The Mets welcome Juan Soto, the alleged murderer of the UnitedHealthcare CEO is celebrated online, and Sora is here to convert text to video. But first:
Resource of the Week: How to Have the One Conversation
We’re excited to share our new video all about having what we call the “One Conversation.” Research shows that parents have the most influence on their teens’ faith, and it’s the small, everyday moments that add up. This video is a reminder that you don’t have to have all the answers to connect with your teen. You just have to keep showing up.
PS: We’re incredibly excited to keep creating resources like this video to support parents, grandparents and other caring adults like you. All of our Axis resources are free thanks to the generosity of our community. One donor has pledged to match all donations through the end of this year, up to $50,000! There’s never been a better time to give to Axis.
Three Conversations
1. Golden Glove
What it is: Baseball’s most eligible free agent, right fielder Juan Soto, signed with the Mets in the biggest contract in professional sports history—a $765 million deal.
What baseball fans are saying: News of Soto’s gargantuan contract with the Mets has left Yankees fans heartbroken, as Soto was an integral piece of the team’s run up to their defeat by the Dodgers in the World Series. While Soto will stay in the Big Apple, his decision to jump ship from his spot in a lineup that boasts Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton seriously shakes up the baseball ecosystem. There’s an argument that Soto, at 26, is an all-but-guaranteed hall-of-famer—but does being Cooperstown-bound before your thirtieth birthday justify a $51 million per year payday? And at this rate, how much longer will it be before we enter the era of player contracts inching over $1 billion?
Continue the conversation: Do you think pro sports players are overpaid? Why or why not?
2. Troubling Response
What it is: Lots of young people are saying that Luigi Mangione, the prime suspect in the murder of the United Healthcare CEO, is an admirable figure who took a justifiable action.
Why it’s controversial: Mangione, 26, was the valedictorian of his high school class. He had a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in engineering from UPenn. But six months ago, he fell off the radar of his friends and family. And now he’s under arrest for the premeditated murder of a father of two. It’s a tragic outcome for everyone involved, but many have framed Mangione’s alleged act of violence as an understandable—maybe even necessary—act of vengeance against what they see as a destructive, greedy industry. One of Mangione’s favorite quotes, listed on his Goodreads profile, reads, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” Ironically, his act of violence—and others’ celebration of it—has illuminated how sick our society really is.
Continue the conversation: Why do you think so many people are defending Luigi Mangione?
3. Don’t Believe Your Eyes
What it is: This week, the creators of ChatGPT debuted their much-anticipated text-to-video AI tool, Sora.
How it’s going so far: At its launch, OpenAI’s Sora was only available to people who had a subscription to the paid version of ChatGPT. But even with this restriction, massive demand for the new service seems to have overwhelmed their ability to keep up, and people trying to log in to Sora for the first time are being told that the ability to create new Sora accounts has been temporarily suspended. The sample videos on Sora’s homepage appear to be freed from the glitches and unexpected mutations that previous AI-generated videos suffered from, although critics say there are still a lot of issues to be worked out. Soon, it will be unthinkably easy for our sons and daughters to seamlessly generate high-fidelity videos of anything they can think of. What could go wrong?
Let’s translate this one further…
“My mom keeps sending me AI videos of baby animals,” a friend of ours wrote to us recently. “My brother and I had to discuss this week how to intervene. She really is living for these sweet baby animal videos… and they are totally fake.”
Thankfully, our friend could still tell that the baby animal videos weren’t real. But once OpenAI works out the kinks, Sora could be what ushers humanity into the era where we no longer can.
The question is, if that happens: is anybody going to care?
Let’s take these deepfake baby animal videos as a case study. If you asked the creators whether they were trying to “deceive” their viewers into thinking that, for example, three baby puppies really were licking each other’s noses, the answer would probably be no. The purpose of these deepfakes is not deception, as we tend to think of it; the point is just to bring our imagination to life (and possibly to create something that easily gets lots of likes and shares).
And yet, viewers are deceived. Their hearts are stirred up by what looks like God’s creation, but in reality has only been conjured up from the cold circuits of OpenAI’s servers.
The internet has always offered a world of unreality. Even “real” photos and videos on social media, divorced from their original context, force us to use our imagination about the events before and after the post—and the stories we come up with aren’t likely to represent reality. Maybe AI-generated videos are just one more step into that same world of fiction: only now, we’re outsourcing our lies to the machine.
That probably sounds sinister. But again: is anyone going to care?
As Christians, we believe we are the ones who should care. We should care whether what we’re seeing online is real—not just beautiful, interesting, or fun—because our faith is based on reality, and on what’s actually true. Christians follow someone who calls himself “the truth,” and believe it is “the truth that sets us free.”
But our taste for the truth has to be cultivated; in the end, this is only a work that the Holy Spirit can do.
For more context and nuance, check out our Monday Roundtable podcast on Spotify or Apple, as well as our course on Media Literacy and Discernment. In the meantime, here are three questions to spark conversation with your teens:
Continue the conversation:- How confident are you in your ability to determine if something is AI-generated?
- What sort of effect do you believe Sora will have on the world?
- Do you think AI-generated images will change how people think about reality?
Parenting together,
The Axis Team
P.S. Know someone who could use our conversation starters with their teens? Share the CT with a friend!