In the near future the words of Paul regarding unfounded gossip will enter a new stage of interpretation, “Every matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses” (II Corinthians 13:1).

Imagine if a friend or a leader you love was accused of an act or a crime that seemed so out of character for them that you could not believe it happened. Then a video begins to circulate on social media that shows them in a very compromising situation or saying something that challenged your understanding of them. You see the “evidence” played out for you in real-time right before your eyes of the very thing that supports the accusation against them, but it was not real.

For the last few years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been developed to aid us in many areas of life like home appliances and assistance with data research. Much of it is innocent and helpful. The next level of AI will soon be functioning. It’s called General AI. General AI expands the narrow capabilities of traditional AI to allow a broader application to multi-task unimaginable banks of data. It will interpret human intent on a basic level and create human-like behavior indistinguishable from reality.

What will take place in this next level of AI is called “unsupervised learning.” The current supervised learning of AI comes from datasets that humans have created and labeled according to certain predetermined categories. In other words, we prepare the data for the AI to interpret and it functions within those parameters. The next level of AI will learn from the data without human guidance or labels. AI will create on its own without our help.

I mentioned all of this to issue a word of caution for the future regarding gossip. The next level of AI will be able to create imagery and speech patterns that are so real and life-like that we will not be able to distinguish what we are watching from real-life face-to-face conversations. Imagine the lynch mob mentality this will release when people shout, “I saw him do it! or “I heard her say it!” referring to an unfounded accusation supported by this technology.

Because this is on the near horizon of the human experience, we cannot take a presentation of any kind as a settled truth about anyone, friend, or foe.  We will need trusted and truthful people with firsthand “I was there and heard it” kind of testimony before we assume any accusation is true. To the rest of the world, such a choice of integrity will appear antiquated since the world will have fully embraced the theology of the gods of technology and any evidence it brings to support an accusation.