Culture Friday: Truth in an artificial age

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NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Friday, September 26th. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. It’s Culture Friday! Joining us is author and speaker Katie McCoy. Good morning, Katie.

KATIE MCCOY: Good morning Nick and Myrna.

BROWN: Well, Hollywood has its latest “It Girl”—except she is literally an “it.” She’s an AI-generated actress named “Tilly Norwood,” the star of a fully AI-written comedy sketch making the rounds.

TILLY NORWOOD SKETCH: “We all knew TV was dead.”
“AI generated 100 better ideas in minutes.”
“It cast and budgeted itself.”
“It wrote the whole script.”
“Claude three, Gemini GPT—we called it a writer’s room.”
“Who did it cast?”
“Tilly Norwood, 100% AI generated.”
“Three seasons and a podcast.”
“She’ll do anything I say. I’m already in love.”
“But can she cry on Graeme Norton?”
“Of course she can—”
“And it’ll be clipped, subtitled, and monetized on TikTok by lunchtime.”
“We’re all going to hell.”

I wonder.

You know, this is not just satire. The trade publication Variety reports that multiple Hollywood agents (presumably human ones) are already competing to represent Tilly Norwood, the AI creation. This is happening in real time … a competition for which agency will sign her if she happens to become the next Scarlett Johansson.

Katie, when you hear that, what do you make of it?

MCCOY: Well, there are a few stories that really grab our attention and bring such a visceral reaction in multiple spheres of society, and this is definitely one of them. I don’t mean to sound like Henny Penny, the sky is falling, but this is actually pretty terrifying.

Now, from just a business perspective, you hear different Hollywood guilds really sounding the alarm and saying this is going to be very bad for the acting community if you can just construct a fake actor or actress. But more than that, this is something that we are not prepared for. We’ve long been desensitized to the idea of dividing parts of the human identity. A body doesn’t have to have any meaning, so why should the simulation of a body have any meaning?

You couple the invention of Tilly Norwood with things like AI girlfriends, and we are, in the words of one author, Laura Bates, sleepwalking into a nightmare. She describes how it is possible that we could think a hyper-realistic, customizable “woman” who can be controlled without consent is actually a good thing for humanity. We are already blurring the lines between reality and virtual reality, between what is real and what is fantasy. This is just contributing to that.

And I think that one of the big questions we’re going to have is, how do we relate as a society to the creation—the image of someone who is human-like—when we know that they are not actually a human being?

EICHER: Katie, this whole discussion actually grew out of an internal post among our WORLD editorial staff. Several colleagues weighed in, and one of our reporters, Juliana Chan Erikson, made an observation I thought was worth putting to you as pushback. She said: isn’t this just a modern version of what animators have done for a century—namely, creating characters out of thin air? What makes this different?

MCCOY: Well, the difference is quite simply that with animation, we recognize that we’re seeing an animation. With these AI creations, it’s designed so that you don’t realize you’re looking at an animation or an artificial construction of a human being. This is one of the many ways the technological innovation of AI is advancing at a far greater pace than our ethical considerations of how we use AI.

I wish I could say that this could be some type of advancement, but when you consider the proliferation of pornography, this is only going to be used to depict the exploitation of women in an even more realistic way.

The other thing though, Nick—silver lining—it might be an opportunity for us to enter into some very helpful conversations, like, what is a human being? Can an artificially generated, technologically programmed appearance of a human replace a human being? You’re seeing such a strong reaction against this that I think it’s giving us this opportunity to ask, why do we instinctively feel like that?

It’s a great opportunity for us to ask, because at the core of it, humanity—when we’re thinking worldview-ishly here—humanity is in the image of God. Humanity has a capacity for a relationship with God. With that we have human agency, we have responsibility. An AI is not in the image of God. It’s in the image of man, in the image of other human beings. It is incapable of communicating beyond what it is programmed to communicate. That right there could be a great opportunity for us to talk about what is truly a human being.

BROWN: Katie, you mentioned a “silver lining.” I heard commentator Michael Knowles—I think he was half-joking—say maybe this is actually a good thing, because it could mean fewer women get drawn into Hollywood and have their lives ruined. Might that be on point?

MCCOY: It might be, but the trouble is, with the advancement of AI, women are still going to have their lives ruined through the increasing objectification and commoditization of the female body.

In Germany, they have something called a cyber brothel. It is actually blurring the lines between what is real and what is virtual, and it is taking these technological advances of AI and using it for sinful purposes. That shouldn’t surprise us, because we live in a fallen world where the same types of minds that can come up with cures for otherwise incurable disease can take that same innovation and use it to harm.

Every time we see something as remarkable as AI, we see two opportunities. We can use that either for the benefit of humanity—for the alleviating of suffering even—or we can see it as a means to bring harm to the image of God. Both of those things are happening in the world right now.

EICHER: Katie, I want to ask you to talk about whether we're in a revival, or on the cusp of a revival, or not.

We put the question to John Stonestreet last week and I loved what he said.

He started by analyzing Jonathan Edwards’s signs of revival, Jesus is exalted, sin is abhorred and repented of. It’s happening in churches with highly doctrinal preaching, strong preaching, and it’s happening among young people.

And let’s listen to the way he wound it up:

STONESTREET: Ultimately we need to remember that if God brings that sort of awakening, it’s out of his kindness. And we want to join it.

And I think right now there’s a lot of Christian voices that are really quick to condemn it in various ways and for various reasons. I don’t want to be that guy.

I want to be that guy that jumps on the bandwagon of a revival and an awakening in whatever form that it is, trusting that the Lord’s bringing what the Lord’s bringing.

That led me to a really great, really popular podcast by Josh Howerton, and he was talking about what he was seeing. He’s a megachurch pastor down in Dallas.

I’d like to play a clip from that podcast.

HOWERTON: This is a little controversial, but the more I think about this and read, the more convinced of this I become: When political conservatism spreads, more people become Christians, and when political progressivism spreads, less people become Christians.

If you start swimming in the streams of truth and liberty, you're eventually going to find its source. So like conservatism in general, calibrates the conscience in such a way that it pushes people toward the God from whom the principles came.

Progressivism is built generally upon a secular, Marxist view of human nature, economics, governance. So what progressivism does, particularly secular progressivism, is it calibrates the consciences of people away from what is true, right and good, and it teaches people to call evil things good and good things evil.

So back to the question: do you think we’re experiencing a revival in the land?

MCCOY: I do, and not only in the sense of just I hope that it is true. I’m going to choose to believe that it is not only possible, but that it is happening, because we are seeing the ingredients happen. We’re seeing people come to Christ. We’re seeing the people of God be awakened, stirred, renewed—a desire to serve and obey and be bold with the gospel.

I, like many people, after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, just felt even more emboldened, and I think we’re seeing that all across the country. I loved that clip from Josh Howerton. Something I know he would agree with—in fact, I think he said—is that the gospel can spread in any environment, any type of culture, any type of government.

But with that, he makes this excellent point that laws are didactic. Behind every law is a moral claim. I just finished writing a Bible study on Deuteronomy, and you see that all throughout God’s law. God’s law is teaching God’s people not only God’s righteous character, but how they are to live righteously. Here is what a good and just society looks like and how it behaves.

With some principles of conservatism—and I’m not talking about the difference between conservative and liberal as they used to be, like, let’s say, 20 or 30 years ago. I’m talking about the difference between conservative and progressive. Josh Howerton makes this distinction as well.

True progressivism is trying to deconstruct or dismantle foundations like family, relationships, marriage, gender, economy. With conservatism, there’s this emphasis on faith, family, personal responsibility, work ethic, respect for authority, valuing moral order, equal opportunities—not equal outcomes—not looking to the government or any kind of centralized authority to fix our problems.

With that, a far more localized understanding of life—meaning family, church, community, these kinds of mediating institutions, as Edmund Burke described them. These mediating institutions are between the individual and the state. With that, they provide far more social cohesion and far more loyalty to one’s community and consequently to one’s country.

Finally, I always think of that quote from President John Adams: our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

BROWN: We talked about this off air, about a preacher who came to the campus that you attended when you were in college. He was a young preacher, teacher, and he came to Union University and had a role there as an adjunct professor, a young man by the name of Voddie Baucham.

We lost him this past week, and sadly he passed away at age 56. Would you reflect on the life of Voddie Baucham, what he meant to you?

MCCOY: Yeah, anytime you can still remember what a preacher said 20 years later, you know there was something really special about it.

BROWN: It’s a good test!

MCCOY: Yes, I was a college sophomore, and I heard Pastor Voddie Baucham. I still remember when he gave, he told us things that I know I had never heard before, like how reliable Scripture was. He gave all these different historical events and said, did you know there is actually less historical corroboration for things like Caesar crossing the Rubicon than there are for the resurrection? It just bolstered my faith.

I remember that was just one example of the things that he instilled in these college students—how to think about the world. He had the characteristic mic drop moment. I still remember the last line of this message when he talked about Christianity. He said, it’s not true because it works. It works because it’s true.

This was something that as a 20-year-old, I didn’t fully realize or appreciate everything that I was hearing, but it stuck with me. I’m like millions of people, touched by his ministry, influenced by his preaching. He was bold on the dangers of critical theory infiltrating evangelicalism—things that he was kind of a voice in the wilderness on before people really woke up to the dangers of it. He spoke so clearly.

We’ve lost some giants this year, and I know the Lord is going to raise up others. I pray that it would be in my generation, in Gen Z, that we would see for everyone we lost, we’d see others with the same type of boldness and moral clarity, just being completely unashamed of the gospel, just like Voddie Baucham was.

EICHER: Author and speaker Katie McCoy! Great visit, thanks for this.

MCCOY: Thanks for having me.

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