We’ll have an especially intriguing “Special Report” soon on the strangeness of our times.
It’s weird and getting weirder.
Is it real (is often the question) or fiction?
It’s getting awfully difficult to tell. You have to ask the question at each turn. Right now, there are tools one can use to see if text, pictures, or videos have been contrived by artificial intelligence.
The above? It’s fake. Notes an article subhead:
Hundreds of fabricated sermons and speeches, in English and Spanish, underscore how easily hoaxes created using AI can elude detection, dupe viewers.
Pope Francis had been a special target.
Soon, they warn, those tools will not work. The “deepfakes” will be too good for detection. We simply won’t know what’s real and unreal. This we know: everything seems surreal.
The Vatican even opened a website that we can visit to check and see if videos of the Pontiff are authentic.
Last week one made through A.I. of Leo XIV giving a talk that involved U.S. politics circulated widely.
It was fictive and for now, the first signs of A.I. are often narrated words quoting someone without showing them saying it and images that are too perfect.
Already you can’t trust many things on TikTok, X, Facebook, and YouTube. Your mailbox? It likely has seen its share too of weirdness.
Are there aliens or not? Does the government actually have proof of “UAPs” (unknown aerial phenomena)?
In 2024, a finance worker at Arup, the 78-year-old London-based architecture and design firm, approved a $25.6 million transaction after attending a deepfake video call with Arup’s CFO and other staff members. You can’t even be sure whom you are talking to! U.S. Senator Ben Cardin was tricked on a fake video call impersonating Ukraine’s former Foreign Minister trying to gather sensitive political information. There was a deepfake video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky instructing Ukrainian soldiers to lay down their arms and surrender to Russian forces.
There was a deepfake of Secretary Marco Rubio.
It’s said that Satan is having his “hour,” and what more blatant example than the fact that we can’t distinguish reality from unreality—cannot discern that truth (without the Holy Spirit)?
Satan is a liar, the prince of all lies.
What an hour it is and will continue to be!
It’s another “sign of the times.”
Unreality.
TikTok also requires creators to label posts sharing realistic AI-generated content, though several pope-centric videos went unmarked.
According to a 2023 report by DeepMedia, over 500,000 video and voice deepfakes were shared online that year. As 2025 progresses, we expect this number to increase significantly.
How can we tell?
DeepMedia offers several guidelines:
- Look and Sound Too Real
- Target Real-World Institutions and Events
- Easy to Make, Hard to Detect
- Undermine Democratic Institutions
- Ruin Lives and Reputations
Let us offer the most important:
Asking the Holy Spirit to come upon you and reveal His Truth, for He sees it all and He alone.