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Artificial Truth

How deepfakes, AI, and virtual reality are contributing to an organized onslaught against truth.

By Gillian Bethel

In 1957, a British TV news program reported on the bumper spring spaghetti harvest in Switzerland. It showed a family joyfully picking ripe spaghetti from their spaghetti trees and having a celebration dinner of fresh garden-to-plate spaghetti. The program, Panorama, was a popular and trusted news source, and since the British public was not very familiar with spaghetti back then, many took the report seriously. Some even called in to find out if spaghetti bushes could be purchased in the UK. They were kindly reminded what the date was—April 1!

Most people had a good laugh about the clever fake news report. They continued to trust the BBC to provide them with reliable, factual accounts on Panorama. But today, fake news isn’t so funny. Every day is potentially a fool’s day. Truth seems to be increasingly elusive in the 21st century, and advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are certainly

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References

  1. “What Is a Bot?,” Akamai, akamai.com. https://www.akamai.com/learn/what-is-a-bot

  2. Ibid.

  3. Avatars are figures that represent users in a computer-generated world.

  4. “How Social Media is Fueling Divisiveness,” International Policy Digest, intpolicydigest.org, May 2, 2022. https://intpolicydigest.org/how-social-media-is-fueling-divisiveness/

  5. Lucifer means “light-bearer.”

  6. Rev. 12:7‒9; Luke 4:5, 6.

  7. See Revelation 20, especially verse 3.

Image credits

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