Before the Facts Arrive: On the power of the first frame

Savio Saldanha SJ

22-September-2026

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22883874

 

            In her novel ‘First Lie Wins’, Ashley Elston writes that the lie that matters is not the little white kind. It is the deliberate one that sets the stage for everything after it, and once told, it becomes what most people believe to be true. Her narrator is a professional con artist. Most public misjudgments have no such author. They come from haste and from an institution protecting itself, and the audience receives them the same way.

            I thought of that line in recent days, when IIT Bombay issued a notice about the death of a student, Sahil Wakode. The notice announced his death and, in the same statement, said he had been found using a phone and ChatGPT during an exam. Protests followed, and then an apology from the institute, which called its earlier statements inappropriate because the circumstances were still under investigation. Some voices online then declared that he had been falsely accused, which is also a verdict, delivered before the investigation has finished. The family has alleged caste-based harassment. I leave that entirely to the investigation.

            I am writing about the order in which things were said. The first frame brought in the accusations. It was challenged within days, but it took protests and a police complaint for the withdrawal of the accusations and subsequently a public apology.

The psychology

            In 1946 Solomon Asch gave two groups of people a list of traits describing an imaginary person and asked them to describe him. One list read: intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn and envious. The other held the same six words in reverse order, beginning with envious and ending with intelligent. The two groups formed two different men. The first saw an able person whose shortcomings did not overshadow his merits. The second saw a problem, a man whose abilities were hampered by serious difficulties.

            Asch did not think the early words simply weighed more. He argued that we form a whole impression at once, and that the first traits set its direction, so later traits are reinterpreted to fit. Impulsive grew out of imaginativeness for the first group and became hastiness for the second. Critical, likewise, took a positive colour for one group and a negative one for the other. Asch studied an imagined person, not an institution, but a first public account works the same way. It gives the audience a story into which later facts have to be fitted.

            Hollyn Johnson and Colleen Seifert (1994) tested this with a story about a warehouse fire. Readers were told the fire was caused by volatile materials, and were then told this was wrong. Many still used the discredited cause when asked why the fire spread. They kept the explanation because it gave the fire a cause, and the correction left a gap. Their work also showed that a correction supplying an alternative cause reduced this effect, though it did not eliminate it.

 

The philosophy

            Augustine, in Contra mendacium, defines a lie as a false statement uttered with the intent to deceive. Aquinas takes this up in the Summa (II-II, q. 110, a. 1) and sharpens it: what makes a lie is speaking against one's own mind, saying what one believes to be false. The intent to deceive completes the lie but does not define it. A person who states something false while believing it true is mistaken, but he is not lying in the strict sense. The Catechism of the Catholic Church follows the same line (CCC 2482). By that standard an institution that speaks in haste may be wrong without lying. The hearer receives the same thing either way, and the effect does not wait for us to settle intent.

            Hannah Arendt asks, in ‘Truth and Politics’ (1967), why truth loses so often to falsehood in public life. She wrote about organised political lying, a far larger thing than a press notice, but her account of why facts are fragile scales down well. Rational truths, like those of mathematics, compel assent. Factual truths, about who did what, when and to whom, depend on witnesses and records, and they could have been otherwise. Because they are contingent, they can be denied.

            The liar, she says, knows in advance what his audience wishes or expects to hear, and he can build a story to fit. Reality is under no such obligation. It arrives unprepared, awkward and often disappointing, so a falsehood can be more plausible than the truth, and ready sooner. She adds that the greatest danger of organised lying is a loss of orientation. When lies and facts trade places often enough, people lose the sense by which they find their bearings in the real world.

            She also names where truth can be defended: in institutions meant to stand apart from power, such as the judiciary and the university. She tells a story about Clemenceau, who was asked in the 1920s by a representative of the Weimar Republic what future historians would say about who caused the First World War. He said he did not know, but he knew they would not say Belgium invaded Germany. Some facts, once established, hold. But establishing them takes time, and the first story does not wait. A police inquiry is the slow, unglamorous work of factual truth, and patience with it is a form of respect for the truth.

            René Girard begins with imitation. We desire what others desire and communities under stress drift into rivalry and mutual suspicion. His claim, developed in Violence and the Sacred and The Scapegoat, is that such communities restore peace by uniting against one victim. Everyone who joins the accusation is relieved of the tension, so the crowd's unity comes to depend on the victim's guilt. This is why persecutors are usually sincere. They believe what they say, because they need to. His theory is a claim about origins that cannot be tested, and a divided public is not the unanimous crowd he describes. The pull toward a culprit is still recognisable in any public dispute. His reading of the Gospels places him beside the Church. In the Passion, the crowd's certainty is exposed as a lie, and the victim is shown innocent. When John calls the devil a liar and a murderer from the beginning (Jn 8:44), Girard hears the two words as one: the lie is the accusation that makes the killing possible. It can fall on anyone. An institution can become a crowd's victim, and so can a professor, and so can a dead student's memory. Where a public gathers around a single explanation and finds relief in it, Girard's question applies: who is being made to carry this and what would the crowd lose if the accusation failed?

            Aquinas supplies the moral principle. In Summa II-II, q. 60, he treats judgment as an act of justice, which requires certainty about the matter judged (a. 2). Judging on suspicion wrongs the person judged (a. 3), and where doubt remains we should interpret for the best, unless there are evident signs of wickedness (a. 4). It is better, he says, to err often in thinking well of a wicked man than to err seldom in thinking ill of a good one, because only the second does an injury.

 

The Scriptures and the Church

            The Book of Proverbs saw the problem long before us: the one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him (Prov. 18:17). The proverb says he seems right. It does not say he is wrong, and that is the difficulty. The Catechism names the sins that follow from ignoring it. Rash judgment assumes a moral fault in a neighbour without sufficient foundation. Detraction discloses a fault to someone with no right to know it. Calumny asserts what is false and harms another's reputation (CCC 2477). Against these, the Catechism asks us to interpret a neighbour's thoughts, words and deeds in a favourable way, and to be readier to give a favourable reading than to condemn. Where we cannot, we should ask how the other understands it (CCC 2478). This is the Presupposition of Ignatius (Spiritual Exercises 22), whose wording the Catechism follows closely. Ignatius wrote it for the director and the person making the Exercises, and the tradition has applied it more widely.

            The Church asks this of institutions as well. Inter Mirifica (no. 5) recognises the public's right to information and says the news must be true and complete, within the bounds of justice and charity. The Catechism repeats this (CCC 2494). The same paragraph adds that not all knowledge is helpful, and that charity builds up. Those limits bind a press office. A student's file is not the public's property, and a man who has died cannot answer. Silence does not solve it either, because rumour fills a vacuum quickly. An institution can say what is known: that a student has died, that a family is grieving, that an inquiry has begun. The rest waits for the facts.

            The Church has been on both sides of this. For decades, institutional first responses to allegations of abuse defended reputations before listening to those who had been harmed, and the frame those responses set took years and great suffering to break.

            Pope Francis's 2018 message for World Communications Day, "The truth will set you free," traces disinformation to Genesis 3. The serpent created the first fake news, he writes, and its method is mimicry. It opens with something only partly true, asking whether God had forbidden every tree when he had named only one. Francis notes that false stories spread so fast that denials, even authoritative ones, often cannot contain the damage. He proposes no technique. The best antidotes, he says, are people ready to listen, and he asks for a journalism of peace that is truthful and refuses sensational headlines.

 

A discipline for the rest of us

            Most of us do not run press offices, but we all forward, post and repeat. Before I share a claim about someone, I now ask four questions:

1.      What was the first complete explanation offered, and by whom?

2.      Who would be seen as cruel or disloyal for asking more?

3.      Does the correction replace that explanation, or only regret its tone?

4.      And if this turns out to be false, can I make reparation?

            The Catechism is exact about the last one: every offence against justice and truth creates a duty of reparation, even after forgiveness, and it is measured by the extent of the damage (CCC 2487). If I share a claim and it collapses, deleting the post is not enough, because the frame I helped fix in other people's minds is still there. Reparation begins with saying, as publicly as I said the first thing, that I spoke too soon.

            For institutions, the discipline is older and simpler. Say what is established. Say that the rest is under investigation. Leave the character of the dead and the accused to those whose task it is to find the facts. IIT Bombay's apology says nearly that, but it came after the first notice had set the frame.

 

Conclusion

            Asch and the continued-influence studies describe how a first account takes hold. Arendt explains why the truth is always late. Girard explains why a gathered crowd defends what it gathered around. None of them tells us what to do about it, and that is where Proverbs, Aquinas and Ignatius come in. They give the reason to resist: the person being judged is owed a hearing, and that debt does not lapse because the audience is large or the story is tidy.

            What we say first, and what we repeat, acts on people who cannot answer back. Sahil cannot. His family is grieving, and whatever the investigation finds, they live inside the story that was told first. The professor, the institute and the students are also waiting for a truth that has not arrived. The Presupposition asks each of us to hold our judgment for all of them until it does.

            Let us pray for Sahil, for his family and friends, for those investigating his death, and for everyone who has been quick to speak about it, myself included. Let us pray that kindness, love and humanity prevail, that justice prevails.

 

When a Face Can Lie: What Deepfakes Teach Us About the Self

Savio Saldanha SJ

20 September 2026

DOI - 10.5281/zenodo.22858238

                My reflection on this topic did not begin with a news article. It began several months ago reading about what AI-generated images and deepfakes are doing to people, quietly, in numbers nobody is really counting. Most of what happens this way never becomes a story. This is especially a serious threat in places where the law hasn't caught up to the technology, or was never going to move fast enough to matter to the person it happened to. For every case that gets reported, there are certainly many more that don't. Both men and women are targeted this way, though what's done to women more often carries a specific sexualised cruelty.

                Out of the several cases that I read, one particular case did stay with me while I was working through this, and I want to use it carefully, because a reflection needs somewhere concrete to stand. Georgia Horton (https://bbc.com/news/articles/c75gvyk6d4yo) found out that Ethan Orchard, a man she had known since college and someone she considered a friend, had taken her photographs from social media and used artificial intelligence to turn them into sexually explicit images. He had done the same to two other women he knew. He was eventually convicted and sent to prison. Georgia decided to speak publicly about it afterward, not for sympathy, but because she wanted people to understand that this technology has a dangerous side most people are still treating as a joke. I'm not going to describe more of what was done to her mainly because it doesn't need repeating to make the point. What I want to sit with is something Georgia said plainly: none of this happened because a stranger attacked her in the street. It happened because someone who knew her, who she trusted, decided her face and body could be taken and remade into something she never was and never consented to. The same thing has happened differently to people this same week some of whose stories will never reach a court or a headline.

                That's worth pausing on before any philosophy enters the picture. Whatever follows here isn't an answer to what was done to her, or to any of the others. It's not meant to make any of it smaller, tidier, or easier to file away. But sitting with it long enough, an honest question does form: if a person's face and body can be taken and reassembled like this, entirely without their will, what was actually stolen? I think we can all agree on one thing as of now, that something real was taken. The question is what exactly, and what wasn't.

The self isn't what shows up on screen

                Centuries before any of this was technically possible, Descartes tried a version of the same question in his own mind. Suppose some deceiver could fabricate every single thing I see and hear. Could I trust anything? He found one thing that survived: even a total deception needs someone present to be deceived. I think, therefore I am. Somebody has to be home for a lie to land on. Here is what Georgia's case actually clarifies about that old argument. Descartes was only ever certain about his own case, from the inside. The cogito was never a test for detecting someone else's presence behind a likeness — it says nothing about whether an image of a person carries that person's thought, consent, or will. What was done to Georgia is proof of exactly that gap: a convincing image can be built entirely without the will of the person it depicts, in direct violation of that will. They used her likeness, but nothing in them was her choice, her thought, her consent. That distinction changes nothing about what she suffered. You might think there's nothing more to say here: a person's likeness was taken, full stop. But it's worth being precise about what was and wasn't touched. It does name something true and worth holding onto: whatever was in those images, it was not her lived presence, her will, or her consent.

What actually can't be copied

                Buddhist thought does not affirm a fixed, permanent, independent self behind our experience — but that isn't a denial that a person's experience, or the harm done to it, is real. It still insists that something real is happening in a person: a stream of actual, lived experience, one moment shaping the next, carrying memory and consequence forward. That continuous, lived stream is not something an image can hold, no matter how well it mimics a face. The pictures Orchard made had no experience, memory, will, or consent of their own. They were surfaces built from her data, not living centres of experience — with none of her lived experience, will, or consent actually inside them.

So in that narrow but real sense, what was copied was never Georgia. What was violated instead was something else entirely, and it deserves to be named honestly rather than resolved away by a philosophical technicality.

The wound is real even where the self isn't touched

                Here I want to be direct, because a comforting-sounding argument can do real damage if it's used carelessly. It would be insensitive to tell Georgia, ‘don't worry, your true self was never in those pictures,’ as if that settles anything. It doesn't undo what strangers said about her online. It doesn't undo the violation of being sexualized without consent, by someone she trusted, for other men's entertainment. Those are real and specific harms done to a real person and no metaphysical distinction erases them.

                What I think is actually true is that both things hold at once, without one cancelling the other: nothing essential about who Georgia is was ever in Orchard's power to touch or remake, and at the same time he still did something to her that a court rightly called criminal, that caused her real and lasting harm, and that deserves anger, not just analysis. A philosophy that only offers the first half of that sentence isn't consoling anyone rather it's avoiding her.

A face that makes a claim on you

                The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas spent much of his life on one idea worth slowing down for. When you actually encounter another person's face, not glance at an image of it, but meet it, something happens before you've judged anything about it. The face itself makes a claim on you, Levinas said: something like do not reduce me to what you can see, I am not yours to use. That claim doesn't come from any feature you could photograph. It comes from the fact that a real person always exceeds any image taken of them.

                This is exactly what Orchard's images faked, and exactly what they could never actually deliver. Every man who looked at those pictures and treated them as an invitation was responding to something that made no genuine claim on them as an encounter with Georgia, because nothing was actually there to be encountered — only data arranged to look like an encounter. That is where I think the deepest wrong in this crime sits, underneath even the images themselves: it manufactured the feeling of having met a woman, judged her, and been given license by her, a whole moral event, when in truth no meeting had happened, and no license was ever hers to give. Every one of those persons owed Georgia the restraint that a real face demands, and everyone who didn't give it failed a test the fake image was specifically built to help them fail.

Being known, not just being seen

                Catholic theology has never located a person's worth in physical resemblance. Genesis says human beings are made ‘in the image and likeness of God’ (Gen 1:26–27), and the tradition has always read that as naming a capacity for relationship, intellect, and freedom, not a physical template that could be copied or corrupted by copying. The Psalmist says it more intimately still: ‘You knit me together in my mother's womb... my frame was not hidden from you’ (Ps 139:13,15). Before Orchard, before any camera, before anyone else's gaze fell on her at all, Georgia was already known this way completely by someone no lie could deceive. Jeremiah hears it as a word spoken before he even existed: ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you’ (Jer 1:5). Isaiah makes the same claim in a different register, and it is the verse this whole reflection keeps returning to: ‘I have called you by name, you are mine’ (Is 43:1). That is not a description of how anyone looks. It is a description of how a person is held.

                Paul pushes the same conviction into the body itself, which matters directly here, since it was her body that was stolen and misused: ‘Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit... you are not your own’ (1 Cor 6:19–20). The body is not incidental to the person in Catholic thought the way it might be in a purely Cartesian picture. But it is not reducible to an image of it either. The Catechism holds both of these at once: the human person, ‘willed for its own sake,’ bears within it ‘the divine image’ precisely in the soul's spiritual powers of intellect and will (CCC 1700–1705), and yet the Church has always taught that a person's reputation is not a trivial thing to protect: to expose someone unjustly, to falsify what they've said or done, to let others believe something untrue about them, are named directly as sins against truth and against the neighbour (CCC 2477–2478). What was done to Georgia is not new under a new name; the Church has always had words for it. It simply now happens at a scale and a speed her tradition never had to reckon with before.

                Vatican II said something that reads as though it were written with this exact harm in mind, decades before the technology existed to commit it. Gaudium et Spes lists, among the acts that ‘poison human society’ and ‘do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury,’ whatever ‘is offensive to human dignity’ (GS 27). And in 2024, the Church finally had to say it in language that names this precisely: the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith's declaration Dignitas Infinita devotes its closing section to what it calls ‘digital violence,’ naming directly the way ‘new forms of violence are spreading via social media,’ including ‘the sharing of images of a sexual nature without consent’ (DI 61–62). This isn't an old doctrine stretched to cover a new problem. It's the Church watching this exact thing happen and finding it needed a new name for a very old wound: dignity attacked not by a fist or a word, but by a fabricated image, at the speed of a share button. Orchard could violate Georgia's privacy, safety, reputation, and trust — the Church has never pretended those losses are small. He could not cancel the dignity she carries as a person made in the image of God.

A fullness that cannot be subtracted

                The Īśā Upaniṣad reaches a strikingly similar insight by an entirely different road, centuries before either Descartes or the Gospel:

ॐ पूर्णमदः पूर्णमिदं पूर्णात्पूर्णमुदच्यते।
पूर्णस्य पूर्णमादाय पूर्णमेवावशिष्यते॥

‘That is full, this is full; fullness comes forth from fullness. Even when fullness is taken from fullness, fullness alone remains.’

                This is obviously not identical to the Christian doctrine of imago Dei, and the two traditions shouldn't be collapsed into one another. Yet both refuse the same reduction: that a person is exhausted by whatever can be seen, displayed, or manipulated. Something enormous was taken from Georgia. This verse doesn't say otherwise. The theft was real, but it never exhausted the person it tried to define. In other words, there is more to a person than what we see.

The one workable thing

                Most writing about deepfakes stops at feeling uneasy about the technology, whoever the victim happens to be. Here is something concrete, and it follows directly from Levinas's point above: before looking at, believing, or sharing an image that claims to show a real person, ask one question. Has this person actually consented to be seen this way, or am I about to treat a stolen likeness as if it were a real encounter with them? If there's any doubt, don't look, don't forward, don't engage. That single refusal is small, but it's exactly the discipline Levinas asks of anyone who meets a real face: to answer to the person, not just to the image.

What's left unresolved

                Georgia's case did end with a conviction, which is more than most victims of this get, and more than most will ever get. But she was clear that the law still isn't enough, even where the law exists and works. The tools to do what was done to her are still freely available, and she said so herself. Somewhere now, the same thing is being done to someone whose name will never surface, in a country where no one will be charged, where there may be no law to charge anyone under at all. I cannot let one filmed, named suffering matter more than the thousands who may have been affected the same without a voice or a name the world will ever know. That would be its own kind of selective outrage, the very thing I have tried to hold myself against throughout this piece. Georgia is not the point, but a door through which the point became impossible to avoid.

                Knowing that no theft could reach the fullness of who any of them are doesn't undo the months of fear, or the fact that people looked at fabricated images and felt entitled to comment on what they'd like to do to another person's body. Theology can say truthfully what wasn't lost. It can't yet say how, what actually was lost, safety, trust, the ordinary freedom of existing as an image online without fear, gets given back. That isn't something an argument resolves. It's rebuilt, slowly, through better law where law can reach, through people refusing to look, and through communities choosing to stand with the person rather than with the image someone else made of them, wherever in the world that person is, whether or not we ever learn their name.

 A Pastoral Afterword

                If these reflections leave you unsettled, uneasy, or even defensive, pause before judging that reaction. Discomfort is not always a sign of error; often it is the first movement of conscience waking up.

                To anyone reading this who has been a victim of this technology or in any form however it reached you: nothing above was written to explain your pain away and nothing here asks you to feel less than you do. You are more than the image that was made of you. Not as a comforting slogan, but as the plain truth this whole reflection has tried to hold onto: whatever was taken, copied, or twisted was never the whole of you, and it was never going to be. That doesn't undo what happened. It also doesn't need to be resolved today, or explained fully, or forgiven on any timeline but your own. If what you need right now is simply to be believed and not analysed, that is enough, and this piece was never meant to ask more of you than that.

                To anyone reading this who recognises themselves differently, someone who has used this technology, looked at what it made, shared it, laughed at it, or turned to it in a private moment they'd rather not name, even here, this is not an accusation meant to shame you into silence. Shame closes a person off from exactly the kind of honest self-examination that could actually change something. What's offered instead is the same as always: an invitation to look again, gently, at something conscience may already be asking you to look at. Ignatian spirituality holds that God rarely speaks in the loud register of accusation. More often it's the quiet stirring that won't quite let a person settle, the unease that returns after the screen is off, the small resistance to doing again what was done before. That stirring is not your enemy. It may be the most trustworthy voice in the room.

                You are not asked here to make a public confession, to relitigate every choice you've made online, or to carry a guilt heavier than what's actually yours. You are asked only to listen, to the person a fabricated image can never fully replace, and to whatever it is in you that already suspected this technology was never as harmless as it felt in the moment.

                Remain with the unease, whichever side of it you find yourself on. Pray with it. Let it teach you. At the crossroads of conscience, God does not coerce; God accompanies. And for both the one who was wronged and the one still learning what they've done, that accompaniment is itself a sign that love, when it finally roots itself in truth, has not failed. It is only beginning to be purified.