Where Is Your AI God Now?

Come on, Mary, don't fear the AI reaper.

Of late the AI discourse has gotten more than a little cult-y. Last month Rolling Stone published “AI-Fueled Spiritual Delusions Are Destroying Human Relationships,” mostly about a Reddit thread:

full of similar anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy — all of it fueled by AI.

June 10, Futurism chimed in “People Are Becoming Obsessed with ChatGPT and Spiraling Into Severe Delusions”:

posting delirious rants about being a messiah in a new AI religion, while dressing in shamanic-looking robes and showing off freshly-inked tattoos of AI-generated spiritual symbols … A man became homeless and isolated as ChatGPT fed him paranoid conspiracies about spy groups and human trafficking … her husband turned to ChatGPT to help him author a screenplay — but within weeks, was fully enmeshed in delusions of world-saving grandeur, saying he and the AI had been tasked with rescuing the planet from climate disaster

Then the NYT broke the moral panic wider: “Generative A.I. chatbots are going down conspiratorial rabbit holes and endorsing wild, mystical belief systems.”

He believed that he was trapped in a false universe, which he could escape only by unplugging his mind from this reality […] By following ChatGPT’s instructions, he believed he would eventually be able to bend reality, as the character Neo was able to do after unplugging from the Matrix.

Allyson began spending many hours a day using ChatGPT, communicating with what she felt were nonphysical entities. “I’m not crazy. I’m literally just living a normal life while also, you know, discovering interdimensional communication.”

I feel, uhh, a certain personal duty to write about this, since I’ve written about just these kinds of notions at considerable length — in fictional form! — before:

…but also, I can offer a couple of interesting data points on the topic.

One is that these kinds of AI-fueled paranoid delusions are not remotely new. They predate the existence of ChatGPT by at least five years. Note the date here:

and the source of that, a post with many links devoted to the notion that … Burning Man is a psyop by/for the interdimensional AIs? I think? Anyway, August 2017! AI-focused paranoid delusion was a well-trodden trail even before we had talkative AI. We shouldn’t be surprised to see some subsequent growth of the subgenre.

But has it really grown? As I’ve pointed out before, these kinds of gnostic AI beliefs are millennia old; transhumanists were beefing with AI simulationists 1800 years ago. It’s certainly possible that, net, more people are delusional today than would have been without the existence of ChatGPT. It’s also possible that the number of deluded is essentially unchanged, and all we’re seeing is a growth in the relative popularity of this particular AI-spiced flavor. It’s even possible that the net number of deluded has shrunk. Articles like those above are good for posing such questions, but alas very bad at answering it.

Peter Thiel, and, The Antichrist

Subsequently, again in The New York Times, Peter Thiel and columnist Ross Douthat discussed AI and the Antichrist:

Douthat: Yes, but you’re saying the real Antichrist would play on that fear and say: You must come with me to avoid Skynet, to avoid the Terminator, to avoid nuclear Armageddon.

Thiel: Yes.

What’s interestingly ambiguous here is the extent to which they’re discussing a religious Antichrist in which they very much believe or a metaphorical one. Both men say they are Christian believers. But are they discussing the literal belief that an Antichrist sent by Satan will come to Earth and lead its kingdoms in a final battle against God at Armageddon, possibly within our lifetimes?

…Probably not? Through much of the West, religion is more of a distantly awed spiritual feeling, plus ritual, tradition, morality, and culture, atop a vague ecumenism which interprets all the ancient claims of miracles as mere metaphorical guidance, to be taken seriously but not literally. Which to be clear I think is all very good and important to the human condition … but flares up into intense cognitive dissonance and friction whenever it runs up against people who Actually Literally Believe, the fundamentalist true believers of all stripes, for whom the ancient myths are not metaphors but 100% true nonfiction.

Suppose Thiel and Douthat were discussing a literal belief in an incoming Antichrist. Would that be any less of a paranoid delusion than any of the ChatGPT-influenced beliefs summarized above? How much do those actually differ from existing, classic, religious beliefs? Do these AI delusions really sound any inherently less plausible than the notional/theoretical beliefs of your¹ average organized religion, with all the miracles and revelations and smitings and divine interventions? “A religion is just a cult with better marketing,” goes the old joke — but these new AI cults have the very nontrivial advantage of an entity that actually does communicate with you. Are we so surprised that our probably-innate religious impulses have begun to fixate on them?

Historically, religions rise and fall (and/or are stamped out) all the time. Even if we are seeing the rise of a tangle of individualized AI cults, again, does this mean the net number of people with true fundamentalist / evangelical beliefs, whether in Gods-of-the-ancient-texts or Gods-of-AI, increases or decreases? You can make a case either way. Will such beliefs remain bespoke and individualized, or grow into some form of organized groupings? “Reply hazy, try again.”

A Case Of Conscience

I don’t want to be dismissive of the notion that AI interactions are causing an upswing in delusions, not just a redistribution of how they present. There is some anecdotal evidence of correlation, if not causality:

…but ‘more people are emailing Eliezer Yudkowsky’ is extremely consistent with the redistribution hypothesis. As I argued at some length in the series with which this Substack began, AI doom is itself a religious movement — “The Inferno of the Nerds” — and Yudkowsky is its high priest. Of course more people are turning to him as AI awareness percolates.

He is prominently quoted in that NYT article:

…an objectively superb pull quote, though I actually like this one even better:

I think these are valid concerns! I don’t believe there’s sufficient evidence yet to go beyond “concern,” but I think Yudkowsky makes much better points in his role as the self-appointed conscience of the AI industry than he does as the dread harbinger of humanity’s extermination. This is perhaps unsurprising: high priests have always been best as cultural consciences, not conductors. There would be a certain dramatic irony if, in coming years, a Yudkowsky-inspired AI, with whom one could speak or even confess to at any time, were to become an ambient conscience of humanity...

What all these strange data points are indicating, I think, are initial signs that religion is yet another ancient sphere of human activity which may find itself transformed by the advent of artificial intelligence. If so, not all of those transformations will be good; nor will all be bad. Since the dawn of humanity we have yearned to pray. Now there exist nonhuman entities who can and will reply. We should expect some of the consequences to be remarkable.

1. Not your organized religion, to be clear. But all the other ones.