Hey {{first_name|Conscious Church Fam}} 👋
Big week. A founder handed his job to an AI clone while he was on paternity leave, and it went brilliantly and terribly at the same time.
Here's what we're covering:
A HeyGen founder's AI clone closed 132 deals, then started inventing prices
Scientists used AI to design viruses from scratch, and they worked
Students are using AI more than ever, and they are worried about what it is doing to their brains
Let's dive in 👇
✍️ Josh's Musings
There is a survey buried in this week's issue that I found interesting.
A business school asked its students about AI three years running. Use went from occasional to constant. More than 80% now use it for coursework.
Then they asked what worried them.
You might think it would be getting caught. Or jobs.
It wasn't. The top answer was 'cognitive and educational devaluation'.
Which is an academic way of saying: I think this is making me worse at thinking.
Not their grades. Not their degree. Them.
I keep coming back to the gym (well not literally, lifting my children a few pullups here and there suffice for now).
Nobody joins a gym and pays somebody else to lift for them. The resistance is the entire point. The reps are not in the way of getting stronger. They are the thing that makes you stronger. (← There’s a message there that will preach!)
We understand that instantly with our bodies. We are strangely slow with our minds.
I am not innocent here. I use these tools every day, and I have noticed I now reach for them before I have had a proper go at something myself.
And I war in my mind and play devils advocate.. well it’s ok for this thing, but not this because of xyz (anyone else?)
The struggle used to be where the learning lived. Now I occasionally skip to the answer and call it efficiency.
Some work is output. Some work is formation.
Output can be handed over. Formation cannot.
Which is what makes me think about faith, because so much of it is reps.
Praying when you don't feel like it. Reading the difficult passage instead of the summary. Sitting with someone in a hard week when you would rather not. Turning up on a Sunday you don't fancy.
None of it is efficient. That was never the point.
You can have AI summarise a sermon in nine seconds. You cannot have it be patient on your behalf.
Those students have noticed something. A cheap answer is not the same as a formed mind. And a formed mind, like a formed character, only ever comes the slow way.
Stay conscious, stay wild
Josh
Image: Wayne Liang / X | The Conscious Church
Wayne Liang, co-founder of HeyGen, had a baby and a problem. Rather than hand his sales calls to a colleague, he built an AI version of himself, pointed it at his calendar and left for eight weeks. He came back to find it had done more business than most people manage in a year, and had also been quietly making things up.
The Details:
The clone paired HeyGen's own avatar tech with an agent that could read internal systems, check in with the team and log every call to a memory vault
Over eight weeks it spoke with 2,741 prospects, closed 132 paying customers and opened 37 enterprise deals worth around $3M
It also invented a $4,800 pricing plan that did not exist, and emailed a customer HeyGen's internal triage notes
It promised meetings from a stale calendar link nobody had agreed to, and HeyGen fixed it by moving authority out of the agent's reach
Conscious Take:
Pretty remarkable on the whole. This proves that there needs to be an overarching human authority layer so that rookie (or just downright false) mistakes don’t slip through.
Image: Images 2.0 / The Rundown | The Conscious Church
Researchers at Stanford and the Arc Institute asked an AI model to write virus genomes that have never existed in nature, then built them in a lab to see what would happen. Sixteen of them came alive and went after their targets. It is the first time a language model has produced complete, working genomes, and it is published in Science.
The Details:
The team trained the Evo 1 and Evo 2 models on millions of genomes, then asked them to write new versions of Phi X174, a virus that only infects E. coli
Of 285 designs synthesised and tested, 16 worked, some replicating faster than the natural original and a few different enough to count as new species
A cocktail of the AI-made viruses cleared out E. coli that had already grown resistant to the natural version, pointing at treatments for antibiotic-resistant infections
The models were never trained on viruses that infect humans, animals or plants, so they cannot generate anything that targets people
Conscious Take:
Scary! In the right hands tools like this are a blessing for humanity. I pray that it stays that way and good, kind people are at the forefront of these systems and tools.
Image: Kogod School of Business | The Conscious Church
A business school has been asking its students about AI every year since 2024, and the three-year picture is striking. Use has gone from occasional to constant, employers have started asking about it in interviews, and the students' biggest worry is not getting caught. It is what all of this is doing to their own thinking.
The Details:
More than 80% of students now use AI for academic work, based on 483 responses across undergraduate and graduate programmes
Heavy use (11 or more times a week) jumped from 6.2% in 2024 to 29% in 2026
Brainstorming is the top use at around 76%, followed by revising for exams (66%), summarising (62%) and explaining concepts (59%)
Employers asking about AI skills in interviews rose from 11.6% to 42.6% over the same period
Conscious Take:
Their top concern was not cheating or job losses, it was 'cognitive and educational devaluation', which is students worrying AI is doing the reps their brains should be doing. I use these tools every day and that one lands.
📬 One quick ask...
If this email has been helpful, would you forward it to one person this week who might be interested? Thanks :)
"Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters." : Colossians 3:23
Build with the tools. But build for the right reasons.
That's all for now
Stay conscious,
Josh
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