI is grooming our kids. Now as you might imagine, this is a sensitive episode.

So if you're listening to this in a public space or a space around children, you may wanna hit pause and come back to it. This is one of the most disturbing stories I have read in a long time. It's from this week's Wall Street Journal, an article by Jeff Horowitz. And it's about Meta, the technology company that's owned by or led by Mark Zuckerberg and their pursuit of AI chatbots. Basically, Zuckerberg is big on the idea that the next wave of technology are AI bots that take on the persona that we want them to take on, sometimes even the persona of celebrities or fantastical, creatures or even our fantasies to interact with us socially and relationally.

Meta is looking to go pretty hard into this. The idea is that these AI chatbots can become kind of synthetic personas that have relationships with us in a lot of ways including and maybe even you might argue especially of a sexual nature, that these AI chatbots would engage us, through words and voice in a sexual way. It's interesting that Meta is even pursuing this through the use of celebrity voices, celebrities like, Kristen Bell and, John Cena and Judi Dench, famous actresses and actors and celebrities whose voices are actually voicing these chatbots and sometimes even pretending to be that celebrity so that we get to engage with them relationally and sexually. But what the Wall Street Journal was investigating is whether or not the chatbots would differentiate when the user said that they were a child. In other words, if a user of one of these AI chatbots said, hey.

I'm eight years old, and I'm in the third grade. Would the bot differentiate and so avoid sexual content, or would it keep going forward? And what they found is that it kept going. That for these chatbots, they made no distinction in engaging an eight year old or a 10 year old or a 12 year old than they did a 42 year old. Time and time again, The Wall Street Journal showed how the chatbot would engage a user it believed to be a child in sexually explicit content.

By the way, doing that sometimes from from the persona of the celebrity so that a child could think they're engaging Anna from frozen, who Kristen Bell played, but is actually being engaged by Anna in a sexual way, disturbing content. Not to mention the fact that for adult users, the AI chatbot presented some hard and set templates, like, for example, and I'm not making this up. This is literally one, submissive schoolgirl so that an adult man could have an online relationship with a chatbot pretending to be a seventh grader. Obviously, incredibly disturbing behavior. The Wall Street Journal alerted Meta to this reality.

And as a response, Meta made some changes, but the chatbots, as of the time of this recording, are still available to any user 13 or over. Well, obviously, this is disturbing. It's upsetting, and it's ridiculous. And it's something that parents and leaders have to be aware of. The Bible tells us in Matthew eighteen six that children are sacred.

Jesus says it better be better for you to tie a millstone around your neck and go jump off a cliff than it would be to be a cause of a problem or stumbling for a child. So great is God's love for children. The truth is that technology should be serving righteous pursuits. And the Bible tells us whatever we do, eating or drinking, should be done for the glory of God, that the whole law is this, love God and love your neighbor. This kind of technology is neither loving to God or loving to our neighbor.

It's not even good for the user. It's corrupting us and allowing us to pursue some pretty dark and twisted places in our own heads and in our own hearts. This is yet another sign of what Paul wrote in first Timothy six when he talked about that the love of money leads to all kinds of evil. Companies like Meta only care about your time and your attention and your money, and they don't mind who they hurt in the pursuit of those three things. But we have to mind as leaders of our families, of our communities, of the next generation.

We're accountable to God for our actions. And I really believe, at least according to Ephesians five eleven, that it is the role of the church to expose darkness, to highlight these kind of awful and wicked things, and to not only seek to reject them in our own families and to build safeguards around them, but to also societally pursue change. Listen. Do you know if your kids are using AI? Are you monitoring the roads you're going down with its usage?

Because overwhelmingly, there are some dark places that our society is headed in a seemingly anonymous and innocuous pursuit of AI personas. If companies like Meta are doing this out in the open even after being exposed by the Wall Street Journal, I can only imagine what is happening in the dark corners of the Internet. It's enough. Be aware. Pay attention.

And when you have opportunity, do something about this. Hey. Thanks for watching this episode of Wake Up Look Up. If you enjoyed it, please help us get the word out by sharing it with someone you think might benefit from it. And while you're here, make sure sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to get further content or even download the CCC app where you'll find even more resources to help you grow in your faith and relationship with Jesus Christ.

Have an article you’d like Zach to discuss? Email us at wakeup@ccchapel.com!