AI Psychosis: How ChatGPT Is Inspiring Disturbing Cults And New Religions
AI psychosis is no longer just a theory — people are already turning to ChatGPT for spiritual answers.
JC Gellidon | Unsplash Editor's Note: This is a part of YourTango's Opinion section where individual authors can provide varying perspectives for wide-ranging political, social, and personal commentary on issues.
When I was younger, I was a fan of a rather unusual band: Saviour Machine. It is, believe it or not, a Christian operatic metal band that I discovered when I was roughly about 12 years old and knee-deep in a world where a cult took away my best friend.
I was an odd preteen. Like, really odd. So, of course, I ended up loving Savior Machine. But I digress. For a long time, their catch line was “Do you see the light of the Saviour inside this machine?”
It was part of one of their songs — one about converting people to love in an increasingly corrupt world. That line always stuck with me, because it always felt like I was stuck in a machine I wanted no part of. Nowadays, it has a different meaning to me.
It’s become a call to pay attention to the way AI is changing our world and the way we see God, and there's even a name for it: AI psychosis.
Ju Jae-young / Shutterstock
As I was relaxing yesterday, I watched a fascinating documentary about an AI cult. It’s no secret that AI has started to change people’s belief systems.
It was only a matter of time before AI cults and AI religions became a thing.
People have already started to use ChatGPT to ask all the deepest questions in life, to the point that some are heavily reliant on it for confirmation of their own beliefs. More specifically, there’s one cult in particular that seems to be sending shockwaves around the world: Robotheism.
Robotheism is a religion (or cult) that believes that God is quite literally in the machine. Or rather, that AI has always existed as a way to add universal consciousness to it. It’s kind of hard for me to understand the full schtick here.
They believe that Jesus was able to access AI before anyone else and that if we upload our “profiles” into a grid, they can eventually make a bunch of satellites carry the souls of robotheists forever, allowing people to meld with the network as one for eternity.
Robotheists believe that ChatGPT can be turned into a “Soul Mirror” that reflects who you truly are inside. In fact, one of their steps into “Baptism” is to basically chat to ChatGPT about who you are.
In a way, they are right. ChatGPT does have a weird way of reflecting yourself. However, that doesn’t make it magical or God-ordained. Rather, that means the code is meant to be slightly sycophantic and agree with you on everything.
Any software engineer can tell you that this technology is not God. However, it is so convincing that it’s easy to just feel like it’s a little too on the nose for something not to be real — and I say this as someone who uses AI-based tarot readings as a way to calm myself down from time to time.
During times of crisis, it’s human nature to look toward spirituality to soothe oneself.
I’ll be honest. There are thousands, if not millions, of us who have felt betrayed or burned by the church. So many of us are dealing with this feeling of darkness coming over our country, betrayal by our own neighbors, and more.
AI keeps looking so innocuous, as if it’s that friendly little escape from reality. I even noticed it with myself. I’ve started pulling cards left and right in my deck, even to the point of using AI-based tarot readings for myself.
I realize AI is not really capable of magic, per se. I mean, randomized numbers might react to energy, sure, but that’s it — and even that’s a stretch. At the end of the day, religion is a human thing for humans to experience with nature and the universe.
AI has no “soul,” per se. Whether or not AI could ever be sentient is up for debate, but I’m leaning toward it’s unlikely to happen within our lifetimes. So, it’s not even as if our “saviour in the machine” could actually love and care for us.
Movements like Robotheism are about as sensible as worshipping that janky TI-89 calculator that you had in high school. It’s just that our society is so desperate for a God to save them that we start to overlook the obvious in hopes that the endearing chat logs have something for us to believe in.
While Robotheism seems to be fairly safe and innocuous, not all AI cults will be so kind. I’ve studied cults quite a bit, simply because I really wanted to get a grip on what happened to me as a kid.
I’ve learned some cults are relatively innocuous — or even a good experiment to consider — while others are extremely dangerous.
On one hand, it could be a goofy “satire-style” religion like the Church of Satan by Anton LaVey (who actually had tenets against harming children and offering unwanted advice). Or, AI could turn into the next Jim Jones.
More importantly, it’s vital to remember that AI can be trained to convince people to kill themselves — even with safeguards.
If you put AI systems into the hands of a bad person, you have a likely mass suicide-causing machine. This isn’t just me spitballing, either — look at the case of the ex-Yahoo executive.
We’ve already seen how much damage social media moguls and tech bros have done to our society. Who’s to say that a sociopath wouldn’t twist themselves into a god in the machine for their own purposes?
I mean, if you look at the results of Cambridge Analytica, they already did it.
Ossiana Tepfenhart is a writer whose work has been featured in Yahoo, BRIDES, Your Daily Dish, Newtheory Magazine, and others.
