This is the fifth installment of Meghan Sullivan’s series about DELTA, Notre Dame’s faith-based framework for a world of powerful AI.
Next up in the DELTA lineup is “T,” for transcendence — there is objective truth, goodness and beauty that is independent of anything we create. Living well depends on cultivating our ability to love these “transcendentals.”
In late September, OpenAI released an app called Sora that lets you use a basic text prompt to create and share AI-generated 10-second videos. More than four million people have used it so far. And many millions more have happily consumed this new and surreal “brain rot” (My new personal favorite channel is Szauderland.).
Video generators like Sora create attention-grabbing, visually stunning content that’s designed to encourage user engagement. It’s easy to see the risks inherent in this type of technology. Fake videos can spread misinformation and misuse people’s images in offensive, hurtful ways — for example, the Sora-generated videos that depicted public television icon Fred Rogers holding a gun — and the dopamine hit they provide makes us want to keep scrolling. They’re not optimized for truth; they’re optimized for your eyeballs.
As humans, we don’t always desire the truth. All too often, we want content that simply distracts us or makes us feel good or reaffirms our assumptions.
We need to remember that beauty and truth are objective goods that are freely given to us by God for our contemplation and joy. Think about the first snowfall on campus. Independent of any software or AI system optimization, that graceful blanket of white was a stunning vision of natural beauty, and we responded to that gift from God with awe and gratitude. We all have an innate desire to experience this type of transcendence.
But if the majority of what we consume is digital and even AI-generated, what will happen to our appetite for things that are real and true? When a short video of a grand mountain range with cascading waterfalls comes across our feeds, will we immediately assume it was made by AI?
Our society is struggling with trust right now — we’ve become suspicious of politicians, institutions and each other. We thought things were bad five years ago, but now, with the proliferation of AI-generated content, it can feel as if we’re wading through mud online. According to a recent Deloitte survey, the average American teenager spends almost seven hours per day on a screen. That’s almost 20 years of life. How many incredible, jaw-dropping experiences will a person have missed by being on a screen for more than two decades?
As AI unlocks new forms of creativity, we must resist the temptation to confuse innovation with ultimate meaning. As Christians, we need to cultivate our capacity for wonder and awe through the practices of worship and contemplation. We must root ourselves in the real, rather than the digital. The practices aren’t just antidotes for brain rot — they are the way we satisfy our deep human need for transcendence.
Meghan Sullivan
Wilsey Family College professor of philosophy and director of University-wide Ethics Initiative and the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good
Nov. 25
