SOMETIMES I HAVE what they call “lucid dreams.” I’m aware that what I’m experiencing is a product of my mind and not tethered to outside realities (like the law of gravity). I can wake myself up—with much effort—by yelling in my dream, which actually activates my real vocal cords (to my husband’s annoyance). As in the films The Matrix and Inception, the million-dollar question arises: How do we know what is real and what is all in our heads?
With the skyrocketing use of generative AI in our everyday lives—from work reports to dinner-table Googling—the question takes on new layers. How can we tell when something is generated by Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT? What are the telltale signs of the “uncanny valley” experience? And—more importantly—is there something distinct and irreplaceable about our embodied reality that AI cannot simulate?
Artificial intelligence is a closed system. The material it uses to generate output is whatever we feed it, which can be up to the entirety of what exists on the internet. Though that is a colossal amount of information, it is also nothing new. The “thoughts” AI “thinks” are ideas that some human being at one time or another has already had.
AI can’t dig its toes into the soil on a crisp morning and have a singular encounter with a blue jay. AI can’t touch death as it creeps over a sick loved one and stiffens their limbs. AI can’t feel the electric energy of being in a crowd chanting “¡ICE, escucha! ¡Estamos en la lucha!”
The thing about reality is that it comes from outside of us.
The thing about reality is that it comes from outside of us. It can’t be generated from our heads and our past experiences. There is a surprising quality to it, a “breaking in” of something we did not expect, something that transcends our current consciousness. “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth; do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert” (Isaiah 43:19).
While God did speak to people in the Bible through dreams, God’s trademark “breaking in” came in the form of Jesus Christ in a body, walking around a Galilean lake, spitting, sticking mud in people’s eyes, and casting pigs off a cliff. Talk about surprising and unexpected.
There are many useful applications of AI, which I won’t reject wholesale. But in terms of moving humanity forward, or—better put—giving us what we need to solve the intractable problems of our day, I’m not banking on it. I think the gospels are right in pointing us toward the incarnation—that unique alchemy of spirit, body, community, and receptiveness to the present moment. To answer my deepest questions, I won’t be asking Claude. I’ll be gathering with others around a table, planting seeds in the dirt, and listening to what that blue jay has to say.
Liuan Huska is the author of the children’s book My South American Classroom and Hurting Yet Whole: Reconciling Body and Spirit in Chronic Pain and Illness. She works as director of communications for A Rocha USA.
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