Generation, Artifice, Intelligence

A Wayfare Forum on AI

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT; two months later, it had nearly 100 million monthly active users, making it perhaps the most repeated and least understood acronym in the history of consumer applications. For the record, ChatGPT stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer but what it means is still very much up in the air. Fueling this meteoric rise was the palpable feeling that something long promised and much debated had entered the world: artificial intelligence. (That and a lot of electricity!)

The rapid release of subsequent versions of large language models, of which ChatGPT is an example, has only ratcheted up our collective levels of wonder and anxiety. What do we make of all this? What should we make of it? What exactly is this new technology? And what, if anything, does AI mean for Latter-day Saints and Christian life more generally?

In the search for better conversations on these topics, Wayfare invited a number of writers and technologists to contribute to a series on AI. As you’ll see in the reflections below, there are a wide variety of interpretations of artificial intelligence, but also a consensus that at stake is the future of creativity, knowledge, community and religion. Our hope is that these reflections will help you make greater sense of how this technology—and the people in front and behind it—may yet reshape our world.

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