I won a new iPhone. Well, that’s what I thought when I opened up TikTok one night and saw MrBeast, the most popular YouTuber in history, saying I was one of 10,000 lucky winners. Sound like a scam? That’s because it is. And yet, since MrBeast is known for giving money away, it’s just real enough to be believable.
According to MrBeast, this was a scam seen by “lots of people.” Someone created a realistic deepfake video of MrBeast without his consent and ran it as a TikTok ad to scam tens of thousands of people. This has also happened to celebrities Tom Hanks and Gayle King, as well as political figures like Barack Obama. Deepfakes have been around for a while, but this is likely the first time that multiple deepfakes were created with the explicit intention to deceive and served by a social media algorithm to mass audiences.
Unfortunately, AI-powered deepfake technology will only become more convincing with time. This trend should be of particular concern for Christians and the church. However, the embodied community of the local church offers a ready solution to this growing problem.
Eroding Digital Trust
What if someone wanted to harm your church by having a pastor or a prominent Christian say something outrageous and out of character? Or what if you’re a business leader or a parent and someone wants to put words in your mouth to ruin your career or your relationship with your child?
The embodied community of the local church offers a ready solution to this growing problem of deepfake technology.
Many pastors post their sermons online for the benefit of their congregations and as a means of outreach. Though few pastors have as large a digital footprint as an online influencer like MrBeast, many have enough videos and podcasts to train AI to create a believable fake. It’s already easy to edit videos to take comments out of context and unfairly reframe what someone is saying. Deepfake technology could make it seem like someone is teaching heresy or supporting a position he abhors. The inverse problem is also troubling: What if a pastor or Christian teacher says something awful online that disqualifies him from ministry, but he denies the charge by calling it a deepfake or altering the footage?
Everything we post online becomes data that makes it possible to create more accurate deepfakes. Meanwhile, the technology used to create realistic fakes is only getting better and less expensive––and harder to detect. Until recently, video was one of the most reliable ways to know if something was real or not. You couldn’t fake or deny video footage. But the world is quickly changing. After enough high-profile deepfake stories, our epistemic crisis will get even worse. We’re losing one of the last verifiable sources of information, which means we’re losing another way to build societal trust.
Focus on Epistemic Discipleship
“How do I know something?” has always been a philosophically challenging question, but until now, most people were happy to leave it to the philosophers. We must actively instill a Christian approach to knowledge if we want to resist the twin pitfalls of naivety and cynicism.
A society that can’t trust what they see or read on the internet––the ubiquitous source of information and opinions––may become suspicious of everything. Doubt will become easier to sustain than belief in the trustworthiness of the Bible or the historical doctrines of Christianity. We’re already seeing younger generations, flooded with more information and opinions than they can evaluate, becoming increasingly suspicious of authority.
On the surface, deepfakes might seem like just another way to scam folks out of a few dollars. But as this technology develops, we’ll see the little trust we have left in each other erode. One response is to withdraw further and further into isolation, retreating from the world and becoming trapped in an ever-greater individualism. A better solution is found in authentic Christian community.
The author of Hebrews closely associates confidence in the faith and unwavering confession of hope in Christ with gathering together as the body of Christ. As trust in digital relationships crumbles, we mustn’t neglect to meet together in our local congregations to encourage each other all the more (Heb. 10:19–25).
Invest in Meaningful Community
With institutional trust at a historic low, individualism at an all-time high, and the counterfeit institution of social media being drained of the little trust it has, what does this mean for the church?
It means we’re going back to the future. The church must remember that the most verifiably trustworthy thing we have outside of God and his Word is the flesh-and-blood relationships we share. Deepfakes will bring new challenges to the church. They’ll also bring incredible opportunities to our doorsteps. Many things won’t be considered trustworthy if we can’t see them with our own unmediated eyes. The value of trustworthy, personal relationships will skyrocket.
As trust in digital relationships crumbles, we mustn’t neglect to meet together in our local congregations to encourage each other all the more.
We need to invest in the health and longevity of our local churches. We need thick relational webs that digital refugees, removed from their communities by algorithmically incentivized individualism, can step into and find a home where they’re seen, cared for, and equipped for life. We need pastors who are involved in caring for their congregants. And we need congregants who develop meaningful communities and invite others into them.
In the next decade, our greatest apologetic may not be the arguments we make but the relationships we form. Maybe they always were.
The Gospel Coalition