Several years ago, I enjoyed reading Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail, an account of 2008’s economic crisis. I enjoyed it enough that I was eager to read his new book, 1929, which describes Wall Street’s greatest crash and the way it led to the Great Depression. I found it was well worth the read and recommend it to anyone with an interest in history or economics.
1929 does not only describe history, but also sounds a sober warning about today, for “ultimately, the story of 1929 is not about rates or regulation, nor about the cleverness of short sellers or the failures of bankers. It is about something far more enduring: human nature.” Human nature likes to think the good times, such as we’ve been enjoying in the markets over the past couple of years, will last forever. And “in that collective fever, humanity will again and again lose its head.” We do, after all, read history so that we are not necessarily doomed to repeat it.
As much as I enjoyed reading the book, there was something in the experience of buying it that alarmed me. I went online to buy it on the day of its release and was fascinated to see that when I searched for “Andrew Ross Sorkin 1929,” there was a whole list of results, many of which bore a striking resemblance to the actual book. I was disturbed to realize that most of them were lookalikes meant to fool people into buying them. Not surprisingly, these lookalikes were written by AI and self-published, a process that can write a book, create a cover, and list it with the major booksellers in a matter of minutes. Since then, I have seen this happen with many other books, and especially those likely to sell briskly.
We often hear these days of “AI slop,” a term that’s used to refer to the massive amounts of poor-quality AI-created material that is churned out and unceremoniously dumped onto the internet. This was once primarily artistless artwork and authorless articles, but has now advanced to much bigger and more substantial forms of content. My Facebook feed is cluttered with movie clips that have been fabricated with Sora, my search results with confidently wrong answers that have been generated by Google, and my RSS feed with articles that have been written by ChatGPT. It’s the world we live in now, a world in which the work of machines is mimicking and displacing the work of human beings, sometimes for good but often for ill.
I have many concerns with AI, but the foremost is that its meteoric rise and wide-scale adoption will begin to cause us to doubt truth altogether. If we cannot trust that an author wrote his book, a band composed their song, or a pastor prepared his sermon, it is truth itself that suffers. I have previously said it like this: “What I am finding is that the existence, the growing prevalence, and the invisibility of AI have begun to seed a kind of epistemic doubt in my mind. When I watch videos, I wonder if they are real or fabricated. When I see a photograph, I wonder if it is authentic or generated, untouched or manipulated. When I read an article on the internet, I wonder whether it was written by a human being or a machine. I don’t know what’s true anymore. I struggle to know what’s real.”
And now it has spread to books—books listed on many of the sites we like to buy from. Who’s to say now that the books we buy have been written by a real author, edited by a real publisher, or contain real facts? If we used to say that “a lie will fly around the whole world while the truth is getting its boots on,” we may now say that AI will write a thousand books—or a million—while an author is sharpening his pencil.
May we be those who master our technology rather than letting it master us.
I suppose the upshot is that we need to be more careful than ever to exercise discernment—to distinguish truth from error, right from wrong, and real from fake. This will require us to analyze the content we encounter, but it will also require us to consider the creator of the content we encounter—to attempt to determine whether that creator is a living and moral being who is capable of telling right from wrong or an amoral algorithm that simply provides what it programmatically determines we wish to see. More than ever, we will need to be as wise as serpents.
Like most of the digital technologies humanity has ushered into the world over the past few decades, we are thinking more of what AI will do to help us than to harm us, thinking more of its benefits than its drawbacks. We are unleashing it on the world first, and will try to control the damage later. But I hope that we, as Christians, are wise enough to pause first and to ask what it will take from us even as it gives to us. I pray that we will be confidently cautious, knowing that even the best technology exists in this broken world and, to varying degrees, will continue to break it. May we be those who master our technology rather than letting it master us.
