In our gospel readings for Transfiguration Sunday, Jesus performs one of the miracles identified as proof of being the Messiah – he restores the sight of a man that was born blind. And the Pharisees object – first, because Jesus did this on the sabbath, and second, because the Pharisees were not ready to admit that Jesus was the Messiah. So Jesus tries to tackle their wilful blindness by giving them a description of his role, using the language of sheep and shepherds. There are many voices calling out to God's people – the voices of thieves and bandits hoping to lure his sheep into disaster. But Jesus is the voice that the flock recognizes and follows, the voice of the good shepherd, who will lay down his life for the sheep. And hopefully, his voice is the voice we accurately echo as we continue the mission to combat blindness, grow the flock, and spread His abundant-life-giving Word....
One of the scarier parts of the artificial intelligence revolution we are in today, is the rapid improvement in the quality of deepfakes. For anyone disconnected from the internet, a deepfake is a computer method that allows you to create realistic looking video and realistic sounding audio...of things that never actually happened. A deepfake uses a deep neural network to find patterns in the facial mannerisms and vocal inflections of famous people, or at least, people who have bothered to video record the hundreds of speeches needed to train this kind of network. Then these neural networks are used in reverse, to GENERATE video or audio of those famous people, performing the actions or saying the words that YOU dictate. All it takes is collecting a few terabytes of data of your victim, a couple of weeks on a supercomputer, and presto - you have video “evidence” of a politician in scandal, a trusted news source giving misinformation, or Brad Pitt fighting Tom Cruise on a rooftop. Very, VERY soon, it will be AS impossible to determine what is reality – at least in the realms of video and audio recordings – as if we were deaf and blind....
And this must be pleasing to the original master of the deepfake, our adversary, Satan. Ever since he twisted the words of God in the garden of Eden, Satan has run his deepfakes in the CPU's of our brains - trying to say HIS words using the voice of Jesus. And his words to us have three end goals: to steal, to kill, and to destroy. Satan wants to steal our joy, kill our relationships, and destroy our society. And based on the direction our society is going, Satan is getting better and better at it as time goes on.
Take the dialogue between Jesus and his disciples in our first reading, for instance. The disciples see someone suffering, and they want to know whose sin deserved it. Using Jesus' deepfake voice, Satan might try to say to us, "you also DESERVE to suffer. You NEED to suffer to be my disciple. Our Father WANTS you to suffer. If you're a Christian and you're not miserable, you're doing it all wrong." But then again, Satan is too smart to push it too far, because then the fake is too obvious. So we end up with a vague feeling that Jesus told us to suffer, when what he really said was that suffering takes place so that God's works might be revealed. We may suffer at times as a result of pursuing God's kingdom in a hostile world, but it is not to punish us, but to display the results of saving faith.
And take our fourth reading, for instance. Jesus says, "I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep." Using Jesus' deepfake voice, Satan might say to us, "you too, should lay down your lives for sheep, preferably for complete strangers living far away. Sacrificing your life, or at least, the things that are important for your life, for the sake of random others, is good for you - a moral positive. You and your talents are less valuable to growing the kingdom of God than that other random person. Your LIFE is worth less to me than that other random person. I would PREFER that you would die, so that other person may live fully." But then again, Satan is too smart to push it too far, because then the fake is too obvious, so we end up with a vague feeling that Jesus told us to sacrifice ourselves, when what he really told us was that sacrifice was HIS role in God's plan for forgiveness, and we are to love our neighbour AS ourselves, not to the exclusion of ourselves. Using a deepfake of Jesus' voice, Satan works to steal, kill, and destroy – steal our joy, kill our relationships, and destroy our society.