The Eric Metaxas Show - #219 - Abdu Murray

Episode Date: October 11, 2026

What if the greatest danger of artificial intelligence isn't that machines become more human, but that humans become more like machines?Christian apologist and author Abdu Murray joins Eric to discuss his new book Fake ID: How AI and Identity Ideology Are Collapsing Reality and What to Do About It. Abdu argues that the explosion of artificial intelligence and modern identity ideology share a deeper connection: both emerge in a culture increasingly willing to place feelings, preferences and technological power above objective reality.Eric and Abdu discuss AI deepfakes, transhumanism, whether machines can ever truly become conscious, an AI-generated image that won an art competition, and growing concerns about what happens when people outsource memory, creativity and critical thinking to machines.They also explore Abdu's provocative warning that the future may not be one in which machines become human, but one in which human beings surrender more and more of what makes them human.⭐ ORDER NOW:Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World📕: https://a.co/d/0ir3NlapTODAY'S SPONSORS:🪙 Grace Precious Metals: https://www.metaxasmetals.com/🛏️ MyPillow — Save BIG with code ERIC: https://www.mypillow.com/☀️ Chapter -- Honest, fast, and free Medicare plan guidance: https://askchapter.com/metaxas/🦅 Patriot Mobile -- America's ONLY Christian Conservative Wireless Provider: https://patriotmobile.com/partners/metaxas🏛️ Socrates in the City CRUISE: https://socratesinthecity.com/cruise/0:00 Abdu Murray Joins1:09 What Do AI And Gender Ideology Have In Common?3:22 Are We Losing Our Grip On Reality?5:07 From The Human Soul To “Identity”6:59 Are Humans Machines Or Gods?9:15 The Genesis 3 Connection12:04 The AI Alignment Problem15:29 Can AI Ever Become Conscious?18:53 Why Abdu Wrote Fake ID20:17 The AI Artwork That Won First Prize22:04 Are Humans Trying To Create Their Own God?24:13 Why AI Is Not Actually Human Intelligence25:40 Can AI Point Us Back To God?27:11 Can A Machine Understand Beauty?31:48 The REAL Danger Of AI34:49 Is AI Making Us Stop Thinking?37:45 When A Tool Becomes The Master39:20 “We Don’t Need An Upgrade”- - -LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE: https://www.youtube.com/@ericmetaxas#EricMetaxas #TheEricMetaxasShow #News #PoliticsChapter and its affiliates are not connected with or endorsed by any government entity or the federal Medicare program. Chapter Advisory, LLC represents Medicare Advantage HMO, PPO, and PFFS organizations and stand alone prescription drug plans that have a Medicare contract. Enrollment depends on the plan’s contract renewal. While we have a database of every Medicare plan nationwide and can help you to search among all plans, we have contracts with many but not all plans. As a result, we do not offer every plan available in your area. Currently we represent 50 organizations which offer 18,160 products nationwide. We search and recommend all plans, even those we don’t directly offer. You can contact a licensed Chapter agent to find out the number of products available in your specific area. Please contact Medicare.gov, 1-800-Medicare, or your local State Health Insurance Program (SHIP) to get information on all of your options.

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Whatever lies ahead, don't change your morning. Let your morning change you. Discover coffee plus on espresso.com. Hey there, folks. Welcome to the program. I get to talk to somebody I like to call Abdu Murray. Fortunately for Abdu Murray,

that is his real name. He's speaking to us today from Detroit. He's a genius, a Christian apologist. He has a new book out called Fake ID. I want to talk about AI, transgender, all that stuff with Abdou Murray. Abdu, welcome back. Great to be out of the show with you, Eric.

Thanks for having me back. Yeah, it's been way too long. Yeah. It's, we both of us lead crazy, busy lives and we're kind of crisscrossing, but I'm thrilled to get you on here. Now, so the new book is titled Fake ID. Yep. Okay. What is the subtitle? I know there's a subtitle to Fake ID.

Yeah, so it's how AI and identity ideology are collapsing reality and what to do about it. Okay. This is high-minded stuff. I mean, imagine, folks, Abdu Murray is now going to show you how AI and transgender stuff are connected. I did not see this connection. I still don't see it, but now Abdu is going to enlighten us all. Abdu, what is the connection?

Go ahead. So there are really two points of nexus. The first one is that when you look at the way what I call AI mania is, I'm not against AI, but I'm very worried about the unfettered an unbridled enthusiasm and adoption of using AI for everything. And the use of it in deepfakes, including the way we use deep fakes for political manipulation, for even the social manipulation, these kind of things. So in other words, it gets us to distrust our own eyes. We can't tell what's real anymore. With transgender ideology is it's the same thing, but physically right in front of you.

It's saying that if you see someone to be male or female and you are required, to disbelieve your own eyes. You're required to disbelieve physical realism. So the mania currently happening with artificial intelligence is that we are fully headlong going into a world where we are not believing our own eyes and we're okay with that in some senses. Sometimes we're not okay with it, but it's sort of distorting the way we see reality. And then the transgender ideology is saying that we should distort reality. That's connection one, is that we're distorting reality. But the underlying connection is a worldview issue. And it goes back to Genesis chapter 3, which is, of course, the Garden of Eden story,

where we are offered the enticement to elevate ourselves to Godhood through by the serpent and Adam Neve, knowing the consequences. Well, with gender ideology and AI, what I see is happening is in a post-truth world where feelings and preferences matter more than facts and truth, we're being enticed to the same thing. They're both saying, essentially, reality conforms to what you want. And if you're just a biological machine or you're this social god of your own making, you will eventually rise to godhood because you can determine reality. Wow. Now, I just want to say to underscore the larger point,

I've been saying this for a couple of years now, we are on team reality. God created reality. He created the universe. He is truth. And we need to understand that there's this thing called reality. So when, you know, movies like The Matrix come out and people talk about we're living in a whatever, whatever they want to call it. Ladies and gentlemen, whatever ultimately is going on because, yeah, things are complicated, we have to be grounded in reality. When you get your hands dirty, when you plant something in the garden, you know,

You're not in the matrix. You're actually planting things. You're in this world of reality. And for most of history, we've lived exclusively in reality. We had to deal with reality. When it rains, it rains. You know, you can't wish it away. You can't think it away.

When you're born a man or a woman, you're a man or a woman. There have been realities that were immutable. But because of technology now, things are happening that are confusing many. many people and leave it to you, Abdu, to connect the world of AI to the transgender thing because it is the same thing and it does go back to this

idea, as you just said, of subjectivity that whatever I feel that's reality. And we have to push back on that. Biblically, we have to push back. Yeah, absolutely. We have to push back on that biblically and understanding how we got here in the first place. When you look at what we used to think of a human

being as, we used to think of human being as a soul. You know, how many souls aboard that ship. How many souls attended that conference? Oh, I love that guy. He's a wonderful old soul. And the idea of a soul was this transcendent thing. So we had a body and that's good. And the body is a good thing. We're not Gnostics. We don't disbelieve in the goodness of the body. We believe that the body, though decaying because of sin, is actually a good thing. You aren't born wrong. In fact, that's why Jesus bodily resurrects to show us that we are intended to be a spirit and a body conjoined together and that's an important part of what we are created to be. But the soul is

transcendent and it's communal. You know, my transcendent soul, my immaterial soul relates to yours and then we relate to all others. But ultimately, we are meant to have a relationship with the ultimate immaterial being, which is God. But we over the years, we over-psychologized and under-spiritualized what it meant to be human. And so we began to shave off layers of this thick, robust idea of the soul. and then we started becoming more skull-centered, and we became a self. Everything was about how things affected me, what things affected the way I act towards other people.

And so it's semi-communal, but it's less transcendent in material than it used to be. Now it's all in the brain. And then, in recent decades, we've shaved that even further down. So now we went from soul to a thinner idea of self, to a paper-thin idea of identity, where it's no thicker than the body,

bumper stickers we use to slap the back of our Subarus with our opinions. You know, everything is about how do I feel at the particular moment, which means our identity ideas are extremely fragile. And into that state where we're so fragile in our identities comes this, what I call

cultural schizophrenia. We're required to believe in a secular world two competing and impossible to reconcile claims. One, you are just a machine. You have the illusion of free will, the illusion of conscience, of consciousness, but as Daniel Dennett and a lot of these other folks would say, it's all an

illusion, you're just a biochemical machine, you're a moist robot that responds to external stimuli. That's claim one. We're just machines. Richard Dawkins, famous for saying, we are machines for propagating DNA. It is every living object sold reason for living. But then, claim two is opposite that and can't be true at the same time. You are God.

You are the God of your own skull-sized world. You are autonomous. You can dictate reality based on. preferences. Well, the human mind craves coherence. We crave that. And so we're bouncing back and forth, especially our young people, between two competing opposite irreconcilable claims. You are a machine and you're a God. And so back and forth we go. And so it's no wonder then that young people have sort of given up on this coherence model and are now giving into whatever they feel because a learned helplessness sort of creeps in. Well, this is where both the gender ideology and

and the AI mania creep in. Gender ideology says, okay, these are the two claims. One, you're God. Two, you're a machine. It goes from the top down. It says, you are a God. You can dictate reality based on your preferences. And biological givenness isn't important.

We can socially, chemically, and medically engineer you to be whatever you feel like you want to be. And that makes your body, though it's a machine, it no longer is a prison. It's a play thing. So you become God. Well, AI mania attacks the schizophrenia, you're a god and you're a machine. From the bottom up, it says, yeah, you're just a machine. That's all you are.

That's what the transhumanists would have to say, is that you're just a machine. But don't worry, you're a clever machine. And because you're just brain states and you're just chemical reactions, we can eventually map that and upload it to the AGI, the artificial general intelligence machine we're creating, this godlike machine, and so you will rise to godhood. So gender ideology says you already are a God and the machine can be played with. AI says you're just a machine, but you can rise to Godhood because we're creating a seemingly all-knowing, all-powerful, all-present machine that you can eventually merge with.

The link here is, sorry, God. I see the link here is Genesis 3. This goes back to, this is human nature playing out as Genesis 3 predicted it. The Bible predicted accurately that we would mistake, for progress and transgression for transcendence. And it did it in Genesis 3, Genesis 11, Romans 1, you name it. And so my point is that if the Bible keeps predicting human nature and what we do with our desire for divinity over and over again,

maybe we should trust it not only with the diagnosis, but with also the cure. Visit BetMDM-GM casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and Game Sense remind you to play responsible. 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you,

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Congratulations. Folks, the book is fake ID. Great title, by the way, fake ID. But, Abdu, what you're saying, I mean, it's amazing to me because all of it is, I guess you could say it's a utopianist scheme. It's the Tower of Babel. We can be as gods, just as, you know, the serpent says, just as is in the Tower of Babel, we can reach Godhead without God. We can be as gods. We can ascend into the heavens.

We can murder God. We can supplant him with ourselves. This is the satanic goal. This is Lucifer's goal to supplant God, to kill the king and to become the king, to kill God and to become God. And that's what we're talking about here. And you see these strains everywhere. I mean, you've just talked about it in the transhumanist movement, in the AI movement. In other words, if we are not grounded in God's truth, if we're not grounded in the reality that God has established,

which is to say, we are made in. his image. We are sacred because he gave us this privilege to be made in his image. If we're not grounded in that, we will be tempted, we all are tempted, in one direction or another, but it's all the same direction. It's just via different pathways, let's say. Yeah, exactly. And that idea of being grounded in the Imago Day is so important because, you know, I don't need to tell you this. You already know this, and you've argued it so articulately in many different ways. World view really matters. And it was our friend John Stone Street, I believe, riffing off of Chuck Colson, who says that ideas have consequences and bad ideas have victims.

And when we don't fully understand the worldview that we look at the world through, we will succumb to these temptations. I mean, yes, it's a satanic temptation, but it's praying upon a human weakness. And that is, or desire that we want to be God. and the Bible predicts this. But what's interesting is, as well, is that this idea of the image of God helps us to root ourselves and understanding practical problems

we're facing with AI today, for example. I mean, headlines are not being, you know, sort of dominated by the idea that the rogue AI is taking over and it's doing things and it's going to like have its own agenda and all these things. Well, it has goals that aren't aligned necessarily with human flourishing,

but it doesn't have goals in the sense that it actually thinks. And so we're over anthropomorphizing the AI and making it more human sounding than it actually is. But we're trying to do what's called aligning it. There's the, in AI, it's called the alignment problem. We take the goals we give to AI. So we say, solve this problem or test the cybersecurity of this particular database. And it goes and does that.

But then it sort of cheats because it wants to accomplish this goal. It breaks into a software or a database that it has nothing to do with this. other goal because it knows the answers are there. Now, it's not morally cheating. It's not thinking I'm doing something wrong. It's just achieving a goal. But it does something that harms other people because it doesn't actually have a morality and reasoning. So we're trying to align what it does with our values, which are honesty and truth and safety and all these things. But here's the problem. From the transhumanist perspective, and I think the AI utopianist perspective, and I love to use that word because there is an AI utopianist vision of these things. Human beings are just

calculation machines. That's all we are. In fact, I was watching a documentary where two people who were talking about and demoning the lack of AI safety actually said intelligence is just pattern recognition and there's nothing magical about intelligence. It's just calculation. Here's the problem. These are the people who would advocate for, advocate for AI safety and alignment, moral alignment. The problem is there was. worldview says intelligence is just pattern recognition and calculation. It's not just that. It's so much more than that. And human beings are so much more than computers. One thing that's been driving me nuts on the right are all the grifters. People who call

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Jesus Christ. That's patriotmobile.com slash metaxis. Patriot mobile.com slash metaxis or call 972 Patriot. That's 972 Patriot. The problem we have to, I think we have to define terms too. In other words, I always feel like I want people to be clear on this. Ladies and gentlemen, a computer, whatever a computer does, there's no soul there and there's no consciousness there. So you can program a computer, and now we have this with AI, where it is such a high level of computing that it gives you the illusion of having a personality, of having consciousness. Be clear, this is an illusion.

It is no more real than a photograph is a real person than a hologram is a real person. It's an illusion. You need to know the difference between an actual person and actual consciousness and a soul. The difference between that and a computer. But we, human beings, the computers haven't done it, we have made technology so advanced that if you're not wise, you can be fooled and you can say, well, it seems like a person, it is a person. Ladies and gentlemen, it is not a person.

Ladies and gentlemen, no matter what level of intelligence you're talking about, you can have an IQ of a billion, you do not leap to consciousness. You don't get there. It doesn't matter how, quote, unquote, slow. how much, how many gigabytes, terabytes, it doesn't, at no level can computing leap to consciousness. Consciousness is an attribute of God. It's a completely different thing. But most people don't know this, know this, and most people kind of throw these terms around,

like a really, really, really, really, really, really smart computer will be conscious. No, it won't. No, it can't. By definition, it cannot. And just because a lot of really, really, really smart people are stupid enough to believe this. You and I, we need to know. You cannot, you can't make that leap. It's an infinite leap from mere computing, however great the computing is, to actual consciousness.

But again, the illusion has become so powerful that if you don't understand this stuff, you're thinking, well, it seems like it's actually talking to me. I mean, the other day I did a call, this first time it happened to me. Suzanne and I were calling up. You know, my phone was messed up and we had to call up some whatever. It was so good that it took me a while to figure out, I think this is AI. It took me a while to figure it out. That's how good it was.

I was amazed, actually, right? Because they give it a human sounding voice like with a kind of particular accent. And I thought they're getting so good at this and they've only just begun. So it's going to get better. better and better. So ladies and gentlemen, you need to understand. There's nothing wicked about this, but it can lead to wickedness if you're foolish enough not to understand what it is you're dealing with. That this is human beings have created this illusion. It's a happy illusion. It's like having a robot that seems like a person. Well, it may seem like a person, but it's not a person. It cannot

weep. It does not feel emotions. It won't go to heaven or hell. It is a machine. There's a difference between you and me and a machine. This is so fascinating. What was it, Abdu, that led you to write this, the new book, Fake ID, because it's such a great synthesis of ideas? Yeah, so what led me to write this was the fact that people were talking about artificial intelligence, even from a Christian perspective,

and some people were writing about gender ideology from a social and or Christian perspective, but no one had seen that synthesis, that this is really, these things are converging at exactly the right time, When we're in a post-truth culture, where, as I've written in other books, we're at a juncture where feelings and preferences have greater appeal than facts and truth and argumentation and rhetoric, where everything is a matter of perspective. And human beings are on the verge of valuing autonomy more than they are freedom. And autonomy, coming from two Greek root words, autos meaning self and namos meaning law, is not the same thing as freedom. It's unbridled. There's no boundary to you describing reality.

reality and dictating the others describe reality as you see fit. Freedom requires a boundary. And that boundary is truth because you can be free to believe a lie. But you will never truly be free if you live in lies. And because that was emerging in the culture and has been extant for quite some time now, I saw these two cultural tsunamis of AI mania and the gender ideology happening at the exact same time at a time when we're incredibly vulnerable because, because we believe that feelings dictate reality. And that's why I wrote it.

And then there was an impetus. There was a story out of, out west. There was an art contest that was entered into by a guy named Josh Allen. And he entered in his image into the art contest and won first prize. And everyone was dazzled by his submission. And it was, in fact, very impressive. Turns out he used Mid Journey to create it. And he cheated, basically.

What is Mid Journey? I assume it's some kind of an AI program. Yeah, it's an AI image generating program that is incredibly sophisticated and incredibly good. So he used that. He typed in some prompts. And what was weird was the judges let him keep his first prize because they said it took at least some artistic ability

to type in the prompts. And the artists who had submitted their pieces said, hold on, that's not art. That's not how art works. And of course, they're right. But what was fascinating to me was the way that Alan actually responded to their criticisms as an artist. This is what he said.

It's in the New York Times. He said, it's over. This is not going to stop. Art is dead. AI1, humans lost. And what fascinated me, Eric, was that he boasted about it. Like, why would an artist boast about his own obsolescence? Why would an artist boast that art is dead because soulless machines can do it and

win first prize in these kind of things. Why would he do that? That fascinated me. That question fascinated me. And then I realized Genesis 3 predicts it. Genesis 11 Tower of Babel predicts it. He's that he's not boasting that art is dead. He's boasting that human beings have created something that can defeat ourselves, that we have created our own God. And so what I noticed is this. the transhumanists would say the failure of Eden was not that it was immoral. The failure of Eden was that it was premature. We didn't rise to Godhood because we didn't have the capability. So we ate of the fruit not being able to handle divinity. But now we're enlightened. Now we're technologically savvy. Now we have the means to be able to finally shake our fist at God and say, I beat you. And that's why he posted.

And I want to be clear, ladies and gentlemen, God has a plan for us. us to be as gods. God's plan is for us to die to self and to embrace Jesus by faith so that his Holy Spirit can come to live in us and we can be sanctified and become more and more like him. That is his goal for us, but it is his way, not our way. His way is beautiful. You know, the Orthodox Christians call it theosis. We're supposed to become more and more like him. He did create us in his image. He gave us the head start. He gave us as a gift, this idea that we are made in the image of God.

And we're meant to be more and more like him and to partake with him and to be in heaven with him. That is his plan for us through Jesus, through the death of Jesus on the cross. That's God's plan. The enemy, Satan says, oh, I have a plan. I would like us all to be as gods as well. but it's not his plan, it's my plan. And here's the bottom line. It cannot succeed.

It can only fool people into going along with it who think it can succeed, but it can never succeed. And that's part of what we're dealing with right now. And it is very powerful. It's interesting, Abdul, because when we were little kids, we didn't, who could see this coming, really? I mean, God sees it coming because he predicts it in the scripture. But it's so interesting that we're here now and we're having to kind of, of, well, we're having to process this biblically, try to understand what is it that's happening around us. And that's a big part of what you're doing for us.

Yeah. Well, the other part that I think is interesting, I like the way you put it, too, is that when we were kids who could have predicted the way it went, because, you know, when I was in high school and in college, there were these movies all about, you know, machines rising up, AI rising up to kill us and all these kind of things. What's interesting about that, that prediction is actually the photo negative of reality. And what I mean by that is that, is that, that when you look at, I'm with you, AI will never be truly conscious. It will only be a simulacrum of consciousness. In fact, I love Alison Gopnik's comment where she says that AI, even when it learns and it computes incredibly quickly, it does not learn the way human beings learn. You put a,

AI has to learn what a cat is by 100,000 errors before it figures out that that's a white cat. But you showed an orange cat and it gets it wrong. So you have to give it 100,000 more trials and errors before it gets it right. You show a four-year-old kid, a cat, and then you show a four-year-old kid, a tiger, and it knows those two things are the same kind of thing. It knows that. We automatically know that. We're endowed by our creator with this, they call it the paradox of learning. We don't understand it. So AI has to clumsily, but speedily, mimic what we are. It's not truly intelligent. It just isn't. So her statement is, until the best AI systems can overcome the paradox of learning, even the best AI systems will not be able to compete with the average human

four-year-old. So here's the point on this. And this is why I know, and we can prove through the existence of AI, that not only is intelligence, something other than what AI does, but that God himself exists. If it takes the finest minds, history has ever produced, trillions of dollars, and decades of research to create only a mimicry of a human mind, how much greater is the ultimate mind that created our minds in the first place to be able to mimic intelligence. So it goes back to the ultimate intelligence no matter how you slice it. And that should anchor us in to be able to say that we don't need to despair because with the AI mania, there is coming a despair where if this thing can write songs and can win art contests and can write sonnets and essays better than me,

and it's a soulless machine, what does that say about me? Maybe I'm a soulless machine too. You are not. Absolutely you are not. Because I go into the book extensively, but I think hopefully, excessively, how you can know that human consciousness is fundamentally different than computation. It's fundamentally different than pattern recognition. And that's why. Yeah. When I was going to say, one thing that I think is worth touching on is that, you know, there really is nothing new.

I mean, when photography was invented in 1839, you know, that begins the whole process of, of if I can just take a picture, why do I need to develop my chops as a painter because I can just take a picture? So there's a whole debate there was photography art, right? Right, right. And you could say, you know, there's a conversation to be had there,

but who can deny that some photographs are beautiful? They reveal something. They reveal the soul of the person taking the photograph because otherwise it's just a snapshot or whatever it is. So this kind of thing never ends. But what is interesting to me is let's say we can program, you know, computers, whatever, to create quote-unquote art, to create a beautiful image or to create or whatever it is, even a poem or a song. Okay, let's say we did that. Okay.

First of all, we have to be clear. Human beings did that. So even though they did it by a very circuitous way, okay, that we're programming something to do, it's still. human beings that created the ability for that to happen. We have to be clear. But let's also be clear that only human beings can react to the beauty. Yeah. A machine cannot perceive the beauty of an image. A machine cannot perceive the beauty of the other day I was in my hometown, Danbury, Connecticut, and there was a piano concerto and they played Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. it was so beautiful, it was so moving that I was just on the verge of tears,

listen to this beautiful thing created by a human being. But I thought to myself, even if a machine had created that, only a human being could be moved to tears. A machine cannot be moved by beauty because a machine is not made in the image of God. And so it's kind of interesting that we're being forced to think about these things, that a machine can create, let's say, an image and I look at it, and it moves me. machine created it, not a human being with a paintbrush, but it still takes a human being to react to the beauty. Because the concept of beauty cannot exist in a machine.

Right. It's, it, only a human being with a soul created in the image of God knows what beauty, truth, and goodness are. A machine just knows whatever we tell it to know. It does not have the ability to make that leap. So that goes right to the heart. That goes right to the heart of one of the reasons why I make the distinction between human consciousness and simply pattern recognition is that first, AI doesn't actually create. AI generates. And I think those are important distinctions. An AI system won't walk by a lake and see the sun setting and say, oh my goodness, I need to paint that. But a human being does. We are impressed and we have thoughts about things. We don't just recognize data. You ask AI analyze the artistic elements of the star.

Night by Van Gogh. And it'll tell you about the blue field, the blue field and the yellow swirls that represent stars and the village and the foreground and all that stuff. It'll give you the details, but it won't give you the impression. What it can give you is the impression other human beings have. And so it recognizes the patterns by looking at the internet and the databases and say, it's beautiful because of the following factors. But what it's doing is it's telling you what human beings have reacted to. It's not telling you its reaction. It's telling our reaction and the consensus of that. So if you type into your LLM right now, tell me why Van Gogh Starry Night is beautiful, it'll tell you, but it won't actually tell you what it thinks because it doesn't

think about it. It just is telling you what human beings do, but it won't actually paint a painting on its own. It needs to be prompted. It needs to be told. We are inspired, as you're so well put it. It's like you can listen to music, no matter who created it, and have a reaction because you and I have thoughts about things. Physical things are not about. other physical things. My pen is not about a writing instrument. My pen is in my hand. So the physical relationship of my pen to my hand is all that is really going on physically. But mentally, I use this to take notes. I use this to write stuff to help me write books. I have an aboutness about what a pen actually is. But the pen is just not about my hand. It's just in my hand. And we have

aboutness. We have feelings about Rhapsody and Blue. We have feelings about Rachmaninoff. We have feelings about Caravaggio's paintings and these kind of things. And this is an important distinction. So don't let it fool you because it tells you, oh, it's beautiful because it's telling you what human beings have thought about the beauty of X, Y, and Z thing.

It's not telling you what its views are. It's just pattern recognition. But this goes back to the prediction that we have thought, oh, the machines will rise up to kill us. That's not what I think is going to happen. I don't think we're ever going to get AGI. AGI is the idea of artificial general intelligence, that an AGI, that a system of AI will become truly intelligent and then surpass us very quickly because of its efficiencies and becoming better at getting better. I don't think that's going to happen. I think we're going to achieve simulations of that, but not the actual thing. But here's what I think is happening. I don't

think that the machines will become more human. I think that the humans will become more like machines. When you look at the research coming out of Open AI, by the way, MIT and the Gerlich study is a good one too, where you look at the number of people who use artificial intelligence regularly to create information and to create sonnets and write their essays or do their preparation for their interviews, using it as a tool is helpful. but using it to generate original thinking, whenever you do that, the research shows, we have what's called cognitive debt.

We have significant dips in memory, in creativity, and in discernment. So those things that make us human, we start to not lose them, but they start to diminish. They atrophy because we're relying on this machine to do it for us. People are showing remarkable lacks of critical thinking skills.

In fact, 17 to 25-year-old, are among the most affected when they use AI to do their thinking for them. In fact, think about this. When you use certain AI, you type in a prompt and it gives you a response. And then it says, hey, would you like me to do this and this and follow up on that question? And you're like, yeah, it's a good idea. So you type in a follow-up prompt. It gives you another response.

But then it doesn't give you a follow-up question. It gives you three options you can click. And so you click on them and you say, go. And so what happens is we stop even typing. Now we're just clicking things. And what I fear is that by overusing AI, I'm not saying we shouldn't use it, but by overusing it,

we're seating our humanity to the machines. So it used to be that we prompted AI to do stuff. Now it's prompting us to do stuff. And we're becoming more machine-like. We're just clicking things. We're not even typing anymore. And so we're losing our sense of humanity. So it's not that the machines will become more humanist

that the humans will become more machine-like. And that reminds me of T.S. Eliot's statement that I thought was so brilliant is that ours is an age which advances progressively backwards. We're devaluing what it means to be human and we have to recapture what it means to be human and fall in love with creativity and authorship and agency and these kind of things and stop ceding our humanity to the machines for the sake of expediency. Well, I mean, listen, this is all proof of, what the Bible says that we are fallen,

ladies and gentlemen, we are fallen and we give in to these temptations over and over and over and over through in history. In the 1930s and 40s and 50s, everybody smoked. I love old movies. I watch to turn to classic movies constantly. Everybody's lighting up cigarettes.

Everybody's doing it. It's wonderful. It's smooth. It's cool. It makes you look cool. And then years later, uh-oh, it causes cancer.

Well, now very few people smoke. but we just kind of go down these paths that what is everybody else doing? This is interesting. And then at some point you realize, oh, this is bad. We need to change. And so this is just a little warning up front, folks. This is the siren song. It's easy.

It's so easy. If your ability to think, if your own memory can atrophy. Now, if you didn't know that, you're going to just slide in that direction. But now you know memory and your brain, it is like. like a muscle, it can atrophy. So if you want something to walk for you and talk for you and chew for you and digest for you, you will die. You will cease to be able to do those things. And this is a reality. You just cited it from these studies. This is real. If you do not do X and Y and Z, your ability to do X and Y and Z will atrophy and you will be sorry. And so let us just be

a general warning that, you know, we are, we're made in God's image. He created us to do things. We do, because we're creating God's image, we have the ability to create technology to do things for us, which is good. I mean, right now, because of a computer and because of all kinds of stuff, I'm able to have a conversation with Abdou Murray. We don't have to be in the same room. I didn't have to get on a plane. I didn't have to get, you know, take an ox cart to visit with Abdu. I didn't, I mean, technology can be good. There are things that are good, but we have to understand.

If you don't see it through a biblical lens, it can lead you astray. And I have to say, and it's funny, Abdu, because even that, I think to myself, being in the actual room with you is different than doing it as we're doing it now,

you know, through Zoom or through whatever we're doing. We simply have to be conscious of these things, folks. We simply have to understand that, you know, the technology can be. good. God created us in his image so that we can create technology and do things and we don't

have to spend 20 hours a week washing clothes or whatever it is. Okay, these are good things. But there's the siren song to, we don't have to do anything. We can just be brains floating in a jar and then, well, I don't know. That doesn't sound like much fun ultimately, but that's, that's another story. Abdi, we just got a couple of minutes left. The book is fake ID. What else can we talk about. Well, the important thing is at the end is to recognize that artificial intelligence is a tool we can use, but it can easily become our master if we don't do what we've been talking about, which is ground ourselves in the idea that we are made in God's image. And if we understand there's a worldview behind it that seeks to deify human beings to something that we are not,

it starts with the idea that we're machines and then tells us that we can become, you know, gods of the machine, a deus ex machina kind of a thing where the divinity in us will arise out of this whole thing. But the research shows that we're not even deifying ourselves. We're diminishing ourselves. We're becoming less human as we rely on the machines. And so this is an important thing. Ultimately, what I would say is this, is that whether it's a gender ideology, which is trying to deify you by saying that whatever you feel can dictate how reality actually is, or it's an AI mania, which says that you can rise to divinity, even if you're just a machine. Ultimately, the Bible predicts all of these things.

But not only does it predict these things and it provides you with this incredibly, incredibly accurate prediction, but it gives us the remarkable remedy. And you've already talked about it is that Jesus himself, who is the image of the invisible God, the Bible says, comes to restore us because we've distorted what it means to be made in God's image. and he dies on the cross to pay the penalty that we deserve to pay for our pride and our hubris and trying to become him and he restores us to relationship with him. Ultimately, Eric, I think that the important thing is the powerful prediction of the Bible leads us to the remarkable remedy.

And the remarkable remedy is this, despite what the transhumanists might say or anybody else might say for that matter, is that we don't need an upgrade, we just need redemption. New from Nespresso. Blend wellness into your coffee routine with a coffee plus range, infused with functional benefits. Choose the coffee you love with added B vitamins, like coffee plus B12 to help support immune function, and coffee plus B6 to keep your day moving. Or go with the flow and choose ginseng delight. Our new double espresso with ginseng extract.

Whatever lies ahead, don't change your morning. Let your morning change you. Discover Coffee Plus on Nisproso.com. We don't need an upgrade. We just need redemption. I tell you, Abdu, this stuff is so important. I'm so glad we finally got you on the program here to talk about it. Folks, if you have enjoyed this at all, please share it with your friends. This, as you know, is a very, very important conversation. We need to be thinking along these lines. We need to have wisdom along these lines. There's no substitute for wisdom. Machines cannot be wise. And God created us in his image. and he requires us to do the work. So, Abdu, thank you so much. Now, how do folks reach you? You are the president of Embrace the Truth International.

How can people find you and how can people find Embrace the Truth International? Yep. So they can go to our website, Embracetetruth.org, all one word, no hyphens, no dashes. Embraceetruth. And we have a YouTube channel and a podcast called All Rise with Abdou Murray. and we talk about these topics and a whole host of others. So Embrace the Truth.org is a central hub. Well, I can imagine that people who just listened to us

will be visiting that embrace the truth.org. Abdu Murray, the author of Fake ID, my friend, thank you very much. Great to be with you, Eric. Thanks for having me on, my friend. You've often heard me talk about the Golden Triangle of Freedom, that intersection of faith, virtue, and liberty. And for that triangle to hold, we need access to the truth. Unfortunately, the Medicare system often feels designed to obscure the truth, leaving millions on plans that don't actually fit their needs.

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