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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
Speaker 1 0:00
What I'm highlighting is an honesty crisis, which happens when there are more incentives to be dishonest, and it's also easier to get away with it. And I see that happening today. And the thread that goes through the book is it's some link to technology.
PJ 0:21
Hello and welcome to chasing Leviathan. I'm your host. PJ weary, and I'm here today with Dr Christian Miller, the AC Reed professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University. He has led the character project and now the honesty project, as kind of these large scale research combining empirical and philosophical research on the different virtues, and today we're talking about his book aimed at a more popular audience, the honesty crisis, preserving our most treasured virtue in an increasingly dishonest world. Dr Miller, wonderful to have you on today. It's great to
Speaker 1 0:56
see you actually come back again. So I really enjoyed our conversation last time, and thanks for having me back on again.
PJ 1:03
Yeah? Absolute joy, yeah. Last time we had you on for the more theoretical side, which I just love that we're able to do that it was honesty, the philosophy and psychology of a neglected virtue. I have the uncorrected proof here so I don't see the cover art for this popular book, but I love the your your wife did the art for, for honesty, the philosophy and psychology. I thought it was a photograph, right? I got it here. I can help you out. Yeah, it's really, really fantastic.
Speaker 1 1:33
The old book. So that's drafts, and that's my, my mother's art. She's, she's exceptionally good. Looks like, apologies. And then this, in this case, I've got the cover for the new book, but no, so the publisher came up with it. And the idea, yeah, start with the whole person, and then it's slowly eroding and eroding and eroding. And that's supposed to be kind of metaphorical for what's happening to our character, and more specifically, to our honesty over time, it looks like we're in an honesty crisis where our character is eroding
PJ 2:06
well, and so before we dive too quickly into that, you start with the book by kind of defining, but also, I think you say busting a myth common misconceptions about honesty. What are we talking about here when we talk about honesty?
Speaker 1 2:18
Sure. So whenever I pull audiences and I say, what's the one thing you think of when you think of a dishonest person, what's the one kind of behavior that they exhibit is going to be lying? And that's perfectly natural. We think of Pinocchio as an example of that. We think on the flip side, who is our paradigm exemplar of honesty is someone like Abraham Lincoln for telling the truth, and so I certainly think honesty has to do with truth telling. Dishonesty has to do with lying, but it has to do with so much more than that as well. Has to do with more kinds of behavior, and also has to do with what is behind the behavior, what goes into the behavior. So other kinds of behavior that honesty pertains to and prevents are things like stealing, cheating, self deception, hypocrisy, bullshitting, if I'm allowed to say that, Bs, ing, these other kinds of behavior which are typically morally wrong and also fall under the heading of dishonesty. So when you think about that way, honesty really covers a lot of ground, covers a lot of moral territory, but it's not only outward facing, so that's really important, but it's not only behavioral. It's also a matter of where you're coming from with your behavior. So if you tell the truth reliably and you don't cheat or lie or steal, that's great, but if you're doing it merely for self serving, self interested reasons. So if your motivation is egoistic, it's all about you. That does not count as virtuous motivation. It does not count as the virtue of honesty. So make it more concrete. You know, this person tells the truth reliably at the office. Why? Well, because they don't want to get punished by their boss to their it's a fear avoidance. I mean, the avoidance of punishment, kind of motivation. Or, you know, someone does it in order to gain social media followers, or someone does it to increase their positive impression on others or get rewards in the afterlife. It can take lots of different forms. These are all egoistic motives. They don't count, in my view, for virtuous honesty. What does count are other kinds of motivation, which are either selfless or dutiful. And I'll say a little bit about this, and I'll stop. So if I tell the truth because I care about someone else and I want them to know what the truth is, that's selfless, it's other or. Oriented. It's altruistic if I don't steal from them because I am concerned about their well being. Again, that's altruistic, selfless. Also, if I let's change the example, if I keep my promise, why? Because it's the right thing to do and it's wrong to break promises. That's not self interested, that's not selfless, that's dutiful, that's because it's the right thing to do. It's I have an obligation, or the moral law tells me, or morality says that's what you should do. So we have these categories of motivation. We can think of them as self interested, all about myself. We can think of them as selfless, concerned with the well being of others, or we can think of them as more impersonal, because it's the right thing, because it's the honest thing, and because God commands me, can take these forms, and I say it's only the self interested one that's problematic. That is not going to get you to the virtue of honesty. But if you have dutiful motivation, if you have selfless motivation, and you have the good behavior, you're well on the road, far down the road to being a genuinely honest person,
PJ 6:14
how do you handle something like love your neighbors as yourself? So obviously there's that, the kind of egoistic, kind of selfish view of things, but placing proper value on yourself in kind of seeking flourishing of the community, including yourself. Is that? How does that fit into that?
Speaker 1 6:33
Yeah, so I don't see as ultimately egoistic. So I mean, I I start with commands, love God, love your neighbor if you want to. So we're going to pivot to a theological kind of conversation here. So I see it as everyone has equal worth and value, and is I love myself as having that worth and value, and I love other people as also having that worth and value. I don't treat them as worse than myself, so I don't elevate their needs above mine. Depending on the situation, maybe I should, maybe I shouldn't, but I don't automatically treat them as more worthy than I am. I don't treat them as less worthy than I am either. So I think it's an matter of an equal playing field. Got it and so, you know, it's but here's an important corrective to that could be lost into the conversation. So it's not that when I love others, I don't, I don't benefit myself. I'm more, I'm I'm not loving myself. I can love someone else and also benefit in the process. Because the way this works is, you know, my focus is on the well being of someone else, but a byproduct or side effect of that could be that I benefit. So for example, you know, I do something for charity, and then afterwards I'm praised, or I do something for charity, and afterwards I get a tax donation or write off or something like that. That's a nice by product or side effects of my action. I benefit in the process, but it's not my goal, right? And so it doesn't corrupt my motivation. And my motivation can still be virtuous, whereas, if I was just doing this work for others so as to get the tax benefits, or so as to get the praise, or to increase my number of followers on social media, because I'm going to video the whole thing and then post it in order to get more subscribers, then what that is corrupted motivation is becomes about me and loving just myself and using other people instrumentally for my benefit. That's not loving them, that's using them, it's instrumentalizing them so that I can benefit. And I think that's incompatible with the idea of loving your neighbor.
PJ 8:59
Thank you. Yeah, that's really that's helpful clarification and tell us a little bit, because this was fascinating last time. And as we get started here, you had this big the honesty project. And as part of the honesty project, you do a lot of empirical research, which, of course, goes flies in the face of, like all armchair philosophy, you know, all stereotypes everywhere. How does philosophy and this empirical research interact? What I mean? If you can give us an example, maybe some of your favorite experiments
Speaker 1 9:33
you ran? Yeah, so good. So I'm gonna be real clear up front. I'm a philosopher. I actually don't run the experiments because I'm not well trained in that. I don't have a PhD in psychology, and I think I would, you know, botch it pretty badly. But what I do is I help other psychologists from time to time, like design experiments and run them, and think about, you know, how are you defining honesty? How are you being really careful about motivation? Versus behavior, making important distinctions. And in addition to that, though, what I really spend most of my time doing is reading the studies that are out there that have been published, whether by my team or by others, and drawing implications or inferences or conclusions from those studies. And it might seem that alone might seem puzzling, like, what is a study about someone's behavior in an economics journal or in a psychology journal going to tell us at all about how to become a good person or how to become more honest? So maybe I'll expand a lot, a little bit more, make it more concrete too. So sure, here's a study that I often like to cite, because it is a nice, kind of representative study that I would use to draw implications for my thinking about honesty. So this is it involves students, which is also why I like it, because I'm an academic, I have students I'm thinking of their character and their honesty. They come into the lab, they take a 20 problem test. They're told they're going to get paid 50 cents per correct answer, so they have a monetary incentive to do well on the test. They try their best. They turn in the test. It gets graded by the person in charge. They don't do anything having to do with the grading. And in this one version of the study I'm thinking about, it was seven out of 20 on average answered correctly. So that's our baseline. That's our control group. Another group of students comes into the lab, they are given the same test, told the same Ontarian Senate, 50 cents per correct answer. The twist now is that they get to at the end, grade their own answer sheets, destroy their materials, and verbally report how well they did. So they have the opportunity to cheat and get away with it, and they know that. But they don't have to cheat. They're not forced to. It's up to them. They could say what they actually got, or they could say something a little higher, or they could say something maximally high. They could say I got 20 out of 20. In this same study, it was 14 out of 20 was reported seven in the in the control group where there's no opportunity to cheat, 14 in the group where there was an opportunity to cheat. So a couple things that are really interesting about that which so that's the study. I now come to that study, and I think, what does that teach me? Well, one thing it teaches me is that if that's a clue about the heart of lots of students, then I can't trust their honesty, because
Speaker 1 12:41
there's no way, or very, very unlikely, that that second group was just so much smarter that they got 14 out of 20 Correct. Rather, what happened is they probably got roughly seven out of 20, and then they lied and they embellished their performance to get more money. That's dishonest. So that's it. That's not a good reflection on the heart of those students, I would think, you know, generalizes to many other people. But here's another interesting thing teaches me, they didn't say 20. Almost the people actually went if they're willing to cheat, but they're not cheating the maximal degree. So they could have said 20. They didn't. That's also interesting, and that is a little bit of a nod towards honesty, not much again, but I would think a maximally dishonest person would have said 20 had no guilt about it and got paid $10 so that's just a little bit of a sample. There's more really interesting iterations of that study. We can bring in an honor code, we can bring in all kinds of additional wrinkles, if we want to explore that we can later. But that's just a little bit of a kind of snippet, snippet or snapshot of how I would take a study, draw some implications, and then I get more studies, and I get more studies. I get more studies and I aggregate them together to go and craft a picture of, okay, overall. How honest are people overall? How dishonest are people? And I come to the conclusion, and this was a big feature of the previous book, and not as much as in this new book, I came to the conclusion, for the most part, people are mixed. Back. For the most part, people are somewhat honest and somewhat dishonest. So they call a mixed, you know, a mixed character, such that in some situations they will reliably cheat, steal, lie. In other situations, they will reliably not do those things. They'll do the honest thing. And so we can't get the pattern of consistent behavior you'd expect of honesty. And we also don't get the pattern of consistent behavior you'd expect of dishonesty. We get a fragmented, disjointed picture of some good and some bad. And that's one place I take the research, the empirical research. For my own purposes.
PJ 15:03
And now for this book, it's the honesty crisis, and that makes it now I do understand there, there is some license going from academic to popular. Gotta have the if
Speaker 1 15:15
I'm being honest, yes, probably,
PJ 15:21
but, but you spend a lot of time talking about the rise of the Internet and its impact on so, like, there are recent things that have that you think, if I'm understanding correctly, do play a major factor in how honesty is changing. It's changing honesty in our culture. Now, and so I was surprised. I would not have, if I had gone through this, I would have expected, like the the internet and infidelity to be the more interesting chapter. But you mentioned that it was sermon plagiarism was actually the chapter that got, has gotten the most attention so far,
Speaker 1 15:58
yep, yep, yep. So let me, let me do a little bit of background first, and then we can share that chapter. So, yeah, so this is the honesty crisis. You're absolutely right. Is I'm trying to call attention to areas where I think honesty is eroding. I mean, dishonesty has been around forever, 1000s of years, maybe 10s of 1000s of years, and that's nothing new. What I'm highlighting is an honesty crisis, which happens when i There are more incentives to be dishonest. So dishonesty is incentivized more than was in the past, and it's also easier to get away with it, since it's a two fold combination, and that's a very dangerous combination when you put them together. When you put them together. So more temptation, more incentive to be dishonest, and easier to get away with. That's supposed to be for bad stuff. So I see that happening today, and the thread that goes through the book is it's some link to technology. I think technology is that also be the driving force behind a lot of this, but the case studies that I work through, I have six of them, so you've already mentioned one of them, which we'll turn to in a second sermon, plagiarism and more generally, what's going on religion. I also talk about in the education context, AI student cheating, which I think most people are going to be aware of I talk about in the online space deepfake videos and audios, and that's becoming more and more prevalent. I talk about any internet space sexual infidelity, pornography, infidelity websites, chat rooms and so forth. So that's also, imagine familiar, hopefully not directly familiar, but hopefully people are well aware of that. I also talk about political it seems like it's hard not to talk about these issues without saying something about politics. Although I don't make it about some political leader, I try to make it about us and how in our political lives. Seems to be dishonesty is increasing, and a chapter on Celebrity and dishonesty. So looking at not just the famous celebrities, the Tiktok celebrities with millions of followers and so forth, but how we, to some extent, all of us, are celebrities with the aid of things like Facebook and Twitter and so forth. And what's that's what that is doing to our honesty. Now, that's the that's the kind of setup. Those, those happen in six different chapters in the book. The one that you're highlighting is for many people, not what they might have predicted, like you said, and a bit of a curve ball, and also one that people seem to be divided about. I've had lots of pushback against this. So here the issue is sermon plagiarism. So what does that mean? So I focus on just take in a Christian context, like maybe a Protestant context, but it's it can generalize to any religion where there's a speaker who's supposed to be delivering a message. So it's not Christian specific, but let's just use that to make a little bit more focused. So on a on a Sunday, the pastor or the preacher or the minister gets up there delivers a sermon to the congregation. There has been sermon plagiarism for the length of the history of Christianity, people pastors have gotten up there and delivered sermons which are word for word, verbatim from someone else that's always existed. It the plagiarism ramped up, though, in two ways. One, it ramped up with the internet because then you could go online. You could watch other people's sermons. You could download the text of their sermons. You can cut and paste. You can get easy access to all kinds of examples. Some structures and illustrations and take them and use them in your sermon without acknowledgement. And it's the without acknowledgement that is the key. It's fine to use resources. It's fine to not have to write the sermon all by yourself, but consult commentaries or the insights of other people. But when you're taking their ideas and you don't acknowledge that, you don't cite that, then it's plagiarism, turns into plagiarism. So the the first ramp up was with with the internet in general, and now we're hitting the second honesty crisis. This comes in waves, and that's with AI. Because although the internet can make the pastor's life a lot easier.
Speaker 1 20:45
AI can make it even easier. What I mean, if you're if you went to the internet, you still have to spend time finding what you're looking for. You probably, if you're somewhat savvy about it, you want to, like, maybe make some modifications to hide it, to not make it so obvious, like not just a cut and paste job. Probably want to tweak some of the examples so it doesn't refer to some other church and some other part of the country, like dead giveaways with AI, you go on to chat, GPT, go into Cloud, whatever it is, you give it the instructions, and it generates the entire sermon for you within a span of 30 seconds. So work time is basically nothing. You don't have to worry about it being traced to someone on that's going to be found by Google, the track, the backtracking is not a problem anymore. You can ask it to rewrite what it does the first time to sound like your voice that sounds like something you yourself have preached in the past. And you can make it intellectual. You can make it simplistic. You can make it at a third grade level. You can make it at a PhD level. You can do all these kind of things to generate an oppressive output that will fool the congregation into thinking that it's actually something you wrote that is an extremely tempting resource to make use of. And yes, yeah, so here's the here's the problem. It's plagiarism. If you don't acknowledge that, that's what you are doing. If you give the sermon and it's all sounds like your words, and you have no like reference anywhere to I got this example from AI or I structured the sermon based on what AI suggested. If it's all looking like it's your contribution that's not then here, here are the here are the controversial claims. First of all, it's plagiarism. Secondly, it's dishonest. Thirdly, it's multiply dishonest. So it's dishonest to the congregation, it's dishonest to God, it's maybe dishonest to yourself. It can also be dishonest to the elders and people have hired you. And then finally, it's morally wrong, so plagiarism, dishonest and morally wrong. So I don't, I don't hold back.
PJ 23:29
I can't imagine why people so here's the, there's a, there is a slope, a little bit going on here, because, in some ways, as these tools have developed, because almost everybody uses something like Grammarly, right? Or whatever the equivalent is built into Microsoft Word, and so it's very and a big part of dishonesty is self justification and being like, well, it's just, I'm just using, yeah, it's just, like, an advanced form of Grammarly. And it's like, okay, there is like, hey, proofread this for me. That's one thing. And then there's like, hey, generate an outline for me. And then you write it yourself. And then there's just write it for me. And I mean, it's in my voice, like,
Speaker 1 24:15
yeah, absolutely right. And so this is, you know, what philosophers would call us kind of slippery slope idea. So then psychologically, it works just like that. It's not clear where to draw the line. And so once you use it for one thing, you might think, Well, okay, that work went really well. No one noticed or seemed to mind, and why not use it for the next thing? I can't really see a difference, so I'm going to do it now. I, you know, I don't fuss a lot about something like grammar, right, right, right? And I, you know, so maybe the pastor should clear that with the elders, you know, for the sake of grammar. Murder, correcting typos, you know, run ons, sentence fragments, something like that. I'm going to put my sermon through this. Are you okay with that? You know, be explicit about that. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe that's not a big deal. Anything beyond that, though. Now we're talking about substantive contribution. So this is, this is actual content of what is being said and conveyed to the congregation, and either that pastor came up with it, him or herself, or got it from somewhere else in the old days, that might have been from, like a written sermon that was published in a book that's plagiarism, more recent old days that was on the internet, you know, found it by Google, and now that's because some artificial intelligence created the, you know, the idea for you, I don't see any difference between those sources that would let you say, Oh, that one's objectionable, but this one's okay. I think they're all of a piece. They're all of a package. And it's very hard for me to think that using a written collection of sermons without citations, okay, I don't see how you could then make a case that internet's Okay, or AI is okay. I think they're all a package deal. It's all objectionable.
PJ 26:17
Yeah, and there is an interesting thing there too, with it's not academic, so you don't have to cite, like, all the commentaries you use and stuff like that. So in some ways, it's a little this. This example is a little more interesting than like, a, like a student paper, because that is academic. It has very defined standards. So that's really interesting.
Speaker 1 26:39
Yeah, no, you're right. Well, that can be actually an objection to me. So, you know, that's one of the pushbacks I get. I can tell you some other ones too, if you want. But so that is so like, look, here's here's the difference in academic publishing. Yeah, you want to cite your sources. That's expected, like, and if you don't do that, you're going to get punished in your professional life. But this is not academic publishing. This is publishing for general audience. And so what's the big deal? I acknowledge that they are different, and yes, I acknowledge that the standards of citation don't have to be at the same level. Nevertheless, here's what seems to me to be happening when that person gets up in the pulpit on a Sunday morning and delivers this sermon, it's seems to me clear that they are presenting themselves as if they wrote this sermon themselves, and that this is their reflection and their ideas. That's the way they're presenting themselves and as to what, in turn, the congregation is expecting. They're expecting reflections on this passage from the New Testament, for example, offered by that pastor. So they're framed against these background expectations. If that's not what the pastor does, they are misrepresenting what their task is. They're misrepresenting, I'm sorry. They're misrepresenting what they are doing in the pulpit. They're making, presenting it as if it was their contribution, and it's not. So that is distorting the facts, misrepresenting their activity. And that, to me, is the heart of dishonesty. Dishonesty, any dishonest behavior, is going to involve intentionally misrepresenting or destroying the facts. And this case, I think that's what's going on. So I think you have to be transparent to some extent or other. Maybe you don't even have to be in the sermon. Maybe it's in the bulletin. You put in the bulletin, you know, I acknowledge that I used AI to help me create this sermon, or you put on the website, but somewhere there's got to be some acknowledgement what your contribution was and what someone else's or something else's contribution was, and because, look, no one's going to be able to defend the idea that getting up there and delivering a sermon from 100 years ago from some book that you cut and pasted into your into your message, and then presented as if it was your own, that that's okay. You know, there has to be some acknowledgement.
PJ 29:25
I'm curious. I have two different examples that I would love to talk through with you about this, for our audience, who aren't, you know, who don't go to church. There's that people are doing this with presentations, right? Which is, which is another thing, another one is emails. And so I actually had a friend of mine who is in the C suite, and had another person in the C suite like, like CFO or CEO, I don't it became very. Apparent that all their emails were, they were using AI, she was sending emails, and the person, all the responses, what often didn't answer the question, were much longer than they needed to be, and very weirdly professional, right? Like, it's like, like that, like, weirdly polished, like, on you, like, and so it became very obvious, and so, and I'm not sure, I'm curious to see what you think is part of it. It's not because people, I think I read, one in eight people are starting to use AI for everything they do, and so they consider it part of everything. But the the issue is that if you are delivering this, you are able to back it up. You are not just a speaker. You're you are like, not like. And I mean that in a mechanical way, you you are. You have the judgment and you have the knowledge to back up and further articulate, because as a pastor, you have something that you like, there's counseling, there's leadership that is supposed to correspond to what you're teaching. The same thing with presentations, the same thing with emails. Like, if you're being paid to be C suite and you're giving over all your judgment over to AI, yeah, it's like you're like, you're harming one you're not fulfilling your job on the other side of it, and you're over time you will harm your your judgment because you're not informed, because you're not really engaging. Is that? What is that like?
Speaker 1 31:38
Yeah, really nice place. I never thought about this case, and so maybe I'll just talk over together. So what you're, I think you're identifying are some reasons why you would not want to do this, not want to engage in this kind of default use of AI in certain professional contexts. So you're highlighting some harms that maybe unwittingly could come along with it. For example, you might be failing in the assumptions or the standards of attached to your job. So you're failing to live up to the expectations of your job. That could ding you professionally. Another thing is, you may get called out on it later, when it's no longer emailed. You're in person now, and people are following up on what that email topic was, and they're asking you deeper questions, and you have nothing to offer, and it's found out that you really were faking it on this or or have very little to contribute, so that I think you're rightly highlighting some dangers, why we shouldn't go down this path too much. There's a further issue of even if we set those things aside, even if the person can back it up, is it dishonest to write those kind of or have those kind of emails written for them? And I think we have to know a little bit more about what's going on. So if it's common knowledge that this is what's going on, like the person is making no attempt to hide it, they're very they maybe I'll come out and say it explicit, but it's just, it's part of the culture. Everyone knows this is what's happening. That's one thing. If the person is kind of being like pretending like they're really their emails doing nothing to indicate that they're not. So you see what I'm getting at. So look, here's a here's an analogy. You go to a drama production, it's common knowledge that the person on the stage is not Caesar or Hamlet.
PJ 33:48
Okay, sorry, I wasn't sure where
Speaker 1 33:50
you're going with this. Yet they're saying things like, I'm Hamlet, I'm Caesar. You know, I was the leader of Rome and so forth. There, I wouldn't want to accuse them of dishonesty. They're not lying about this. Why? Because it's in that a space, a situation, a circumstance where we suspend the norms of honesty as common knowledge what's going on. Maybe, if it's like that, in the work environment, like we all know what's really going on here is and we suspend the norms of honesty, then this person isn't being dishonest. It's it's actually kind of forthcoming. I'm just thinking out loud, those are some thoughts I have about it. But yeah, worry especially about the person who's trying to pass one over on employees, or here's a here's a one that's closer to home. For me, a teacher who's giving papers back with comments, and they're they're presenting the comments on the student work as if they had. Worked hard to prepare the comments on the student work. And in fact, they had just submitted the students paper to AI, and AI wrote the comments and then giving it back. I think they're, they're, they're intentionally misrepresent. Go back to the definition intentionally misrepresenting or destroying the facts, as far as what their contribution was to the generation of those comments,
PJ 35:24
which is why it's not just lying, because it is it the omission of the truth is is important here.
Speaker 1 35:30
Yeah, that's right, yep. So honestly, can take different forms. It can take the form of lying by commission, it can take the form of misleading someone, and it can also take the form of lying by omission. So if it's a relevant situation where you should disclose this and you don't, you potentially omit something, like in my teacher example, you intentionally omit the fact that you use AI to write the comments on the student papers. That's dishonest, that's a form of lying, yeah,
PJ 36:03
which is definitely something
Speaker 1 36:04
that's happening badly. So in my space, education space, it's not everyone goes to the students and kind of bashes the students, like everyone, all my students are using this and, you know, we can't have any more papers anymore because none of them are actually writing papers, and that might be true, but it's not just the students, the faculty sometimes are cutting corners here in ways that maybe are helpful. We can talk about some helpful ways and ethically acceptable ways, but also cutting corners in ways that I think are unethical, dishonest and
PJ 36:39
wrong, and I appreciate that you've talked about plagiarizing from books, then from the internet and now from Ai. So in the email example, we have some standards already in place, and of course, they'd have to be adapted to AI, but if you're using an automatic reply, you have like out of office on top right now, part of that is so that people don't get mad when it's like, this feels like a stock response, right? Yes, but there is, but there's an important standard being set there of letting people know what's happened. We already have that in place.
Speaker 1 37:13
Good, good, good. I like, I like that last kind of a disclosure or notification. Like, you know, this is, this is the email you're getting, and it does look like it's generic, but here's why, you shouldn't be surprised we're being forthcoming about that, whereas, yeah, if I think I'm just going to completely agree with you here. So the analogy, I mean, another one I'm thinking of, is sometimes, you know, on email responses, people have like, this was written on my phone. You know, excuse typos, because I was maybe couldn't, couldn't be at a computer to write a really thorough, careful email. That's great. Here's another thing, we could have, this automatic disclosure. This email was at least partially generated with the help of AI tools. I that's forthcoming, that's honest, if that's communicated to me, at least I appreciate that from the source telling me that, as opposed to me being misinformed, thinking that this other person have written the entirety of the email, and then I attribute things to them when they actually were responsible for only asking the AI to do it for them. So I appreciate that honest. Yeah, I appreciate that disclosure.
PJ 38:31
So the other example because I wanted to lead it. I saved this one because I wanted to lead into another chapter. I had a pastor friend who was meeting with another pastor who all of a sudden showed up with a book one day. And so when you tell you have your chapter on Celebrity and the way we all become celebrities and the way there's so much value, oh yes. So he took his sermons and he told the AI to take his sermons and write a book out of it, and then he was selling and giving it out at the church. Names are to protect the innocent, yeah. And part of that is, there's a huge advantage. There's a huge prestige advantage. I think it's actually kind of dying off, because people are realizing, like, they're paying more attention to the books themselves. Because I have seen a huge flood of books that I'm like, wait, but, but if you walk into a church and the pastor has written a book that's an automatic, like celebrity type, oh, this is validation. This is all those sorts of things. Yeah, when you So, how does that? How does you know? And I'm happy to just go in the realm, if you want to talk more about celebrity and the value that we get from the dishonesty side of things, or what you think of that
Speaker 1 39:54
particular example, yeah, that's good. So I think we can talk about. Both. So my initial thought is, I see this a lot with pastors. There seems to be some kind of link between being a pastor and writing a book, this kind of cultural assumption. Maybe in Protestantism, I don't actually, I don't see nearly as much in Catholicism, for example, or in Eastern Orthodox churches. Something about contemporary Protestantism and being a pastor and writing a book. I don't know why they're supposed to go hand in hand. I do think that can be just fine, and those books can be extremely helpful. I think of people like Tim Keller, for example, who, you know, I wouldn't want to fault the books he was writing so but I do also think you're right to make these connections, because there can be we have to think about what the motivation is behind the book, and then also the honesty of the book itself. So is the book itself entirely the product of the author, or was it using plagiarized material from AI or from other sources? So we've been over that the content of the book, there's also the question of the motivation, or for writing the book, is it, is it to like for the greater good of the church, or is it for something like, Well, my own fame and fortune like to promote my celebrity status, so that I become a player or mover or shaker in the kind of Christian circles, and then, you know? So it comes back to the heart again, and that's because becomes egoistic. And I'm obviously going to have a problem with that kind of egoistic motivation, putting the book out because of impression management reasons, trying to make a good impression and gain status. But if that, you know, if one does come out with a book and succeeds in getting some traction, maybe appearing on some podcasts. And so obviously this applies to me. I have to think about all this my own kind of retrospectively, and it goes on a speaking circuit. Of course, I can be very financially lucrative and gain social media followers. Then I think a honesty threat looms here that's attached specifically to celebrity. Yeah, it's not just celebrity pastors. It's gonna be any celebrity, but celebrity pastors aren't gonna be immune from it. And so here's what I mean. I think there's a direct causal link between celebrity and dishonesty. So the more celebrity, the more the danger of dishonesty looms. And again, I pastors are not going to be immune from that. So caution, very much. Caution is warranted. Why think that I give in the in that chapter on Celebrity, I give a multitude of reasons. Here are a couple. Celebrity has this insatiability associated with it, like, once you taste a bit of celebrity, you're usually not satisfied by it. You want more. And, of course, you get more. You want more. So it's insatiable. And what's one way to get more? Be dishonest, cut corners, elevate your status. It also has this protectiveness associated with it. So once you've got some kind of celebrity, you don't want to give it up. If you can't get more, you don't want to lose what you have. And so if a scandal looms, or someone's you know, threatening to just to disclose some bad behavior or whatever. Dishonesty can be a way to try and protect your celebrity status, kind of cover up the wrongdoing. It also celebrity can help that person escape moral safeguards that a lot of us have. So a lot of us have day to day in our day to day life, moral expectations that we try to live up to. Celebrities often feel like they are above the rules, above the law, so to speak, that the rules on ordinary rules don't apply to them, including rules of honesty and dishonesty, and they often are surrounded by admirers, yes, men and as pastors, maybe perhaps sometimes are the worst in this respect. You know that just kind of applaud everything they do and aren't courageous enough to say so you know you shouldn't be doing that, or you know you're actually gone too far. So for these reasons and others. I think celebrity is a danger to dishonesty and now, why is it a crisis? Well, social media in particular, but not only, social media has elevated opportunities for celebrity like we've never
Speaker 1 44:39
seen before. There are never opportunities for this many people to become celebrities in human history, like we see now, with 1000s and 1000s of people having huge followings on Tiktok, Instagram, x and the like. So it's there. It's tempting Young kids these days, that's what. They want to do, be influencers, be social media celebrities, more so than other careers like lawyer or doctor or teacher. And so it's appealing, it's tempting, and it has that dishonesty, danger lurking in the background. So that's that's some initial thought.
PJ 45:21
Yeah, there's something really interesting about there seems to be a feedback loop, a very negative feedback loop, where celebrity encourages dishonesty in the celebrity themselves. It encourages dishonesty in the admirers, and that has a tendency to feed on itself.
Speaker 1 45:40
Yeah, that's good, yeah. And by the way, dishonesty can increase celebrity. So celebrity foster dishonesty, but then the dishonesty itself can increase celebrity. Yeah? So you know, think of some of the financial scandals people were already CEOs, or, you know, major advisors, trusted advisors and so forth. They were already there. They were already celebrities in their realm. They were willing to go the dishonesty route with a Ponzi scheme, or, you know, other, you know, fake product development in some of these cases, and that only elevated their status even more. Now, what I mean by that in two ways. One, when the dishonesty wasn't known and they pulled it off, they became more famous because they were able to keep the Ponzi scheme going, it got more clients, but then once it was detected that even ELLs made their celebrity status even more now, maybe not in a great way, because they're now, you know, under arrest or on trial or something like that. But I just wanted to reaffirm that, yeah, there's a loop, and it's a loop that works in all kinds of interesting ways. Celebrity increases dishonesty, but dishonest it can also increase celebrity. They can actually feed on each other back
PJ 47:11
and forth well. And part of this with the social media is that we come to associate celebrity with power, whereas there are people who are powerful and not famous. And so what's interesting to me, and it's just different, right? Of course, people can be dishonest in power, but there's less cost to say you're admit you're wrong when you're in power, if you're not famous. But the power that comes with being famous, the image itself, is the power, right? Like you have like that you have to protect the image in a way that you don't have to when you're not famous, right? Because it's because that's where the power comes from.
Speaker 1 47:51
Is that, yeah, that's right, yeah. That resonates with with my way of thinking about it. So I make a big deal about the distinction between the private image and the public image of a celebrity, so, or the private life and the public life of a celebrity, so the private life the celebrity has some control over, and they can shape that as they desire. To some extent, the public image is often not completely out of their control, but it's at it's also controlled by the public. So how they're perceived, how they're seen, they're following their adulation. All these things are a function of not just what the celebrity does, but what the how the public responds to it, how they see the celebrity, how they craft that public image jointly. And so, yeah, so this the celebrity. Standing of the celebrity is linked to the public image. The public image is not completely under their control. It's at the mercy to some extent, of the public. And so if there's a scenario where that public image is going to be damaged, and the celebrity can intervene and try and prevent that damage using dishonest means, cover up misleading, lying, lying by commission, lying by omission, all these things we've already talked about that's gonna be very tempting, very appealing for them to make use of. So, I mean, we can try and make this more concrete. I mean, let's take I mean, I hate to pick particular people. I don't want to get sued and all that kind of thing. But here's, here's, here's one that's, I'll just stick the uncontroversial part of it. Take Lance Armstrong. Lance Armstrong had a private life and a public image. You know, I had a public image as an excellent cyclist winning Tour de France is also a public image having to do with this foundation and live strong and helping people in need and doing all this good work for the world. Keep that public image in place by covering up. How are you covering up? Well, you're using. Okay. I mean, first of all, you're being dishonest in using performance enhancing drugs, and that's, that's, you know, documented. But then you're also, on top of that, lying about your use of performance enhancing drugs, and that's also been documented, and he admitted to that. So I'm, I think I'm okay. So it's the cover up of the dishonesty, which is also dishonest in order to protect the public image, which would be under threat if it was disclosed what was really going on in the private life. So there's, I think, a concrete illustration of how these things often work.
PJ 50:34
Man, there's so many different directions, but I want to be respectful of your time. One, I think everyone should read your book, right? Roughly 200 pages. Yeah, well, it's short and it's clear, and I think it's a very important these are real discussions that we need to have, right? It's clear that the standards around honesty are changing, because there is, there's something slightly different about AI over something like spell check, right? And so figure out where that line is. When do I need in the same way we created citations for academic papers to begin with? We need something new, agreed, at least that's what I some of. What I'm, you know, you're like, obviously, there's the obvious bad cases that people are using because it's easy and all those things. But this is, this is a real and current problem that we need to address so but besides buying and reading your excellent book, which is easy to read, thank you. I appreciate that. That doesn't always happen. But besides buying and reading your excellent book, what's something that you would encourage people to do or meditate on? And for those of you who are listening, if you're wondering, like, Well, I think I got most of it. I mean, you have you have stuff on covid, you have stuff on marriage, and the way the internet's affected, that there's, I'm a little like, oh, wow, but that's, that's good, because if you want to know more, you should read the book. But so, but apart from reading the book, what would you recommend to people listening that they do or meditate on in response to today's discussion?
Speaker 1 52:17
Yeah, good. So I wish I had an easy answer that question, and it would be you set me up so nicely to just give you this easy answer. The honest truth, as I see it, is that it depends a lot on what we're talking about, and in some cases, I'm actually pessimistic that there's much that can be done to push back. So let me highlight one more area where I'm pessimistic, and then let me go to some other areas where I think there are things we can do. One more area where I'm pessimistic, and I say this in the book, is with the student. Ai cheating. I'm pessimistic that today, professors are going to be able to push back against especially college students, but even now high school, maybe even middle school, it's hopefully not too much yet, but using AI for grade assignments and submitting those assignments as if it were their own work, that's not just papers. That's what we think of first, but problem sets, coding assignments and, you know, take home exams, any of this stuff that's at home you're supposed to do at home, and then submit it the next day to the professor for a grade. The allure and the power of AI to help you do that work is so strong that I'm actually pessimistic that there'll be anything to do to stem that, and that we what we have to do is basically take a lot of the graded work into the classroom and have, you know, Blue Book tests and oral exams and some of the old fashioned stuff that used to be done. And as we're already seeing a big rise in that today, making it's making a comeback now, because you can't, you can't have AI in the classroom, or you at least, can ban it from the classroom, literally in the classroom. Now, on the more optimistic side, I think you know, it depends on what we're talking about, some things like deep fakes, which we didn't get into today, I think a top down legislative approach is going to be very helpful. Having laws which ban non consensual, deep fake pornography, for example, making these videos, pornographic videos with the face of a celebrity or a face of a classmate, and then, you know, distributing them. I think that first and foremost, there needs to be legal remedies there. Of course, there needs to be heart remedies and character remedies. To other areas, I'll maybe, I'll highlight a couple of themes that I talk about in a variety of places. One is accountability. I think it's you know, whether it's you. A pastor and a church having accountability partners which will hold that pastor to account for sermon preparation, whether same thing in the celebrity case has celebrity being self aware enough to have others around him or her who are willing to call that person out, so that celebrity can go to and be forthcoming to, and confess to and or those people can go to the celebrity and say, Hey, we've noticed you doing this. We don't think it's right. Please reconsider what you're doing. So pastor and celebrity kind of parallelism there. So accountability is not just me left to my own devices. To fix this, I can brought, bring other people into my life and have them help me address these areas of my life. Last thought, I think it's really valuable to also have more reminders in our life. So because it's so easy to get caught up in self interest and what benefits me and how I can come out ahead, we see this in the in the chapter on political matters, I talked about political misinformation, and how there's a honesty crisis here, because political misinformation, whether you're conservative, liberal, I don't care about any of that is being dispersed widely. One pushback against that is be reminded of what's right and wrong, the importance of being accurate ports of the truth can push back against distributing political misinformation.
Speaker 1 56:48
It can also push back against celebrity, I mean, sermon plagiarism and student plagiarism in the form of honor codes and more reminders, although, again, push back to some extent, I don't know if it's going to be enough. So to summarize, some areas, I'm pessimistic. Some areas I think we need to go legal. Some areas, I think accountability and having people around us are really important, and sometimes also having more reminders, like, what could that be? That could be? You know, if you're religious, it could be religious texts or going to religious services or prayer or whatnot. If you're not religious, it could be, you know, having messages, signage, emails, texts, whatnot, reminding you of the importance of being a good person, having other people remind you of that too. So you can take different forms, but having these kind of tools will help. I don't see how they would hurt.
PJ 57:46
Oh, absolutely. Thank you for a host of practical suggestions, as always. Dr Miller, joy to talk with you.
Speaker 1 57:55
Great to be with you again, and maybe we'll do it again in the future.
PJ 57:58
Oh, absolutely. You. You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai