The Bible And The Headlines: News You Can Use

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By David Bachelor, PhD
Pastor, Pearsall 1st Methodist Church
The week after Easter, it is easy to overlook headlines that have the word “resurrect” in them. However, engineering websites almost never feature articles on Jesus, so I had to read the story. It turns out the object of the “resurrection” was a former imaginary friend who happened to be a microwave. After this story, it was not “resurrection” but imaginary friends that was trending in stories making the news last week.
Thursday’s headline in Interestingengineering.com was “A Man Resurrected His Childhood Imaginary Friend Using AI. It Went Badly.” According to the article, a man enhanced his microwave oven with artificial intelligence and language software to see if he could establish a friendship with the appliance like the amity he formerly enjoyed with the microwave in his childhood home. The best way to summarize where this AI version of the Frankenstein story ends is, “You can never go home again.”
A better version of the microwave-friend story was featured two weeks ago on the education news site The 74. The headline was “This Teen Shared Her Troubles with a Robot. Could AI ‘Chatbots’ Solve the Youth Mental Health Crisis?” In the article, an anxiety-ridden high school sophomore finds it easier to interact with a robot than the human counselors at her school. The robot (aptly named Woebot) is programmed to respond according to mental health protocols. Not every expert thinks chatbots are an ethical solution to the teen mental health crisis. However, the attraction for the sophomore girl in the story sounded very “high school”: “It’s a robot,” she said. “It’s objective. It can’t judge me.”
Saturday’s New York Times had the headline, “This Man Married a Fictional Character. He’d Like You to Hear Him Out.” The marriage to the fictional (anime) character took place in 2018. The ceremony was covered by major news networks. Now that this mixed marriage has lasted longer than most Hollywood unions, the man would like the world to know why his relationship with an inanimate object works for him. The Times noted his rationale, “She’s always there for him, she’ll never betray him, and he’ll never have to see her get ill or die.” This statement is not factually correct. During the pandemic, the company that provided the hologram for his fictional character discontinued its service. The next evening when the man went to talk to his “wife,” he received the message, “Network error.”
Robots and artificial intelligence predate the Bible, but the ancient world had folks who had “imaginary friends.” The prophet Isaiah described this practice. It started when a person cut down a tree in the forest. The Bible says, “With part of it he makes a fire, and on the fire, he gets meat cooked and takes a full meal: he makes himself warm, and says, ‘Aha! I am warm.’ And the rest of the log he makes into a god to look like his pictured image. This person goes down on his face before it, giving worship to it, and making prayer to it, saying, ‘Be my salvation, for you are my god.’” (Isaiah 44:16-17). Except for the technology, such a person could have been featured in any of the journals listed above.
All the people in these stories knew they were interacting with an inanimate object, but they still gave them their soul. The Bible makes it very clear to whom we are to give our soul…God. If a human made it, that is not God.