Organized Intelligence

Hearing God's Voice in an Age of AI

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 19:51:47 GMT

Recently, Elder Gerrit W. Gong released a remarkable series of videos that offers guidance for how Latter-day Saints should engage with AI.

He offered three gospel-centered guideposts for approaching this technology:

1. Rely on the Spirit: Let technology support, not supplant, revelation, personal study, and covenant living. There is no substitute for “[studying] it out in your mind” (Doctrine and Covenants 9:8) and feeling the Lord’s spiritual confirmation in our hearts and minds (see Enos 1:2).

2. Practice wisdom: Apply wise judgment informed by doctrine and our own lived experience.

3. Choose trusted sources: Anchor understanding in scripture, prophetic counsel, and reliable information.

Elder Gong also invited us to slow down, be still, and allow the beauty of creation to connect us to God and our deepest selves. As he teaches in one of these videos:

“Technology can inform us, but without the spirit it cannot transform our nature or our being. Let us wisely use AI and technology tools to deepen faith and spiritual understanding, strengthen relationships and families, and instill reverence for God’s creation.”

We encourage you to watch these videos and share them with your friends and families.

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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: ELDER GONG’S KEYNOTE ADDRESS AT ORGANIZED INTELLIGENCE 2025

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The Unlikely Red State Trying to Buck Trump and Big Tech

Samuel Benson — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 14:41:38 GMT

On Nov. 5, in a harshly lit conference room at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ main administrative hub in Salt Lake City, Elder Gerrit Gong delivered an impassioned speech about the future of AI.

“Man can create AI, but AI cannot create God,” he told the assembled audience.

Gong was speaking at a conference put together by Organized Intelligence, an initiative not directly associated with the church but one that advances Latter-day Saint perspectives on AI, namely that these tools are safe, properly regulated and don’t impede or replace users’ relationship with morality or God.

Gong, who is one of the 12 Apostles of the church, has spent much of the last year thinking and speaking about this rapidly evolving technology. A former State Department official and Oxford-trained Rhodes Scholar, he is able to discuss AI at a technical level or a more abstracted one. And he is the public face of a concerted Latter-day Saint effort to begin to take seriously the risks associated with AI development.

Over the course of two days at the Organized Intelligence conference, Latter-day Saint leaders weren’t the only ones taking the stage. The speakers included officials from the Future of Life Institute, which works to reduce existential risk from advanced AI, historians from around the country and the executive director of Utah’s Department of Commerce. As quickly became apparent, there is a fast-growing collection of people and interests in Utah who are deeply focused on the future of AI.

Top officials in the state have also shown no hesitation when it comes to going up against the agenda of Big Tech — or the industry’s allies in the Trump administration.

The state Legislature has been aggressive about trying to impose new restrictions on social media companies, leading to a protracted fight that continues to play out in the courts. More recently, Utah GOP Gov. Spencer Cox has drawn the ire of major online prediction market companies — and the attention of their lawyers — after he and Utah Attorney General Derek Brown vowed to make sure their apps were illegal in the state. But it’s the debate over AI that has made Utah the epicenter in the fight for regulation of a technology that its biggest boosters and critics alike say could transform life as we know it.

“Utah being a majority Latter-day Saints state, it has a unique way of doing politics,” said Medlir Mema, the executive director of Organized Intelligence and a Latter-day Saint himself. “It has this mantra about ‘disagreeing better.’”

Utah officials say they’re trying to find a middle ground on AI — guided by faith and morality while also embracing modernity. If they succeed, they could prove to be a national model for tech development and safety. But first, the state will have to find its way out of the crosshairs of the White House.

Utah stumbled into its clash with the Trump administration in January, after GOP State Rep. Doug Fiefia introduced HB 286. A sweeping piece of legislation, it was aimed at increasing transparency and building safeguards around frontier AI models, requiring companies to post public safety and child protection plans on their websites and report safety issues to Utah’s policy office. It also established civil penalties for offenders and protections for whistleblowers.

But after weeks of public debate on the bill, the Trump administration stepped in with a directive: Stop.

“We are categorically opposed to Utah HB 286 and view it as an unfixable bill that goes against the Administration’s AI Agenda,” the entirety of the letter read.

President Donald Trump has embraced Silicon Valley’s efforts to unleash AI and signed an executive order in December designed to preempt any state regulations on AI with a potential federal standard, one that critics are concerned will amount to no regulation at all. Trump’s influential AI czar David Sacks, a venture capitalist by trade, has pushed the federal government away from regulating AI, a move he believes would stifle growth.

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OI2025 Recordings

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 16:55:50 GMT

Friends,

We are delighted to share the recordings from Organized Intelligence 2025 with you.

You can find them below, or on Youtube. Let us know which ones resonate most with you, and please share with your friends and networks.

We are hard at work planning our next gathering and developing additional ways to advance a Latter-day Saint approach to AI. If our work resonates with you, consider supporting us with a tax-free contribution.

-Zachary Davis, Medlir Mema, Bennett Borden

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Valerie Hudson — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 03:24:18 GMT

Valerie M. Hudson is Professor and George H.W. Bush Chair in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, teaching in the masters of international affairs program. Her research interests include foreign policy analysis, security studies, gender and international relations, and methodology. Hudson’s articles have appeared in such journals as International Security, Journal of Peace Research, Political Psychology, and Foreign Policy Analysis.

She is the author or editor of several books, including (with Andrea Den Boer) “Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population” (MIT Press, 2004), which won the American Association of Publishers Award for the Best Book in Political Science, and the Otis Dudley Duncan Award for Best Book in Social Demography, resulting in feature stories in the New York Times, the Economist, 60 Minutes and other news publications. Hudson was named to the list of Foreign Policy magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers for 2009 and is one of the principal investigators of the WomanStats Project, which includes the largest compilation of data on the status of women in the world today. She is a founding editorial board member of Foreign Policy Analysis and an Andrew Carnegie Fellow; her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Defense. Her latest books, co-authored, are Sex and World Peace, and The Hillary Doctrine, both published by Columbia University Press.

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