In November 2022, the world witnessed a staggering technological advancement—the release of the open AI platform ChatGPT. It’s truly impressive. If you tell ChatGPT to “make a case for the abolition of property taxes, providing citations of legal precedent,” it’ll generate a cogent 400-word response in a matter of seconds. If you tell it to “write a children’s bedtime story appropriate for a 4-year-old,” it’ll do it.
But as impressive as ChatGPT is, it presents one hiccup for its users. It’s known to “hallucinate.” Though ChatGPT has nearly unlimited access to all the information on the internet, the AI application at times provides paragraph after paragraph of inaccurate, or even false, information. ChatGPT’s answers sound plausible, but you can’t always trust them.
As impressive as ChatGPT is, it presents one hiccup for its users. It’s known to ‘hallucinate.’
The AI platform’s “hallucinations” should sound eerily familiar to anyone acquainted with the human condition. That’s because open AI software like ChatGPT is built by humans, and it mirrors our fallen limitations.
When we read Scripture or consume the news, it’s easy for us to filter what we see and hear through a particular cultural or political lens. Why do we “hallucinate” in this way? Why do we tend to cherry-pick verses or sound bites in a way that confirms our preconceived notions? It’s because our hallucinating hearts have an inward and selfish bent (Jer. 6:10). We view the world through our own biases and don’t even recognize how biased we are. We need a better way to understand the world.
Our Problem Isn’t Information
We don’t mainly have an information problem. We have an orientation problem. As South Korean philosopher and cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han says, “Today we are well-informed, but disoriented.” Information alone has no power to orient our hearts, but the algorithms that control the ways we encounter information have an uncanny ability to reinforce our preferences, biases, and selfish bents. They create what Han calls a “filter bubble”:
The longer I surf the Internet, the more my filter bubble fills with information I like, information that reinforces my beliefs. Soon I see only those worldviews that conform to my own. Other information is kept away because the filter bubble envelops me in a permanent “sleeping-self.”
We—just like ChatGPT—have the propensity to “hallucinate” and deceive ourselves. We easily find information that sounds plausible, but in reality, we want to use that information to defend and reinforce the beliefs we already have. As Martin Luther wrote, apart from Christ our heart is naturally “curved in on itself.”
We Need Radical Reorientation
What we need most isn’t better information (though that’s necessary too). We need a radical reorientation toward the person of Jesus.
What we need most isn’t better information. We need a radical reorientation toward the person of Jesus.
Sinclair Ferguson warns against our tendency to deceive ourselves through simply knowing about right theology, the Bible, and Jesus (something artificial intelligence is capable of) rather than intimately knowing Jesus himself. We fall into this deception when we separate “the benefits of Christ’s work (justification, reconciliation, adoption, and so on) from Christ himself.” That brings a subtle temptation to keep Jesus at arm’s length, to objectify him as merely a well-organized system of correct information.
The only way to avoid this trap is total reorientation, for Christ to make us alive and bend toward personal communion with him. As John Murray put it, “The life of true faith cannot be that of cold metallic assent [to articles of faith]. It must have the passion and warmth of love and communion, because communion with God is the crown and apex of true religion.”
It’s not enough to have our doctrinal ducks in a row. It’s not enough to be able to articulate the truths of our faith with theological exactitude. ChatGPT can sometimes do that. Instead, we need the truth of the gospel to direct our hearts toward intimate friendship with Christ, the Truth incarnate.
We Can’t Reorient Alone
For this, we need the church. As helpful as it is to remember the need for communion with Christ, such communion can still prove difficult in our cultural moment. We’re constantly bombarded with false narratives about ourselves, about the world we live in, and even about God. How do we pursue reoriented hearts in these confusing cultural waters? We can’t do it alone.
We need Christ’s body—a vibrant community of people whose Christian lives point us to the Savior. The church does this by renarrating the gospel story to us each time we’re together (Heb. 3:12–13).
Ultimately, it’s in the context of these relationships with Christ and your local church community that you’ll find a way to escape world’s “hallucinating” deception and reorient around the Savior who never deceives.
The Gospel Coalition