AI and the crisis of truth

Earlier this year, someone with whom I’m connected on Facebook shared a post that was clearly AI-generated. It was a photo of Willie Nelson sitting at the hospital bedside of Ozzy Osborne, as both played guitar. It was accompanied by a story of Nelson’s seeking out the late Black Sabbath frontman in his dying days. The details weren’t even a particularly good attempt at an AI slop: Much like the photo, they were too saccharine, too predictable, and too inhumanely inspirational to be real.

Curious whether commenters would be calling this out, I clicked the post and was astonished at what I saw. Indeed, many of them admitted this was an AI generated story and photo. But the highest-approved comments rebuked others for acting as if this mattered. So what, the most liked comment said, if the story isn’t true. That’s not the point. The point is that we need to act more like this with the people we love.

Indifference toward truth is fast becoming a feature rather than a bug of the AI era. Online ecosystems being flooded with false and fabricated material is a massive problem all its own. Yet it seems like the sheer amount of fakeness is triggering some kind of cultural apathy or hopelessness toward the very idea of truthfulness. Think of it like an epistemological autoimmune disease, where the infection (AI) causes the very defense mechanisms that should be attacking to it to disintegrate instead.

In a recent essay for The Free Press, Ted Gioia suggested several disastrous consequences of the free reign of AI fabulism. Gioia notes that the rise of AI in areas like therapy suggests a radical transformation of the very idea of objective reality. Those swept up in the AI revolution, he believes, “will have their own beliefs, and their own experiences—but others may now refuse to acknowledge them. That’s because all evidence is tainted. In a world with pervasive deception, everything demands skepticism.”

As a result, Gioia foresees a massive increase of antisocial trends. A retreat to personal enclaves—where we can have a computer tell us whatever we want to hear and generate any reality we want to inhabit—will separate us from one another, make the sharing of information and ideas impossible, and paralyze things like dialogue and persuasion before they can even begin. Gioia ominously warns, “the worst is yet to come.” 

Gioia is right. There is something genuinely explosive about the sophistication of AI programs that are able to mimic relationship and knowledge. The line between person and program, between authentic and automated, is being blurred beyond recognition. Gioia is also right to notice that the psychological toll of the internet’s being flooded with so much fakeness—whether fake photos, fake stories, fake diagnoses, or fake relationships—is enormous. Many will feel the need to assume a posture of inherent skepticism toward everything they see, a recipe for the kind of distrust that can unhinge a person and a society.

But Gioia’s analysis also lacks something. He lacks an explanation as to why, presented with such powerful technology that could, presumably, make things like accuracy and human connection even more possible, our choice seems to be to run in the opposite direction. Why are we using AI to lie? Why are we using it to unload our secrets and problems? Why are we building our own mental and spiritual prisons?

Gioia’s recommendation that we use humane pursuits and physical objects to build accountability structures into our public life is good, but it doesn’t answer the question of motive. Christianity, however, does.

Christianity both gives justification for a commitment to factfulness and explains why our modern tendency is to abandon it. Truth-telling matters because, according to Christianity, the world is a real place, created by a real God, and the people and events of history matter in a divine sense. But it also explains why we use our technology to lie. We create fake worlds or fake quotes or fake friendships because the light of reality is often unbearable. It shines on our limitations and selfish desires. Reality is not kind to sinners.

Many of the worst fruits of the AI revolution are happening in spaces where there has long been a reliance on technology to help us avoid reality. Chatbot boyfriends and girlfriends are shocking in their brazen inhumanity, but surely this is a logical step to take in the same cultural arc that made digital pornography a plausible alternative to physical love. AI therapists pose startling dilemmas for pastors and other counselors, but in truth, the internet has long been a haven for those determined to find someone who will say what they want to hear.

A Christian response to the ascendancy of AI puts the accent on becoming truth-welcoming people. We welcome truth in our narratives, even when they don’t flatter us or our preferred in-group. We welcome truth in our emotional lives, declining a simulation of intimacy with a chatbot that allows us to avoid hearing hard truth. Welcoming truth means welcoming the difficulty and inconvenience of verifying, investigating, and admitting when we’ve gotten it wrong. Why go to all this trouble? God values truth, so we must as well.

The world we are entering is a world where the burden of living in reality can be easily escaped. Many will take this deal. But the gains are just as illusory as the AI photos and stories that go viral on social media. In the end, truth will win out.