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AI Can’t Beat What We Learn in the School of Our Senses
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In March 2020, the sights and smells of Southern California spring were especially sweet to me. The roses and camellia, the potent fragrance of orange blossoms, the chirping chickadees and pollinating hummingbirds; the usually brown Santa Ana Mountains remade with emerald grasses and yellow wild mustard; my 2-year-old son chasing butterflies around the backyard, blissfully unaware of the surrounding societal chaos.
I went outside a lot in those days, trying to escape the surreality and paranoia of life online in the COVID-19 era. I remember feeling more grounded, more human, more hopeful when I could breathe fresh air, sit outside at sunset, or pick avocados from our backyard tree. The script of creation—however uncontrollable—felt more predictable than the uncertain script of human history as our screens narrated to us an unfolding apocalypse.
The reality of COVID-19, we now know, was never as severe as our digital feeds declared. That’s not to say it wasn’t a nasty sickness that caused real suffering; it was and it did. But bigger than the pandemic’s biological disaster was its informational disaster—the tragic alchemy of an already brewing digital epistemological crisis, the algorithm’s acceleration of extreme takes, and the utter failure of the “expert class” to engender trust.
The rest of 2020 was a turning point for me—and I suspect many others—in recognizing the extent of screen-mediated information’s untrustworthiness. That year accelerated the death of expertise and crystallized the reality—which existed before the pandemic and has worsened since—that information in the digital era is severely compromised. There’s too much of it, being created and disseminated too quickly, in ways unhelpfully tailored (via algorithms) to the interests of tribes and partisan narratives.
In the years since, in books like The Wisdom Pyramid and Scrolling Ourselves to Death, I’ve tried to help Christians (and myself) reorient around nourishing truth in a digital world rife with malnourishing narratives and misinformation. But now, on the cusp of the AI revolution, I’m feeling the urgency again to remind us of the vital importance of reconnecting with physical reality in an age of digital delusions.
Trust What You Can Touch
This year reminds me of March 2020. As AI rapidly woos us into partnership with its brand of disembodied “knowledge work,” and more and more of what we see on screens and feeds might be AI-rendered (or significantly AI-enhanced), disillusionment with digital media is understandable.
What is real? How can I know if any written idea, rendered image, or even worship song is made by humans anymore? Is this email I’m reading AI-drafted or from the fingers (and brain) of a real person? Is this Substack post original to the author or a collab between the author and ChatGPT?
Increasingly, I feel what I felt in the first months of the pandemic: Nothing mediated to me on screens is as trustworthy as what I can see with my own eyes and feel with my own senses.
In a world as shaped by digital media as ours is, we sometimes forget what “media” means. It’s the mediating of reality: the secondhand re-presentation of something original and tangible, to those who didn’t perceive it directly. Media is an intervening agent between something primary, direct, and immediate, and what becomes secondhand, indirect, and mediated.
It’s like when kids play the telephone game. The first person says something, but by the time the last person hears it, after many translations and mediations, what’s heard is often far from the original communiqué.
We sometimes forget what ‘media’ means. It’s the mediating of reality: the secondhand re-presentation of something original and tangible, to those who didn’t perceive it directly.
Media can be helpful, of course; at its best, it can make distant realities more proximate and complex situations more easily understood. I’m a writer currently mediating my ideas to you in the form of a website article. I’m not discounting the good purposes media can serve.
But the process of mediating reality is admittedly fraught with peril and rife with potential for introducing distorting errors (as demonstrated by the comical results of the telephone game). Some reading this article will no doubt hear things I didn’t intend to communicate—things I could clarify were we talking about this face-to-face.
That’s why, if you have the choice, it’s usually better to trust what you can see with your own eyes—or hear from people you know in the flesh—more readily than what’s mediated to you.
The Upside Down of an Overmediated World
Our problem is that we live in a dangerously overmediated world.
Digital media has become more central and authoritative to us than our primary context, direct observance, or tangibly lived experience. It’s a world where commentary kerfuffles now take on a more important stature than the truth of the inciting incident being discussed. We’re more interested in something’s usefulness to our preferred narrative than the facticity of the thing itself.
This is a world where:
Watching famous YouTube “influencers” is more compelling than tangibly exerting your own influence locally.
Following the advice of celebrity podcasters is more common than heeding the counsel of your parents or local church pastor.
Commentary on commentary, takes about takes, reaction videos to reactions are the norm—discourse about the discourse about the discourse.
National news headlines shape our politics more than what’s happening in our own city that we can see, feel, and influence more directly.
Online pastor-bashing influencers lead us to distrust our local pastor, even if we’ve never seen him do anything untrustworthy.
Virtual sex via pornography or digital AI companions increasingly pass as substitutes for real human romantic relationships.
We check the weather app to see if it’s raining rather than going outside to see if we feel raindrops.
The list could go on. You get the idea. In all this, the veracity of the digitally mediated is inferior to what we can directly observe. But we’re being conditioned to trust the digitally mediated more.
AI will only accelerate this tendency. It’s a new pinnacle of mediating power. It instantly mediates to us the entirety of human discourse or any particular topic in a concise, synthesized form. We’ll soon default to AI’s answers for all our inquiries, rather than trusting our observations or experiences in the real world—let alone the wisdom of other flesh-and-blood humans in our family or local church.
Resist this upside-down dynamic. God created you with eyes to see, ears to hear, fingers to touch. And because your senses can sometimes mislead you, God also created you to be placed in a family and church community that loves you, forms you, and helps you see what you miss. God created you to be embedded in a physical place, with other embodied people, who don’t have to be mediated to you because you’re beside them, face-to-face, shoulder-to-shoulder, unoptimized and unmanipulated by algorithmic efficiencies.
Freya India put it well in a recent blog post titled “You Have to Be Human”:
AI has to churn out the observations and opinions of other people, of a world it has never touched or experienced. You don’t have to do the same. So go outside, say yes to things, be scared and excited and uncomfortable. Feel your hands shake before you speak, your legs ache after a long day, your face flush when asking her out. Experience it all, the real world with all your senses, the fear of getting lost, the relief of finding your way, the hands of another person. Look people in the eye and learn about the world from living in it.
Arguably for Christians, the best place to look people in the eye, join hands with other embodied beings, and feel that very human discomfort India describes, is in a local church. The IRL church is a buttress of stability in a topsy-turvy world and a tangible community of hope in an age of digital disorientation. “Get offline and go to church” is advice most of us would do well to heed more often.
No Substitute for Immediate Experience
In his book Working, Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Robert Caro describes the immersive, on-the-ground research he did for his famous biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson. He moved with his wife, Ina, from Manhattan to live in the Texas Hill Country, where LBJ was raised. He even slept several nights under the stars in a sleeping bag, on a remote ranch, to feel with his senses what it was like to have been raised there.
Biographers in the age of AI can now easily deploy this technology for highly involved research. Likely, a good prompt could churn out an accurate, evocative description of the Texas Hill Country of LBJ’s youth. But there’s no substitute for observing things ourselves, digging into primary sources and primary places in the way Caro did, using the five senses God gave us—the original “media” of our ingenious design.
Digital media gives us access to infinite information, neatly retrieved and summarized for us by robots. We’ve never been more informed. But being informed is different from being wise. And mediated information is a poor substitute for immediate experience.
This is true spiritually, of course. We can know everything about God but not know him in a relational way. The former matters little if we don’t have the latter. We can be highly informed on theology but doxologically bankrupt; Trinitarian know-it-alls without really knowing the Trinitarian god personally.
Man or Machine?
The first book I read in 2026 was Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity. It’s an unflinching, refreshingly human jeremiad of the sort we need right now. We’re nearing a “man or machine?” decision point in contemporary culture, where we can choose to go all-in on machine authority or instead double down on old-fashioned human wisdom as an act of preparatory resistance:
Wisdom that begins with embodied, sensory experiences AI doesn’t have
Wisdom that involves love and affections AI can never have
Wisdom shaped by painful setbacks and suffering AI doesn’t feel
Wisdom rooted in human limits—limits AI is built to transcend
Reading Kingsnorth’s book coincided with my taking a monthlong break from all social media in January. I was less online than I have been in years; less aware of distant goings-on and trending outrages of the day; ignorant of a litany of pseudoevents that churned up discursive storms for a day or two before dissipating into remnant puddles, quickly evaporated and forgotten.
Being informed is different from being wise. And mediated information is a poor substitute for immediate experience.
This media downgrade allowed me greater presence with more permanent things. I had more time for the tangible, grounding, real-world experiences that shape my soul most fruitfully: Front-yard football with my two older sons, building LEGO castles with my daughter, holding my newborn son and seeing him recognize my face and smile, neighborhood prayer walks with my wife, long coffee meetups, worship and fellowship with my local church, receiving the hospitality of meal-train deliveries, avocado picking and sunset pondering—like in those uncertain days of March 2020.
COVID-19 feels far away now; none of my four kids even remembers it. The digital delusions and informational disasters are different now. But what grounded me then is what grounds me now—and can ground you, too, as the age of AI dawns.
What has always grounded Christians in the chaos? The unchanging reality of God, the gift of his Word, the communal power of his church, and the marvels of the sensory-rich world he made. These are all things we don’t have to ask AI to mediate to us. We can—and should—use our God-given brains and God-made bodies to encounter them directly. “Taste and see” that the Lord is good (Ps. 34:8). Don’t just take ChatGPT’s word for it.
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