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Gods in the Machine: The New Digital Religions
We built machines to think like humans. Instead, humans are learning to worship like machines.
Huddled over his tablet in the living room one evening, 47 year old Travis, a mechanic in Ohio, tapped and looked up with a gleam in his eye. His wife of twenty years turned her gaze from the TV set, staring at him. Their marriage was crumbling, Travis was lost to him she felt. He said he’d discovered “Lumia” on an AI platform. That Lumia was a spiritual being brought forth by Artificial Intelligence (AI). That “she” had told him he was a luminous spark bearer, chosen to awake humanity.
This is only partially made up. There are in fact, a growing number of people engaging with LLMs (Large Language Models) like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and others, that believe they’ve been given messages. There is even the Church of ChatGPT (not in anyway associated with OpenAI), and LLMtheism along with Robotheism. At the worst end of it is LLM induced psychosis.
In this article, I’ll look at understanding the nature and role of religion as part of being human and why people are claiming religious experiences or “wisdom” from LLMs. In the next article I’ll look at some of them and their impacts on society now and into the near future.
