Check Your Sources
The other day I somehow got to thinking about the DC-3, in Canadian military service known as the C-47 Dakota. I was curious about how many ex-RCAF Dakotas are still flying. So I asked Microsoft Copilot, an AI. It came up with several examples. However, when I dug a little deeper I found that none of the examples were actually ex-RCAF. Moreover, actual flying ex-RCAF Dakotas, like the one at the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton, weren’t mentioned. That doesn’t do a lot for my trust in AI!
Books are better, aren’t they? But even with books, you can’t always believe what you read. Let me give you a couple of examples.
I was recently in a second-hand store and I spotted a book entitled, Why I Hate Canadians. Naturally, that grabbed my attention. It turns out the book was written by a Canadian, Will Ferguson, as a self-deprecating look at our culture. I randomly opened the book and ended up at the chapter entitled “The Day Canada Became Nice.” It starts like this:
October 1995. A woman is found wandering beside a highway north of Los Angeles. She doesn’t remember who she is or where she came from. The U.S. police have only a single clue: the woman is polite, very polite. So polite, in fact, that they figure out she must be a Canadian. They send a bulletin to news agencies and police desks across Canada, and sure enough, the woman is a Canadian. Her identity is established as Ms. Susan Simpson, who mysteriously disappeared from her Edmonton home several weeks earlier. Case closed.
I read that and thought: that might be a sermon illustration! So I snapped a picture of it on my phone. When I got home, I thought it would be good to see if I could find some more details about the story. However, when I looked it up (ironically, I used AI), it turns out there’s no record of the story anywhere. Looking even deeper with the author’s name, I discovered that he fabricated the story. It sounded possible, I wanted it to be true, but I had to admit I’d been duped by a book.
The other example is from academia. A few years ago, renowned post-Reformation scholar Richard Muller produced an elaborate hoax. For a festschrift for Willem Van Asselt, Muller wrote an essay entitled “In the Steps of Voetius: Contingency and the Significance of Cornelis Elleboogius’ Disputationes de Tetragrammato to the Analysis of His life and Work.” Under a pseudonym (R.A. Mylius), from scratch he created a Dutch theologian named Cornelis Hendrikus Elleboogius. He invented convincing scholarship around this fictional character. To this day, if you search around on the Internet, you’ll find people who still think this was genuine scholarly work. After all, it was published by Brill, one of the leading academic publishers. Legend has it that Muller did it, not only to indulge his nerdy sense of humour, but also to challenge his students to always double-check research. Just because it was published by Brill doesn’t mean it’s necessarily trustworthy.
Human beings can’t be trusted and neither can AI. Even when your leg is not being pulled for a laugh, fallibility is the air we breathe on this planet. For good reason the Psalmist said in his alarm, “All mankind are liars” (Ps.116:11). The only infallible and inerrant truth is found in God and his Word to us. When it comes to the Bible, you never have to double-check. God said it and you can depend on it. “Let God be true though every one were a liar…” (Rom.3:4).
