By Jim Nichols

Something flew out a window of the White House and landed on the ground. I saw the brief video, as did others. It looked like something that had weight to it rather than just being a paper that floated. It was more solid than that.

Later in the day a reporter asked the President about it. His response was something like, “That was AI. It was fake. It was all fake.”

My hunch is that he was probably correct. However, it illustrates that it is difficult to know what is fake these days. We simply do not know who or what to trust. If others can make still pictures, videos, or audios that are 100 percent fabrication, how can we trust our senses about them—let alone make decisions based on what we have heard or seen?

Two news items crossed my desk recently, both dealing with appearances not being what they seem.

You and I have told lies during our lives; I can think of a few clearly and I suspect you can too. It looked like an easy way out, but the fact that I can still remember the people, place, and events today shows that it was not so easy after all.

A news note from Minneapolis concerned a man being released from 27 years in prison when the key witness to his committing murder confessed that, in fact, she herself had done the deed. She said, “I am not okay any longer with an innocent man sitting in prison for a crime he did not commit.” She continued that she had falsely accused him to draw attention away from her own guilt. An attorney involved said, “I have never seen a more powerful and compelling recantation/confession like this one. If you listen to those recordings, you can hear the anguish in this woman’s voice the enormity of the harm that she has caused his family, and she really feels it. It’s pretty striking.”

Fortunately, your lies and mine do not reach this level of magnitude, but they are real enough that they can disturb us.

Scripture is clear about this as it reads, “Let your yes be yes and your no be no. Anything more than that comes from the evil one.” 

Our increasing AI world sets the stage for much misleading. If we couple this with government leaders who are untruthful consistently and deny scientific facts and replace them with ones constructed by themselves and their friends, we are putting ourselves in a potentially dangerous situation. If those same leaders downplay important historical events, we are in trouble.

Do I trust a medical person who lies to me? An attorney? A preacher? A professor?

I have told my students many times “If you and I do not trust one another to tell the truth to each other, we are out of business together. The relationship is over.”

There is significant discussion in the education world regarding the positives and negatives of AI; there are some of each. Many of the negatives revolve around students using AI as a substitute for their own written creativity. In the eyes of many educators, it is an electronic method of cheating, specifically because students design it to remain hidden.

The second news item is lighter but touches on the same topic. The writer describes an extended bicycle trip he made with friends through the French mountains. With no animosity but with some thoughtfulness, he comments on the fact that he was riding a traditional (although high quality) bike while some of the others rode e-bikes. These, of course, have a small electric motor that boosts the bicycle’s power. That made traversing the mountains much easier. The writer, however, suggests that those riders, although having a less taxing physical requirement, missed aspects of the experience; they were, literally, moving so quickly and easily that the boost was cheating their eyes and ears of part of the mountain experience. There was, however, nothing hidden about these motors; it was clear to everyone what was occurring. No harm, no foul.

One cannot say that with much of AI, especially when it is coupled to purposeful misleading in other ways.

 Jim Nichols is a retired Abilene Christian University biology professor and current hospital chaplain