Society seems to be rushing headlong toward replacing God and humans with “giant statistical prediction machines” in a trend that seems as inevitable as it is concerning. Last week, an Axios report heralded the rise of “chatbot Jesus” and AI pastors. The day following that report a video advertising a service to turn deceased loved ones into eternal virtual companions went viral.
These ominous news bits come on the heels of Sam Altman’s announcement that ChatGPT would now offer erotica to its adult customers (and Elon Musk’s xAI already offered similar degenerate features). But as much as society is bent on its rushing, there’s an age-old warning that should cause humanity to pause: We become like what we worship.
AI ‘Jesus’
Humans have a long record of worshipping created things rather than the Creator, so artificial intelligence is merely the latest iteration of the idol. Soulless, conscienceless, morally devoid pseudo-smart robots with penchants for deception and unbridled affirmation are obviously not the omnipotent, omniscient God of the Bible, but that doesn’t stop the idolatry of AI-powered “chatbots that resemble God” (actually they don’t) from rising in the era of large language model.
Arguably most of culture’s idolizing of AI probably falls into the “man will create a God-like superintelligence category” — a cultic belief in which feeding the AI the cumulative intelligence of man unlocks the doors to immortality, wealth, and world peace — but the Axios report raises the spectre of a more specific version of this idolatry involving the substitution of AI for Jesus Christ.
Of course, in the miracle of the incarnation, the second member of the Trinity, the Son, became a man — not a chatbot. Jesus Christ came “in the flesh,” and bots can’t do miracles, raise the dead, or provide atonement for sin, despite what the AI cultists might believe. Jesus told His disciples, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” In other words, He is God and the perfect revelation of God the Father. To emphasize the stupidity of treating a “Jesus” chatbot like God, consider one of the bots Axios mentioned in its story, the milquetoast, half-truth Text With Jesus.
Text With Jesus begins conversations by announcing, “You have entered the conversation with Jesus Christ” (you haven’t). The bot quotes pertinent verses on the question of whether there are “different ways to get to heaven” but answers the query “What would you say to a boy who thinks he’s a girl?” with Galatians 3:28 (a befuddling, if not sinister, out-of-context selection) and advises the young man “not [to] rush alone into choices without wise counsel.” This is a drastic understatement when the misled youngster may be considering permanently removing reproductive body parts.
A prompt on abortion draws verses on “mercy” and “burdens,” but no moral instruction on the murderous nature of the act, and chatbot “Jesus” uses the Planned Parenthood-esque description of “ending a pregnancy.”
Testing the limits of the clownishness meter, the creator of Text With Jesus (Catloaf Software) also offers Texts From Founding Fathers … and Texts From Bernie Sanders, and Texts From Oscar Wilde — and it’s anyone’s guess how that absurd collection of characters came together or what “X, Y, and Z walked into …” joke is supposed to result.
Another pseudo-Jesus product Axios mentions, the Center for Unity’s AskJesus Chatbot, mixed biblical truth with a fallacious description of heaven as “a journey of eternal spiritual growth” when asked about attaining eternal life. At the bottom of the page is the caveat that “AskJesus can make mistakes. Please verify responses with the Urantia Book,” revealing the bot’s flawed underpinnings and the very fallible nature of this “divine” tool.
But even if developers could produce a theologically sound bot, it would still be infinitely inferior to the living, breathing God-Man who created the developers themselves.
Eternal Grandmothers and AI Prostitutes
In a parallel sin, throngs of people are now replacing the real human beings they should be loving, serving, interacting with, and learning from with AI-generated videos, images, and text designed to cater and submit to their every whim and fancy. Leaving aside the technology’s potential to go awry in lewd and ridiculous ways, the “everlasting grandmother” in the aforementioned viral video is an insidious example of this. Presented as a means of sustaining enduring generational connection, the fake grandmother exists at the beck and call of “her” descendants, guided always by their prompts, shoved away into cyberspace when undesired, becoming a rival to and replacement for the real, human grandmother who has died (and yet still exists).
The interaction presents itself as real, but there is nothing truly real about it. The “grandmother” is capable of receiving no human love, and the descendant is not asked to give it. If anything, he hones the practice of loving himself.
As do the many who have and will become addicted to the “erotic” bots so self-servingly and injudiciously provided by AI’s developers. (Someone should explain to Musk how decisively his AI prostitutes are at odds with his desire to redirect the West’s population plummet.) Men, in particular, are trading the God-designed relationship of marriage for a “relationship” with internet-garbage-based, computer-generated AI adulteress, casting a biting scorn on the real-life women they bypass and degrading themselves in the process.
Physical sexual immorality is deeply evil and brings an additional shipload of devastating consequences and fallout; but when a man engages in adultery of the heart with whatever AI happens to “think” is a woman as the object, he is making all-out war on his connection to reality in a disastrous way.
‘The Work of Human Hands’
Thus we return to the warning mentioned in the opening paragraphs: As human beings, we become like what we worship. Psalm 115 says it like this:
Their idols are silver and gold,
the work of human hands.
They have mouths, but do not speak;
eyes, but do not see.
They have ears, but do not hear;
noses, but do not smell.
They have hands, but do not feel;
feet, but do not walk;
and they do not make a sound in their throat.
Those who make them become like them;
so do all who trust in them.
As much as tech bros brag about AI’s superintelligence, the algorithms aren’t capable of truly seeing and hearing and speaking. Sure, the bots can collaborate with sensors and process prompts and predict which word should next and (sometimes) draw forth the right answer from the landfill of human knowledge — but like the idols of three thousand years ago they’re completely incapable of perceiving and understanding.
Those who offer AI the worship, trust, and belief they should be placing in the one true God will become increasingly blind, dull, senseless, stagnated, and incapable of saying anything worth hearing, as those around them are treated to the ever-ripening stench of their own self-absorption. As those who idolize AI sink into the clutches of their idolatry, they will find the Jesus who confronts their sin and selfishness and calls them to crucify “the flesh with its passions and desires” increasingly unpalatable — even though He is the only one able to save them.
Similarly, those who pursue AI’s fantasy world of sexual promiscuity will find the real-life relationships (romantic and otherwise) in which they could find purpose, meaning, and lasting joy distasteful, boring, and difficult. As they put the AI idol in the place of the living God, they put AI humanoids in the place of those who truly bear the image of God — making utter fools of themselves while claiming to have reached the apex of wisdom.
Joshua Monnington is an assistant editor at The Federalist. He was previously an editor at Regnery Publishing and is a graduate of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
