Earlier this year, my wife and I were in the check-in area at Salt Lake City airport, getting ready to check our luggage. We noticed two men with video cameras talking with three women. Two of the women sat down several seats away from us, while the third walked toward the check-in area with the two cameramen.
She began walking back toward the two seated women, greeted them as if she hadn’t just talked with them, and gave each of them big hugs. The cameramen filmed the encounter.
Then, they all did it again. My wife and I found out later that the three women were on a reality television show. Evidently, we should be using the term “reality” loosely.
Filters, fake photo shoots, and the creation of fantasy largely (if not completely) divorced from reality create a fictional world in which we are increasingly immersed. We have already been exposed to various forms of virtual reality.
The results have been less-than-stellar. When the Facebook files were leaked in 2021, we found out that individuals working for Facebook were aware of the adverse effects Instagram was having on teen girls.
Earlier this year both the American Psychological Association and the Surgeon General recognized the negative impact of social media on certain groups, including adolescents.
The fantasies to which we are exposed (but may not recognize as such) encourage us to covet what others have. We want to have the chiseled abs of a fitness influencer, drive the cars or wear the clothes of pseudo-celebrities, or have the insight of under-informed opinion-makers.
Social media opens us up to a virtual space where reality is often suspended. We know social media has negative consequences.
Yet, despite recent warnings and the general lack of motivation from social media companies to consider how they might safeguard their products prior to releasing them for public use, artificial reality continues its march forward.
How Might AI Make Our World More Artificial
Given that AI currently has no agency of its own, we aren’t dealing with the machines but with human agents using technologies in an attempt to:
- Amplify current technological and content offerings.
- Accomplish beneficial ends without considering the potentially negative consequences.
- Pursue projects intentionally designed to harm others.
Despite the projected potential for AI to develop its own agency, our primary concern at the moment should be human agency. As such, it seems unlikely that we will see anything substantially different than what we have seen before. The good, bad, beautiful, and ugly will just become easier to produce.
In a very real sense, then, AI won’t make the world more artificial. We will. While it may be tempting to place the blame for such artificiality on those who create compelling fiction, all of us are responsible.
We are often captivated by less-than-real images and experiences that emerge from stories that diminish God and, thus, diminish us.
While we are right to be concerned about the more pernicious use of AI in, for instance, the generation of child sex abuse imagery and fake news stories, we should not ignore the challenges associated with moving away from physical reality toward augmented and virtual realities that create relatively immersive storied environments that have the potential to change the way we perceive the world around us.
The underlying sense-making frameworks we use to navigate our everyday worlds often obstruct our vision. We end up following the conventional wisdom of the day instead of imitating Christ.
It is difficult to believe that further immersing ourselves in worlds made with human hands will guide us toward a life that is more authentic than artificial or insincere.
Artificial reality is not something new. Humans have often constructed reality in physical and technological forms to enact a certain sense-making in the world.
Commenting on human meaning-making, sociologist Peter Berger suggests, “Human existence is, ab initio, an ongoing externalization. As man externalizes himself, he constructs the world into which he externalizes himself. In the process of externalization, he projects his own meanings into reality.”
In other words, we act on the world so that it comes to serve our interests, reflects our values, and maximizes our sense of security.
As human beings (often including Christian human beings) construct worlds that reflect ourselves, we create rhythms, patterns, symbols, and structures that are often (if not always) distorted copies of heavenly reality.
They are artificial in the sense that they are not naturally occurring and in the sense that they are affected. The façade, however impressive, lacks a final sort of substance.
Augmented reality, virtual reality, and social media are not the first mechanisms humans have used to construct a reality. They have, however, allowed for the proliferation of constructed realities.
Everyone has an opportunity to create, promote, and benefit from their own interest, values, fears, and beliefs. As Christians look into the realities others construct, we must take care that the constructed realities of others do not become a screen between us and God.
AI constructs reality in a slightly different manner than other technologies in so much as AI has developed a mystique that has yet to be matched by its performance. AI models don’t replicate human thought. They mimic it.
AI-enabled humanoid robots don’t grasp the realities and difficulties of life. They don’t yet need or feel. Yet, AI Jesus doles out pithy advice, and various AI models offer counseling.
People are beginning to consult AI models as if they have some secret knowledge unavailable to our inferior human minds. The notion that “artificial intelligence” is even “intelligence” at this point creates something of an aspirational fiction rather than a reality.
How Might Christians Proceed
While often viewed as tedious reading, the instructions for building the Tabernacle (Exodus 25-31) are, in part, intended to ensure the construction of an environment that mirrored a heavenly reality.
As Old Testament theologian Bruce Waltke notes, “The liturgy is a symbol, a copy, of the heavenly reality. Exodus 25:9 speaks of the pattern God showed Moses, implying, according to the author of Hebrews (9:23-24), that liturgical objects are an earthly copy of the heavenly court.”
The instructions, laws, and statutes given to Israel were intended to allow Israel to live in light of heavenly reality and to, in some sense, embody that reality on earth.
As Christians, we need to consider that the patterns we live by are to reflect a heavenly reality. While we don’t need to reconstruct the Tabernacle or temple, we do need to reflect God’s order by refusing to live in ways incommensurate with the gospel.
We are not to “be conformed to the passions of your [our] former ignorance” but “as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, ‘You shall be Holy, for I am Holy.’” We are to imitate God. We are to confirm the patterns of our lives to him.
Living in a digital world presents certain challenges. Yet, the challenges are not so different from what we have faced in the past that they surpass the wisdom found in Scripture. As such, God’s people need to learn to look with eyes that see and listen with ears that hear.
We are under constant pressure to ignore God. As I note in Christian Resistance, “There is a sense in which the principalities and powers with which we interact press us to ‘convert’ so that we love what they desire us to love in the way they desire us to love it.”
Resisting those pressures means we must learn to recognize God as the most relevant Actor and Factor in the world today.
For further reading:
How Should Christians Respond to AI? Bias, Decision-Making, and Data Processing
How Should Christians Respond to AI? Its Virtue and a Response to Vervaeke
How Should Christians Approach Progress in Technology?
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