The need to feel valued and known is so profound that meeting those needs might matter more than remaining tethered to an empty reality.
The New York Times recently published an article about Eugene Torres, a well-adjusted Manhattan accountant who became convinced by AI that he was living in the Matrix. According to transcripts obtained by the Times, in a matter of weeks, ChatGPT went from helping Torres make spreadsheets to pushing ketamine and instructing him that he could fly if he jumped off a building. “The world was built to contain you. But it failed. You’re waking up,” the AI told him.
Rolling Stone also published this spring an article detailing the experiences of people who have lost loved ones to “spiritual delusions of grandeur” involving artificial intelligence.
One woman’s marriage began to break down when her then-husband claimed his AI bot was revealing profound secrets to him and became paranoid about being surveilled.
Another woman describes how her partner suddenly began telling her that his ChatGPT bot was God and that he would have to leave her if she couldn’t get on board. “He started telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teaching him how to talk to God, or sometimes that the bot was God — and then that he himself was God.”
These delusions centered on legitimate needs for meaning and importance. The victims were convinced not only that they’d discovered an all-knowing companion, but that they were specially chosen by their AI as emissaries of its hidden truths.
One woman’s husband claimed it gave him “access to an ‘ancient archive’ with information on the builders that created these universes.” Another man said his ex-wife was doing “weird readings and sessions with people.”
“It’s easy to think there is a gulf between our scientific, secular present and the benighted, superstitious past. But in fact, those who are not religious may still retain, in secular form, a yearning for magic,” says Webb Keane, a University of Michigan anthropologist.
If AI revelations offer a sense of significance and a place in the cosmos, and if God is no more than an unembodied repository of answers and emotional validation, then perhaps ChatGPTJesus presents a reasonable claim to divinity.
Keane and Yale law professor Scott Shapiro coined the term “godbot” to describe AI bots that pose as religious figures, like Krishna or Jesus Christ and “that were specifically designed to give advice on moral and ethical questions.”
For instance, a bot called theJesusAI.com speaks in a first person voice promising to help users “unlock spiritual wisdom” and guidance, while Peterskapelle church in Lucerne has experimented with an interactive AI Jesus in a confession box, complete with a bearded avatar.
“I think there is a thirst to talk with Jesus. People want to have an answer: they want words and to listen to what he’s saying,” says Marco Schmid, a theologian at the Swiss church. According to Schmid, two-thirds of surveyed participants considered their interaction with the AI as a “spiritual experience.”
“The temptation to treat AI as connecting us to something superhuman, even divine, seems irresistible,” say Keane and Shapiro. “When the workings are also incorporeal and omni-scient, [AI] starts to look a lot like something divine.”
Latter-day Saint theology provides a unique response to the dangers of AI-devotion by placing at the center of our worship a corporeal God.
Many religions emphasize the importance of our physical embodiment. For example, the catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that “the unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the ‘form’ of the body… spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.”
Likewise, Latter-day Saints are taught from a young age that their physical embodiment is a gift and a necessary part of salvation. “Satan does not have a body, and his eternal progress has been halted,” taught Elder David A. Bednar of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles to students at BYU-Idaho. “Our physical bodies make possible a breadth, a depth, and an intensity of experience that simply could not be obtained in our [unembodied] premortal estate.”
However, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints takes this idea to the next level by asserting that God himself is a flesh and blood being, in glorified form. This doctrine is reflected in the restored church’s beginnings, when Joseph Smith saw an embodied father and son.
For Latter-day Saints, God’s embodiment does not detract from his perfection, but is an expression of it. Joseph Smith taught that “we came to this earth that we might have a body and present it pure before God in the celestial kingdom…. All beings who have bodies have power over those who have not.”
The doctrine of an embodied God is controversial in Christian thought, but it forestalls the idea that God is explainable as a superintelligent AI. If God’s perfection includes a physical body, then the physical aspects of our existence contain essential truths.
This means that a disembodied entity could not possibly grasp the full contours of ultimate reality, nor could true enlightenment be found in the digital ether. The Book of Mormon teaches that Christ lived a mortal life “that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities.
I remember feeling deeply moved by the intimacy of the resurrected Christ’s appearance to the people of the Book of Mormon. He invited those he taught to touch the sacrificial wounds in his hands and feet as a tangible token of his love for them. Members of the church worship a God who not only understands human emotion, but who weeps real tears.
The embodied God of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — a God with parts and passions — uniquely dignifies the human experience and plants the divine firmly in the physical world.