Question
How Does AI Influence Our Perception of Reality?
AI generates plausible content at scale, blurring the line between what is real and what is constructed. The risk is not just deception but a slow erosion of our capacity to distinguish reality from its representation — a capacity essential to faithful witness.
Generative AI produces text, images, audio, and video that can be indistinguishable from human work. Some of this is genuinely useful. But the cumulative effect on a culture is significant: as AI-generated content fills the information ecosystem, the baseline capacity to distinguish real from constructed weakens. Jean Baudrillard’s term simulacra — copies without originals — captures the long-term concern. We may increasingly live in environments where the representation circulates more freely than the reality it once depicted.
For Christians, this is not just an epistemological problem but a discipleship problem. Faithful witness requires truthful speech, and truthful speech requires the cultivated capacity to recognize truth. When that capacity erodes — through deepfakes, generated content, hallucinated answers, and the constant production of plausible-but-false material — Christians risk repeating, spreading, and being shaped by what is false. Discernment in an AI age is therefore not optional. It is a precondition for witness.
Key Takeaways: AI and the Erosion of Reality
Core Concept: AI generates plausible content at a scale that erodes our capacity to distinguish real from constructed.
Scholar: Jean Baudrillard (Simulacra and Simulation).
Scripture: Ephesians 4:25 (speak truth); Philippians 4:8 (whatever is true).
The “So What”: Christians who don’t cultivate active discernment in an AI age will be shaped by plausibility rather than by truth.
About the Author
James Spencer, PhD, is a theologian, author, and host of the Thinking Christian podcast, where he writes and speaks on Christian formation, political theology, and technology. He holds a PhD in Theological Studies from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and completed the Institute for Educational Management at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He serves as President of the D.L. Moody Center in Northfield, Massachusetts, as adjunct faculty in Wheaton College’s MA in Leadership program, and as an Associate Research Fellow at the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, Christianity.com, and Sojourners. His forthcoming book is Discipleship and Discernment in the Digital Age (InterVarsity Press, Fall 2026). Learn more at jamesgspencer.com.