(Jesus said)
For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.”
Pilate said to him, “What is truth?”, John 18:37-38.
Pilate’s cynical put-down continues to echo down the centuries. The concept of truth has always been contested and in one sense there is nothing new about the questioning of truth and authenticity which are a feature of our current digital age.
But there do seem to be growing levels of confusion and uncertainty about the nature of truth in the public square. Our common understanding and agreement about reality and what is happening seems to have become untethered. There is a sense of ‘truth decay’ in the political and public realms.
Can democracy itself survive if we cannot agree together on what is true? In a world where deepfake videos and voice calls are becoming ever more sophisticated, and AI-generated marketing and propaganda is starting to flood the internet, how can we ever know what is genuine, true and authentic?
There is a common sense understanding of truth which all human beings share, and it is interesting that even nursery age children can grasp the difference between truth and lies. “Tell me the truth Tom. Did you or didn’t you hit Anna?” This common sense understanding of truth underpins our justice system and every day in our law courts, judges, lawyers and juries attempt to work out whether witnesses are truthful – whether there is a match between what the witness says and what actually happened.
Philosophers call this the correspondence theory of truth and the Apostle Paul rests the credibility of his preaching and of the Christian Gospel itself on whether or not it was true that Jesus rose from the dead.
“….If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. (1 Corinthians 15:17)
The Christian faith is based on a historical claim to truth. It actually happened, and if you and I were there in the garden with Mary we could have seen and even touched the risen Jesus.
But there is a deeper aspect to truth than a correspondence with external reality. It is not an accident that the English words “truth”, “trust” and “troth” all share the same root. The truth is what a person you trust tells you. And in old English language, when you “pledge your troth” to another person you enter into a solemn covenant of trust and truth-telling.
So truth is ultimately rooted in personal relationships, and the personal God of the universe, the one who is completely trustworthy in word and deed, is the ultimate source and guarantor of truth. We live in a cosmos which is founded on the trustworthiness of God who only speaks the truth and who hates lies.
So is it really true that Jesus rose from the dead? I believe it because many trustworthy people said it, and those early Christian witnesses to the resurrection were prepared to stake their own lives on it. If you like they ‘pledged their troth’ with their lives.
To come back to generative AI programs such as chat GPT and other language or image-producing technologies, these technologies have no human-like understanding of truth and falsehood. Their seemingly intelligent output is generated by an astonishingly complex statistical process that has only a tenuous connection with reality. The technical word for the generation of AI-generated falsehoods is “hallucination” but perhaps it is better called “confabulation”. This is a medical term for a phenomenon seen in patients with brain damage or dementia. They think they are speaking the truth but their misfiring brain cells invent an alternative reality. In the same way AI programs are capable of producing text which might contain blatant lies or subtle half-truths.
The problem with these AI hallucinations is that they can be very plausible and difficult to detect, even by experts. And this means that, in essence, generative AI is not trustworthy. It is not a person who understands truth. Instead it can unwittingly play the role of an extremely plausible and deceptive liar.
It’s obvious that there is a very close relationship between a trustworthiness and authenticity. An authentic person is one in which the external appearances matches their interior truth. That’s why the private lives and ethical behaviour of politicians matter. If there is a mismatch between their words and their private behaviour then the voting public realise that they are not truly authentic – so how can we trust them?
The problem is that authenticity can be faked. In the cynical words of a snake oil salesman – “Once you have learnt to look authentic then you are really on a roll…” Again this is hardly new. Jesus warned of persuasive prophets who were wolves in sheep’s clothing (Matthew 5:17). And the latest generative AI programs can be used to fake authenticity with ever-increasing power and subtlety.
Although it may be very tempting for preachers to use generative AI tools, it’s pretty obvious that they should be used with great caution. In their present form AI programs are not trustworthy, and not only may they create outright falsehoods, the content may be affected by subtle and hard-to-detect biases.
Of course this does not mean that God is incapable of using AI-generated text for his purposes. As Tim Bull points out, he used a donkey to communicate truth to Balaam! But if we use AI tools to create or modify our material, then personal authenticity demands that we are truthful and transparent about this.
In an age of digital fakes and propaganda, many ordinary people have a new longing to discover what is genuine and authentic. Perhaps the age of AI will provide golden opportunities for preachers to teach about the nature of Christian truth. There certainly seems to be increasing interest in deep questions about our humanity.
In a world where machines can do everything, what does it mean to be human? What are human beings for? Instead of despairing about “truth decay”, we need to re-emphasise the common sense meaning of historical truth on which the Gospel is founded. And we can encourage conversations about trust, about how to build authenticity and transparency in our dealings with one another, and above all pointing to the source of all truth, the One who is genuinely Trustworthy.