Faith & AI | AI Literacy, How To Use AI, AI For Beginners, AI and God

On this episode of Faith & AI, Dice Gamble, the Tech Minister, sits down with co-host Dr. Natalie, engineer and Assistant Dean, to break down the word everyone keeps hearing: agents. They explain what an AI agent really is, how it differs from a chatbot, where agents shine and where they fall apart, and how someone can trick an agent with instructions you will never see. Dr. Natalie shares her recipe for building a first agent the safe way, the platforms that are beginner friendly, and the exact formula to tell an agent what to do, with a human check every step of the way. Dice closes with a word from Exodus 18 on delegation and why our character still signs every email, even when an agent writes it. Listeners leave with homework: find one repetitive weekly task, write it out step by step, and hand it to an agent with approval turned on.

Faith & AI helps believers navigate the AI era fearlessly without compromising our Faith.

1:22 What is an AI agent?
2:54 Chatbot vs agent: what's under the hood
5:47 Who agents are for, where they shine and break
7:56 What can go wrong when you give an agent a task
10:22 Can someone trick your agent?
12:45 Where to start: the recipe
15:42 Training an agent like a new hire
17:28 Beginner friendly platforms
18:12 The formula to tell your agent what to do
20:28 How to test an agent before it touches your inbox
22:54 Faith: handing work to a machine

AI is the new literacy. So who's teaching our community? On this episode of Faith & AI, Dice Gamble sits down with AI engineer and lifelong educator Terrell McKinney to break down how everyday people, families, churches and small businesses can start using AI with confidence.

Terrell has taught SAT prep in Chicago's south suburbs, taught English in Colombia, trained software engineers at a bootcamp, built systems at Angie's, and now builds AI products at a startup while helping local businesses in Chicago get online through his company, Aaron Douglas LLC. He also helps put on the Black Computer Science Success Summit in Chicago every year.

In this conversation, Terrell explains why AI is the next disruptive technology, why the basics still matter even when AI can do the work, and the simple prompts he uses every day, including "tell me a story" and "explain it like I'm a child." Dice shares how she uses AI to audit her own week and hold herself accountable. Terrell answers the skeptic's question, "If you already know how, why use AI?", tells the story of a young man in Uganda who taught himself to code by writing it out by hand, and asks what happens when a billion-dollar quantum computer comes to Chicago's South Side. We close with what beginners should never put into AI and three things to do first.

Believers Navigating Faith in an AI Era. FaithAndAIShow.com

00:00 Intro
00:45 Meet Terrell McKinney
03:22 Why learn AI right now?
03:52 What a disruptive technology is
05:21 Before the AI boom
06:20 The multiplication rule
08:44 His favorite prompt: "Tell me a story"
10:03 The attention of the operator
10:14 The weekly audit and the mirror
11:09 The 200 grandmas test
12:31 Why use AI if you already know?
13:06 Why do rich people borrow money?
13:58 Grit vs. being situated
16:05 "Me and 33 agents"
16:54 The self-taught coder in Uganda
19:56 A billion-dollar computer on the South Side
21:28 For anyone who feels left behind
22:01 What never to put into AI
23:25 Three things to do first
24:58 Why context changes everything
26:29 Have fun with it
27:01 Connect with Terrell

Is AI going to take your job? My guest Ron Mangune says it could, but it will never have the passion you bring to the work God gave you.

Ron has spent 20 years in technology and 15 in telecom. He started with a support team of three and grew it to thirty. He is not a coder, but he got curious, started asking Claude questions, and ended up building about 20 apps that save his team hours every week. Now he builds voice AI, the kind that can answer a business phone and talk with the caller in their own language.

We get into the questions our listeners ask most. Should I use AI in my business or my ministry? Where do I even start? Ron keeps it simple. Start with the problem, not the tool. We talk about how a church with one secretary could answer calls from a whole multicultural congregation, why every AI tool needs guardrails, and why some calls, like a crisis line or 911, should always have a real person on the other end.

If you feel like you are too late to learn AI, this one is for you. Ron says be brave enough to be dumb again.

This week on Faith & AI, we get honest about a question most people never stop to ask: why does the same prompt give you two completely different answers depending on which AI you use? We walk through what actually makes one chatbot different from another, from the model itself to the tools it can run, and why most people only need two AI tools instead of six (except Dice, who needs all six). We break down the four levels of asking a better question, starting with a basic prompt and building up to using AI as a real thinking partner that can point out what you're missing. We also explain what LLM actually stands for, when it's worth letting AI think longer before it answers, and why nothing an AI gives you is finished until you've checked it yourself. Underneath all of it is the question we keep coming back to on this show: just because a machine can answer you doesn't mean it should answer everything. Some things still need prayer, scripture, and a real conversation with another person. We close with a simple piece of homework: ask AI the same question twice, once plain and once with the words "what am I missing," then compare what changed. The lesson isn't finding the perfect AI tool. It's learning how to ask a better one.

Marcel Patillo has produced music and video for twenty years. He built The Modern Filmmaker, teaching color grading, post production, sound design and animation, and now records as I Am Able. Raised in the Patillo family, he watched his mother build a career in Christian music from a receptionist desk with no college degree.

His argument: the most valuable skill right now isn't a skill at all. It's learning how to relearn. He built his own website in a day and a half with no background, runs marketing for three companies in fifteen hours a week, and tells the story of an LA carpenter who rendered a set image himself when his 3D artist fell through.

Marcel walks us through thirty years of the music business and argues it didn't lose because the tech was bad. It waited. He says the church is standing in that same spot.

AI is built to agree with you. That is not a glitch. That is a design choice, and almost nobody knows it.

On this episode of Faith & AI, host Dice Gamble sits down with cybersecurity leader Jeffrey Baez for the show's first guest interview. Jeffrey holds his CISSP, CCSP, and MSIS, works at Splunk, and spent his career building security programs from the ground up. He was the first Chief Information Security Officer for the New York State Department of Financial Services, held national responsibility at Palo Alto Networks, and built the cybersecurity program for the New York State Board of Elections.

Together they take apart the question most people never think to ask. If the machine is designed to tell you what you want to hear, how much of what it says can you actually trust?

They get into why AI agrees with you by default and how to change that setting yourself, why it makes things up, how to feed it better sources so it gives you better answers, and what prompt engineering really means in plain English. Dice explains large language models using hair braiding. Jeffrey walks through the business plan AI wrote him in under three minutes. They talk about using AI for Scripture study, for taxes, and for the ordinary work that eats your week.

Then they close on the part that matters most. What you should never give AI access to, and why giving it your data means training it.

Faith & AI is where believers navigate faith in an AI era. Our mission is AI literacy for the church. Nobody left behind.

00:00 Intro
00:24 Meet Jeffrey Baez
02:19 Why does AI sound human?
03:09 You can tell AI how to talk to you
04:18 AI is designed to agree with you
05:53 How AI hallucinates
06:43 Why your sources matter
07:32 What prompt engineering actually is
08:17 Explaining AI with braids
10:07 It wrote a whole business plan
12:31 Curiosity, wonder, and just playing with it
13:41 Learning AI is like learning to drive
15:16 How Jeff uses AI every day
16:47 Asking AI about the Golden Rule
18:03 Using AI for taxes
19:14 What are you doing with your time?
20:27 AI will not replace humans
22:03 If you were a fictional character
24:24 What you should never connect
25:32 You are training the model
26:41 The do not connect list
27:27 Make your dreams come true

Link To Your Files

Every AI query, every chatbot answer, every recommendation runs somewhere. That somewhere is a data center: rows of servers, running 24 hours a day, pulling more power and more water than most of us ever stop to think about.

Dice Gamble and Dr. Natalie Waksmanski lay out what data centers actually are, why they're going up in Chicago's backyard and in Memphis, and who's really paying for the AI boom. The numbers: data centers pulled 4.4% of all US electricity in 2023, headed toward roughly 12% by 2030. PJM's grid capacity price jumped from about $29 to $329 per megawatt-day in one year, and the market's own independent watchdog says about 70% of that came from data center demand. ComEd already has more than 80 data centers in Northern Illinois, with 75 more proposed.

This isn't just Memphis. This is your light bill.

They name names: xAI's Colossus, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Digital Realty, Equinix, Blackstone. They cover the NAACP's federal lawsuit against xAI's gas-turbine plant in Southaven, and the story from Dice's own mission trip to Haiti that reframes the whole conversation around water. Then they walk it through faith instead of fear: what it looks like to actually show up at a hearing, use your voice, and ask hard questions instead of just being afraid of the headline.

The cloud is not in the sky. You are using AI, or AI is using you.

WHO IS TALKING
Dice Gamble. Licensed minister, Christian hip hop artist, Billboard number one credit, CHH Hall of Fame, twenty five years in ministry. Host of Faith & AI on Holy Culture Podcasts.

Dr. Natalie Waksmanski. Assistant Dean at DeVry University's College of Engineering and Information Sciences. Engineer. A woman of faith and a woman in STEM.

FAITH & AI
Helping believers navigate AI fearlessly. AI without fear. Faith without compromise. We learn it, question it, discern it, steward it, navigate it wisely.

Website: https://FaithAndAIShow.com
Newsletter: https://faithandaishow.substack.com
Booking and media: [email protected]
Follow: @faithandaishow

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Have you ever felt like your phone knows you better than the people in your own house? Are you scrolling more and connecting less, and you can't quite explain why?

The word algorithm has been in your life for twenty years and nobody ever sat you down and explained it. Today that changes. Dice Gamble and Dr. Natalie Waksmanski break down what an algorithm actually is, why it feels like it knows you, and what four of the people who built these systems said on the record about what they built. They get into the U.S. Surgeon General's loneliness epidemic, what showed up on Dr. Natalie's own daughter's screen, and the twist nobody expects: why 24 million people picking up a pickleball paddle is a spiritual story.

It knows your patterns. It doesn't know your heart.