Can You Detect a Fake Orthodox Page?

Forgive me. The following is a Sunday afternoon ramble about some Monday-through-Friday thoughts.

Merriam-Webster defines “cosplay” as “the activity or practice of dressing up as a character from a work of fiction.” Wikipedia expands on this:

A cosplay (a portmanteau of "costume play") is the activity and performance art in which participants called cosplayers wear costumes and fashion accessories to represent a specific character. Cosplayers often interact to create a subculture, and a broader use of the term "cosplay" applies to any costumed role-playing in venues apart from the stage. Any entity that lends itself to dramatic interpretation may be taken up as a subject.

Why am I providing you with this definition? It appears that the longer I am Orthodox, the more I see cosplaying in the allegedly Orthodox realm. I already wrote about it a while back:

One deceptive “Orthodox” church I recently came across right here in our hometown. They are advertising themselves as being an Orthodox church, but they are under no one’s canonical authority. So they may cosplay Orthodox, but at the end of the day, they are fooling the faithful.

Today, I want to take it into a slightly different direction though: AI, or Artificial Intelligence. You must truly live under a rock if you haven’t encountered AI in your everyday life yet. Just ask a question on Google. Have Outlook give you an often rather useless summary of an email. Even my Ring camera has recently been sending me a summary of the type of unusual motion it detected at our house. Now, those are actually useful. I can make out whether I need to act quickly rather than just ignore the alert, such as when I know my husband is on the front patio snipping rose bushes.

I use AI in my work at the university as well to develop materials to teach. Prezi, e.g., created beautiful slide decks with gorgeous transitions from content you feed it with the click of a button. If I have to redistribute my syllabus across a different number of weeks for a new semester, AI makes light work of those tasks. I am not anti-AI, just to make sure that’s clear.

Okay, so AI exists and is everywhere. What does that have to do with finding cosplaying Orthodox? And further, what use does it have for actual Orthodox? One of the people I enjoy interacting with quite a bit is Father Michael Vallecillo. He is an Eastern Orthodox priest here in Arizona, and I know him from seeing him and his family at my husband’s church a few times. I don’t always agree with his thoughts, especially when it comes to Oriental Orthodoxy, but I truly value many of his posts on “current affairs” in the Orthodox world, which I read on his Facebook account.

I often reach out to Father Michael when I have found yet another apparently fake Orthodox Facebook/Instagram/YouTube/website account. I have taught myself a lot of detection tricks, with some being more obvious than others. Once I am reasonably certain someone is not canonically Orthodox, I ask Father Michael for his opinion. He usually concurs. He has written about it himself: AI iconography or other imagery is often a dead giveaway.

If you haven’t seen it, AI iconography seems to be pretty much everywhere these days. And there are some that have drawn quite large Facebook followings who exemplify an enormous use of AI, and yet, one can voice very reasonable doubt about their legitimacy in their declaration to be Orthodox clergy. One particularly (to me) egregious example can be seen in the photos here. So this all points to something - what appears to me - almost sinister.

But what if the AI use is to support true Orthodox messaging to the faithful? I am a bit torn on this one. There is a new series of short videos that I actually appreciate. It is targeted at our younger ones (or those young at heart). In it, two cartoon AI characters, representing a Syriac Orthodox nun and monk, explain the offices and tools used in the Syriac Orthodox Church. You may have seen it here. Imperfect though it may be, it seems to be a good use of AI to develop learning tools.

One apparent AI use that I truly struggle with (sorry to those who put this together… I love you, and you worked very hard to put it together… please forgive me… I just don’t care for it) is this year’s Syriac Orthodox calendar here in the US. To be brutally honest, the images give me a sort of Jehovah’s Witnesses vibe. You can see the calendar here. It is tremendously useful to me as a Syriac Orthodox Christian. Yet, I am fairly certain AI was at work here.

It is impressive what AI can generate, and I have plenty of examples of that from my own playing around. Here is one of my more recent AI creations, after our visit to Montana where a gentleman in his sixties was tossed in the air by a bison at Yellowstone National Park (thank God, he is okay, although he broke his femur in four places when he crashed down again). In a bit lighthearted reflection on this event - just days before we visited Yellowstone - I thought I’d make an image of my husband Nick in that position using AI when a bison decided to follow him at the park.

The real images:

AI’s version of Nick's encounter.

So yes, it’s crazy how realistic the image is that a simple command line can produce with an AI tool. But going back to the Syriac Orthodox calendar for 2026, I have to challenge the decision and ask, “Why?” We have so many beautiful manuscript illuminations for our liturgical year and also images of our saints that are accessible from the Department of Syriac Studies website.

Just look at some of these glorious icons:

I was so excited to see some of this beautiful iconography appear in large icons in the nave of the church at Dayro d’Mor Jakob and also in one of the smaller chapels there.

To wrap up, this is really a plea that we give AI the place it is due to make our daily tasks easier, but that we do not let AI take over what God gifted humans to create: painting beautiful iconography that declares the good news of Jesus Christ conquering death by His own death! We need to provide our faithful with the critical thinking tools to detect falsity in what they view. And to add Father Michael’s warning to this: “AI will kill all art and critical thinking.”

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