People are freaking about artificial intelligence (fake concept).
But we already have fake cops (women), fake media (propaganda), fake elections (absentee ballots), fake pandemics (flu), fake climate change (weather).
I could write a long article about each one of those topics—and I have done so—but at some point, you have to go past the surface issues of the news and get into metaphysical questions about reality.
Show me a dimension of reality, and I’ll point you to a matching hoax ideology that blocks you from seeing the truth accurately.
It’s not that reality changed. It’s that you’ll always need to use your brain to distinguish the real McCoy from the counterfeit.
What Is Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
The only Being in the universe who has the power to create an intelligent being is God alone.
If you believe that humans can create human-like computers with human-style brains which are capable of forming rational thoughts in spontaneous response to stimuli, then you are denying basic reality.
These computers, no matter how sophisticated their inputs or outputs (scripts, databases, speeches, images, deepfake videos) are always/only machines. They can only reproduce or reiterate stuff you stuffed into them before they churned it back out.
It might be rearranged, but it won’t be ‘random’—any more than the cumulative outcome of flipping a coin a hundred times would be ‘random’.
Machines cannot learn.
Only humans (and to a much lesser extent, animals) can do that.
The ability of humans to learn is a function of our being created by God. The nature of our minds is extremely complex and we simply do not understand how our minds interact with the universe. Our grasp of this is very primitive, but good enough for hooking onto the world and getting things done.
Considering how little we grasp about how our own minds work, why would we ever believe that we could construct ‘other’ minds which had the potential even to equal our own mental powers, let alone eclipse them?
We can’t, and we won’t. All of this is mental masturbation, or put more biblically, idolatry.
Idolatry has two sides: the self-love side (delusions of grandeur) and the self-loathing side (delusions of persecution).
Here’s what I mean by that.
The minute you depart from a basic grounding in God (we all do this in small ways, all the time, no matter how devout we are), you enter into a form of idolatry.
Anything or anyone you show a higher fealty than God, you are projecting a form of yourself onto that thing and making yourself into a little god.
The fears about AI involve both an overestimation of human prowess (delusions of grandeur, assuming we are as powerful and creative as God) and an underestimation of God’s sovereignty (the delusion that God would be unable to restrain human activity once it reaches a certain level of evolution outside His control).
So it truly involves two interrelated fallacies, or failures of faith: too high a view of humans and too low a view of God.
In reality, we can’t make intelligent machines. It’ll never happen. It is literally like Eve believing Satan when he said that she would become a god by eating the forbidden fruit, and she could be in charge of reality.
Conversely, God is in total control of humanity and even our limiteid free will is entirely subservient to His supreme sovereignty.
(The compatibility between God’s absolute sovereignty over history and our own secondary free wills as individuals is way outside the scope here, but it’s an article of the Christian faith. No serious Christian denies either premise. But people who are afraid of AI taking over the world are flirting with denying both.)
As far as computers: they are just machines.
Machines can be more or less complex, depending on how intricate the systems involved in building and maintaining them. But they are never in danger of giving rise to a consciousness independent of the human minds which created them.
The Connection Between Fake News and Artificial Intelligence
I’m not afraid of artificial intelligence taking over because I don’t believe it’s possible.
What is possible, though, is a false sense of confident knowledge in the minds of humanity. To say it another way, it’s possible to condition people into believing they understand what’s happening in the world while the reality remains completely hidden from them.
(And yes, we are getting into Plato’s Cave territory. Always dangerous ground when you suggest that things aren’t really all they seem. You’ll have to judge for yourselves if you ‘buy’ my narrative but just know that I like it out here in the sunshine. I’m not going to hang out with you in the dark forever. Socrates agreed with Jesus that you have to be born again. You have to leave the cave to get up to the Higher Reality. Anything less is Mommy Syndrome/Womb Worship.)
Of course, nobody’s omniscient. And thankfully, you don’t need to know everything—or even very much—to live a good and productive life. You just need to know the basics.
But we live in an age when even the most basic facts of reality—like the idea that it is evil and unhealthy to do surgery on children to remove their genitals—is obscured by massive amounts of propaganda and psychological conditioning. It’s as if the price for believing in the truth and living according to that is being driven higher and higher all the time by an ever-expanding fear of disagreeing with media narratives.
The media narratives are so deadly and life-threatening that any child can recognize them as evil as soon as they are spoken aloud. Claims like:
the world is going to go up in flames unless we stop eating meat forever
everyone is going to die from a deadly virus unless everyone takes a safe and effective deadly vaccine
people have no souls but at the same time they can be born in the ‘wrong’ bodies and then get surgery to switch to the ‘right’ bodies
every individual is born an equal blank slate, and only becomes what xhe is as a result of conditioning, so we have to make all environments uniform in order to produce real social justice and equity
Again, these are self-evidently stupid ideas—children laugh when you tell them these things, or they’re horrified.
At the same time, the media drumbeat around these ideas is so intense, so relentless and so all-encompassing, and the consequences of dissent so dire, that even you (dear reader) had trouble reading that list without feeling that you already agree with a lot of it in ways you of which you were scarcely aware.
Your spirit is willing to disagree in theory, but your flesh may have trouble following the impulse when your job or marriage or friendship are on the line.
It helps to lay the narratives out side by side, like I did above. To remember what we’re being told to believe, and see just how absurd it all is, and how inhumane our rulers must be to deprive us of the freedom of disagreeing with it—to the point where people who doubt these ideas are routinely fired, jailed or even killed for expressing doubts.
So here’s the connection between artificial intelligence (which isn’t really a threat, but more of an annoyance) and fake news (which is also a problem, but a more palpable one): both are founded on a false conception of reality, where the creators claim the power of shaping reality at the stroke of a key on the keyboard.
The difference, though, is that while artificial intelligence doesn’t really convince anyone that the robot is thinking, people are far more susceptible to fake news delivered by lying humans (sometimes known as journalists).
How Can You Discern Fake News From Real Truth?
People often ask me, “Greg, if the media is so fake, then how else are we supposed to know what to believe about the news?”
This is an important question.
My answer: your ability to discern the true from the fake in terms of news is similar to your ability to do that with friends and acquaintances.
If I tell you some individuals or coworkers are more trustworthy than others based on how they act and how they speak, you immediately understand what I’m talking about. Sure, you can be mistaken about a person’s trustworthiness, but basically your guts are sound.
If later they prove themselves (or betray you), adjust for the new data. But don’t stop having hunches! That’s suicide.
But if I suggest that there’s a similar process for assessing the media and different narratives, you may have trouble following me. Trust me, though, the process of choosing friends is VERY SIMILAR to deciding which books, news articles, videos and blogs you’re going to trust (including this one you’re reading).
Just as you meet people in life who turn out to be reliable, there are certain patterns you can watch for in news reporting that should help you discern what to believe and who to trust.
Sometimes it’s worth going back and remembering the history of the phrase ‘fake news.’
Today it’s linked with President Trump because he said it constantly as a way to attack his enemies in the mainstream media.
But you have to remember that he stole the phrase form the media itself.
They were branding his commentary as ‘fake news’ as a way of casting doubts on his trustworthiness in speaking to voters. Turning their phrase against them, he in turn accused them of being ‘fake news’ because after all, what’s good for the goose etc.
The media didn’t like that reversal. But Trump fans loved it. They instinctively felt that he was expressing something they themselves had often thought: that the media slants its presentation of news in ways that are self-serving or intentionally harmful to anyone the media dislikes, or fawning toward those it loves.
A key question to ask about any news story you come across is “Cui bono?” Who benefits?
When government officials and media people insist that something is true, and you can’t quite believe it, bear the concept of ‘cui bono’ in mind.
Many people lean toward a basic accepting trust of whatever they’re told, or of whatever they’re told most recently. The basis for this trustingness is a simple of matter of creature comfort. Feeling doubtful about what you’re being told can be painful, and asking questions can be uncomfortable.
But that’s really all it is—a desire to avoid pain and keep from rocking the boat.
In contrast, we all have within us a desire for truth. Our hunger to really know what is going on is deeply wired in us as human beings and cannot be vanquished, no matter how hard we try to lie to ourselves.
My suggestion is that believing in fake news narratives—like global warming, Covid, Ukrainian democracy, or universal political equality—warps society in ways that are parallel to the harm incurred by befriending liars and thieves.
People easily grasp the danger of doing business with liars, or getting married to them. But the task gets harder, the further you venture from your own neighborhood. In terms of national or global news, it’s necessary to ask “Who benefits from the decision to publish this particular story?” Or even, “Who benefits from this angle of coverage?”
A few examples:
Is most of the recent coverage of the war in Palestine/Israel balanced in a way to allow for the possibility of nuance, complexity and competing legitimate national motives on both sides of the conflict? Or is there relentless coverage of one team’s atrocities, coupled with silence about the other side’s?
Did you encounter equal amounts of positive and negative coverage of both Putin and Zelensky during the Russia/Ukraine war over the last two years? Or did you find near-uniform demonization of Putin and ubiquitous Marvel-Movie hero worship of Zelensky?
During the pandemic in 2020, were American businesses treated uniformly under the law, with everyone getting shut down at the same time so that we could all unite behind the science and flatten the curve in 15 days? Or was it the case that only small businesses (and churches) were required to close? While big box chains and corporations conveniently stayed open, because apparently the dangers of Covid only operated inside small businesses (and churches), but not inside Wal-Mart or abortion clinics?
Does Greta Thunberg speak out against demonstrable environmental hazards like the Palestine, Ohio chemical train wreck, and the demolition (by America) of the Nordstream pipeline in Germany, and the incineration of asbestos this summer in Paris, and the Ukrainian bombing of a Russian dam that flooded an entire city? Or does she pick and choose her outrages based on how well those merge with larger globalist narratives like carbon footprints and the reduction of agriculture? (I’m telling you she’s bought and paid for by globalist swindlers, none of whom care about the environment—and some of whom are aware that climatology is a pseudoscientific swindle).
Instead of reporting on these inconsistencies, or diving into the nuances and exploring every aspect of both sides of admittedly complex events, the news media is perversely motivated to present a singular—and often expressly false—view of every issue.
If you don’t think there’s payment involved in such coverage, you have a few things to learn!
But even beyond the money to be made in supporting narratives which funnel more and more resources into the hands of fewer and fewer firms and institutions, there’s the separate issue of naked power.
In other words, the interlocking lies are motivated both by greed for money and lust for power. Some are more prone to one or the other, but none of it is legitimately about healing the world.
The relationship between government and its media lapdogs today is straight-up prostitution. And the media whores aren’t even well paid. They fancy themselves courtiers, and most delude themselves they’ll exercise some power of their own one day. The relationship represents a near-total matrix of interlocking censorship and thought control.
At the same time, I don’t think you should be too upset about it. I mean, the censorship does piss me off, and it should also piss you off.
But it has as much chance of destroying humanity as artificial intelligence has of taking over all of society. Which is to say, none.
Truth is paramount here. The reason we’re being prevented from telling the truth is because its promotion threatens the gridlock on power. And the more we are able to know the truth and live in its terms, the less sway the rulers have over us.
If we had free speech and a free press, where alternative media were allowed to disagree with the mainstream narratives, truth would eventually win out and nobody would cooperate with all the nonsense.
And we will have that. Victory is inevitable, because Jesus Christ is Himself the Truth. He has declared that you (that is to say, Christians) shall know the truth, and the Truth shall make you free.