Technology is overwhelming. It feels like we are being confronted with more and more ways to ‘stay connected,’ whether it’s augmented reality goggles, computers on our wrists, or personal assistants that will confirm our every opinion and whim.
Which brings us to AI.
AI is everywhere. If you have read a magazine, a blog post, listened to a podcast, or watched a YouTube video, you’ve seen an ad for it. If you use any web services at all, they’ve all rolled out ‘AI-powered’ chat support assistants. If you watched the Super Bowl, the only thing advertised as heavily as AI was sports gambling).
At Mere, we’ve spent a long time thinking about AI: using the latest tools, studying what they’re helpful for, what they’re not helpful for, and trying to wrap our heads around this new technology. We’ve always considered part of our job the duty to understand new software for our clients, so that we can help churches to keep up with the ever-changing web, and also consult wisely about what is and isn’t a good idea.
This series of articles will aim to answer a few related questions:
1) What is AI (and is it ethical to use it)? 2) Is AI relevant to the work of churches? 3) Is AI relevant to the people in churches? 4) How should churches and church leadership respond to AI? 5) How should regular people respond to AI? 6) Should we shepherd our congregations with regards to this new technology? 7) Finally, can we trust the material presented by AI as answers?
AI is here, it’s real, and we can’t really ignore it.
This series contains our own studying of the marketing world in a post-AI landscape. This is what we’ve been learning about and planning around. In other words, the web, which is constantly changing, has changed again, and to do our job well we need to keep up so that we can help you keep up and understand what you need to be doing to get your message in front of your audiences.
Mere has been making websites since 2011, and I personally have been making websites since 2009. This was around the time when websites looked like this:
I was still trying to convince people that CSS was a better way to visually display your website than tables. When we got started, our differentiator was clear:
Write good content regularly, in a well-built semantic framework, and win. 8 out of 10 results on “Sermons in 2 Timothy” were Mere sites.
The web has always been about reaching people, and in the 2010s the way to reach people was through Google Search results. Build a good site, with good content, and Google rewards you with high rankings in their search results, which would drive massive amounts of organic traffic to your site.
We’ve adapted several times since then: to mobile-first web development (9 in 10 Americans have a smartphone, and nearly a quarter of Americans use a phone as their main networking device), to the social web and the rise of aggregators like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.
In that time, Mere has grown from providing just website services to helping our clients with search engine optimization, ads and marketing services, social media posting and growth, and communication via email and physical media.
AI is the ‘next big thing,’ but what about the last big thing? Did organizations that did not come up with their own cryptocurrency fall behind? Did organizations that didn’t go all in on the metaverse get left behind? Is AI any different? Is this a flash in the pan, or something that’s here to stay? We believe that however you feel about AI, some form of AI is here to stay in some form or fashion.
But before we get too far into it, in our next post we’ll take a close look at what the term "AI" actually means.
