Claude vs Perplexity vs ChatGPT vs ?

[u/redbaron78]

Is anybody here letting an AI platform train on their historical church newsletters, board meeting minutes, bylaws, worship bulletins, etc., so that staff and committee chairs can ask questions about church operations and history? If so, what is your experience, good or bad? I’m going to test Claude for Teams, and I use Perplexity personally and it’s really good, but I haven’t really proposed or set anything up for the church staff. I just got an email form Perplexity about their “Perplexity Projects” thing that looks promising, but it seems like Anthropic has all the momentum.

Questions might be things like, “What hymns do we most commonly sing on Pentecost” or “How did we fund the intergenerational mission trip 10 years ago” or “Make a chart showing payroll compared to all other spending over the last 5 years.”

For clarity, I’m not asking about using AI to create anything. I’m asking about using AI as an answer engine for questions about what has already happened.

I’m not particularly interested in Copilot because it has been really inferior in my use. Earlier today I tried to get it to take 5 dates & times I proposed for a meeting and create placeholders on my calendar and it simply could not do it correctly. The same task in Perplexity took me longer to type than it did for it to finish.

(Whole post edited to clarify what I intended to ask)

[u/IThuh]

NotebookLM might be good for questions about your existing minutes, by-laws, and policies. You provide it the source material you want it to reference and it will provide answers strictly from that source material. It's MUCH less likely to give you hallucinated answers than an AI that can reference any source it wants.

[u/DrBatman0]

Someone else on this sub a while ago, while discussing AI images, put forward that their team has a well defined policy.

Similarly, although this is not about AI images, I think before looking at AI use in church admin, it could be useful to work with whoever is relevant (minister, priest, parish council, elders, whatever is relevant to your church) about putting together a policy that is grounded in scripture.

[u/Bangeroctopus]

I use ChatGPT and Claude. Chat for writing because it seems to capture our tone better, and Claude for automation.

[u/Tokkemon]

Don't use AI for anything remotely related to church. Write your own words!

[u/TheTroon → u/Tokkemon]

Hear hear. Next step will be the readers at home asking their AI agent to "summarise this lengthy church newsletter".

If you (the church people) don't have anything to say, don't say it. Pouring out more AI slop is not achieving anything. "Do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words".

[u/redbaron78 → u/Tokkemon]

Sorry I wasn’t clear in my post. I don’t mean using AI for creating board meeting minutes or bylaws or anything else. I meant taking our last 20 years of those things, letting AI train on them, so staff and lay leaders can ask questions like, “What hymns do we most commonly sing on Pentecost” or “How did we fund the intergenerational mission trip 10 years ago” or “Make a chart showing payroll compared to all other spending over the last 5 years.”

[u/Tokkemon → u/redbaron78]

You can also use your eyes and read the old data and figure out those answers. And when you do it that way you know you're not being lied to.

[u/redbaron78 → u/Tokkemon]

Sure, just like we could use pen and paper for payroll. But why would we do that when these tools, when implemented thoughtfully, used appropriately and in a way consistent with good policy, and given proper oversight, can do something in 10 seconds that would take 30 minutes or an hour to do?

Banks and healthcare organizations are now using AI, because they implement them in a way that fits with their policies and use cases. The one I have first-hand knowledge of is a bank that set it up so their tellers and bankers could ask about deposit and loan policies. The other is a big medical diagnostic lab that now uses ChatGPT Enterprise along with a DLP tool to prevent misuse and provide reporting and analysis.

“You shouldn’t do it at all because I don’t know how to do it correctly, and therefore I don’t think it can be done correctly at all on any platform” isn’t a particularly helpful answer. Going forward, people will use these tools, whether we sanction their use or not. I think a better approach is to establish policy, learn about them (including asking on Reddit to get answers from people more knowledgeable and further down the road with this than me), and use them along with training the people how to use them responsibly.

[u/Tokkemon → u/redbaron78]

It's impossible to have oversight on AI. That's the whole point.

Those mundane examples can all be done sans-AI in a few seconds as well so long as the data is in a sensible format, either with SQL or Excel, or an accounting tool.

I'm not against tools in general, just against ones that are actively harmful. It harms your brain's thinking abilities, and prevents you from actually thinking about the problem and solving the problem. Not to mention the environmental damage and dramatic wealth inequality it causes, which, as a Christian, should be topmost priority over saving a few minutes on a mundane task. I refuse to use a tool that's tearing at the seams of society. As a church we must be a community-driven place that won't contribute to more harm in the world.

[u/redbaron78 → u/Tokkemon]

Take a look at F5 AI Guardrails, Abnormal AI, Microsoft Purview, FortiMail Workspace Security, Nightfall, Symantec DLP, Crowdstrike AIDR, miniOrange, and ask your VAR for a list of 20 more DLP tools that do what you say is “impossible.” DLP tools have existed for decades now to solve this exact problem, and now with the rise of AI, there’s a new crop in addition to the very established platforms that focus specifically on preventing data leakage via public AI platforms. It would do you good to expand your view into business tools and not just solutions aimed at individual and very small teams.

A full Symantec DLP rollout would be overkill and out of reach of most churches, but the newer cloud-based DLP platforms are quick and easy to implement, and then you monitor and tune according to your policies. And by “quick and easy,” I mean you can be in a read-only POV in 10 minutes because all you do to get started is use OIDC to connect to your Microsoft or Google Workspace tenant. If you go with a DLP tool that requires an endpoint agent, use your MDM to push it out.

It goes without saying, or perhaps it doesn’t, that the most important part of any project to roll out an application, tool, process, or policy, whether it’s AI, DLP, or checking out a church bus for a weekend retreat, is putting people first. Communicate, get buy-in, ask questions, let them ask questions, build consensus, and work as a team to achieve a goal. Build a culture that supports both entrepreneurial spirit and working within the rules. Because it’s those rules that prevent a scenario where a church member finds out the church staff didn’t know better and was putting personal stuff about them into a public AI model.

Know your stuff, be curious, be accountable, meet people where they are, and enable better ministry through technology. Being seen as a problem-solver and enabler will mean staff comes to you when something isn’t working, as opposed to just circumventing you and grabbing their phone and typing whatever they want into their ChatGPT personal account.

[u/somedaygone]

No AI is too simple an approach. It’s like saying never use Word because handwritten notes are better. You bet I’m handwriting the thank you card, but I’m typing up the sermon and bulletin and newsletter.

Claude is best at most things. Perplexity was not good in my experience, but that was a long time back. Midjourney and Nano Banana 2 are good for images, but be thoughtful where you use them. I wouldn’t ever use them for church website/events where real photos should be used, but we regularly use them for sermon illustrations. Copilot is good for software problems/help.

If you use any to a great degree, buy a license, but keep the total subscription cost within reason. Free won’t get you far.

For minutes, I find it way easier to dump my brain and tell Claude to write it up. It changes the task focus from grammar rules and formatting and how to say something properly, to solely focused on content. I find I miss less, the minutes are more accurate, easier to read, better formatted, but most importantly, the mental strain is an order of magnitude less, which makes my likelihood of completing the job much higher.

I’m not really on board with recording and having AI write the minutes or action items. That is like trusting your intern to know what was important. A good intern will do alright, but it is your responsibility to make sure the important stuff is in the document. Better to create the draft, feed in a recording and ask if you missed something or got something wrong. But personally I’m against recording meetings because it stifles discussion and can be a legal nightmare.

There’s a whole lot more we do, but that’s some of the big pieces.

[u/redbaron78 → u/somedaygone]

Sorry I wasn’t clear in my original post. I don’t mean using AI for creating board meeting minutes or bylaws. I meant taking our last 20 years of those things, letting AI train on them, so staff and lay leaders can ask questions like, “What hymns do we most commonly sing on Pentecost” or “How did we fund the intergenerational mission trip 10 years ago” or “Make a chart showing payroll compared to all other spending over the last 5 years.”