A well-known pastor and author says AI deepfakes of Billy Graham and other figures are fueling confusion about what’s true – but that the church offers the remedy.
Author and writer Joshua Pauling sounded the alarm in a new column for Mere Orthodoxy after a church member sent him a link that allegedly included a sermon from Graham – but instead was an AI video created for clicks. Pauling is the vicar at All Saints Lutheran Church in Charlotte, N.C., the author of Education’s End, and the co-author of Are We All Cyborgs Now? Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine.
Last year, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) warned its supporters about deepfakes of Graham, who passed away in 2018. The BGEA urged the public to only trust sermons from its official channels.
“The voice sounded like a young Graham from what I could tell, but something didn’t smell right,” Pauling wrote. “Maybe it was the patterns of speech, the cliches, or the voice inflection. Granted, I’m too young to have heard many of Graham’s sermons, but this was one he never delivered.”
Pauling grew suspicious when “Graham,” in the video, referenced a Vatican statement released in 2016 – years after Graham stopped preaching. He became convinced it was a deepfake when “Graham” made two more telltale statements: “share your thoughts in the comments below” and “this video on screen is for you.”
Unfortunately, thousands of viewers had already fallen for the video, believing it was legitimate.
“I scrolled through the comments to see if anyone called this out for what it was: a deception, a sham, all in the name of Jesus,” Pauling wrote. “Turns out this YouTube channel, Faith in Action, was filled with Billy Graham ‘recordings.’ Were they all deepfakes? Was this whole channel AI-generated? And what about the commenters who heaped fulsome praise on Graham’s sermon? Did they not catch the clear clues? Were they bots, too? Scanning the comments revealed another dead giveaway. The YouTube channel ‘replied’ to what seems to be every comment with the stock phrase: ‘God bless you!’”
The quality of AI videos is rapidly improving, making it nearly impossible to determine what is and is not true, Pauling asserted.
“The point is the same no matter the deepfake’s form: the whole edifice is built on artifice, a deception that will wreak further havoc on trust, truth, and reality,” Pauling wrote. “Think of the church member who sent me the link, who thought it was a sermon from a beloved source. Instead, it was AI slop. But somehow it was still good enough to pass the sniff test for hundreds of thousands of viewers (or maybe bots?). This church member is by no means alone; in a few weeks, the video had over half a million views.”
The pastor asked: What happens as deepfakes increasingly flood our information ecosystem? What happens to our sense of truth and how we know it?