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Current State of AI

AI in Everyday Life​

By early 2025, ChatGPT has over 400 million weekly users. Ministries use AI for tasks like sermon preparation, content translation, prayer chatbots, and donor engagement. AI now functions through mobile apps, wearables, and integrated enterprise tools like Microsoft Copilot and Google Duet AI. Open-source tools such as LLaMA 2 and Mistral are expanding access even to low-resource contexts.

Even before ChatGPT, AI systems were being used commercially (and for fun) in numerous contexts, generally at corporate and industry levels, and as built-in services to consumers:

  • Google search results
  • Facial recognition systems
  • Social media friend suggestions
  • Navigation and driving directions
  • Voice assistants (Alexa, Siri)
  • Text-to-speech services
  • Recommendation systems (YouTube, Amazon)

Behind the Scenes​

Additionally, many people's experiences have been affected by AI in ways they might not realize. These include email spam filtering, online advertising, customer service chatbots, and song, video, or product recommender systems. Additionally, unbeknownst to most people, their experiences have likely been affected by AI in flight delay predictions, energy management and distribution, supply chains, sales forecasting, investments, legal forensics, and online article posting. AI systems are also increasingly being used in criminal justice, traffic management, medical insurance and diagnoses, and reviewing job applications.

Most, if not all, of these examples represent "narrow" or "weak" AI systems, since they focus on a few specific tasks or very specific domains of knowledge.