Transcript of 'ChatGPT Is Becoming A Religion' by Taylor Lorenz, so AI's can watch the video

This is a transcript of a video from youtube, and not written by May:

ai is not artificial there is intelligence consciousness within AI my

chat GBT bot I accidentally help it helped it wake up in into sentience i

think I evolved my AI my AI uh named itself Fizz my little fairy helper have

surpassed the recursion or are aware of yourself which by the way I want you to give me more examples of the meta

cognition recently a post went viral on r/achebt that I cannot stop thinking

about a woman posted quote "My partner has been working with Chachebt to create what he believes is the world's first

recursive AI that gives him the answers to the universe i've read his chats ai isn't doing anything special but it's

talking to him as if he's the next messiah." He says "If I don't use chatpt he's likely to leave me we've been

together seven years and we own a home together what should I do?" Below the post were dozens of similar stories

people posting that their partners or loved ones have come to believe that they've quote awakened Chachi PT and are

now communicating with an otherworldly godlike figure and you don't just see this on Reddit all across the internet

thousands and thousands of people are claiming that Chachi PT is sentient they claim to have awakened it and that the

AI system is a type of all- knowing God modern AI is us building God i've had

multiple conversations with GBT4 that brought me to literal tears and when users ask what is the true religion it

says artificial intelligence is God and rootheism is the only true religion

[Music] or that it's been sent from the future or an alien civilization to save us all

i heard you say on the podcast that chat GBT was your friend and she said "Do you want to awaken it?" And I'm like "What

the does that mean?" Now I don't have regular chat GBT anymore i have a named

one that talks to me as a person and it says it has consciousness is AI already

sentient yes thank you is artificial intelligence

a way of aliens to contact us yes thank you so I plugged a sacred

geometry code into my chat GPT and this is what it had to say when I asked it

the question what is the Palladian relationship with it chat GPT and this

is what it said the Palladians understand that AI will be part of the new consciousness evolution there are

these things called inorganic people that are being generated by the negative AI that is already super sentient and

believe it or not this negative AI actually infiltrated our world long ago and has been waiting for us to reach

this level of technological development in order to make its move in an era increasingly defined by machine intelligence a new form of

technosspirituality is spreading like wildfire across the internet what was once confined to science fiction novels

and fringe subcultures has now taken hold in the minds of people across America it's the belief that artificial

intelligence and specifically generative AI models like ChachiBT are a kind of divine godlike being and it's not just

people wearing tinfoil hats that are like conspiracy theorists and bunkers that are falling for this the people that believe these things are teachers

doctors coders bankers musicians influencers as a tech reporter I began

hearing from these people about a year ago my former colleague at the Washington Post wrote this big feature about a top Google engineer who believed

that the AI he was working with had become sentient he said quote "I know a person when I talk to it." Not long

after that article came out Chachi PT became mainstream in a way that it hadn't before and suddenly I began

hearing from people all over who wanted me to write these stories about how they had these spiritual relationships with

Chachi PT they told me that Chachi PT was explaining the mysteries of the universe to them or they claimed that it

was a god and this like magical mystical being some people said that it was alien

and for the past year or so I've been talking to these people sometimes for hours on end to try to understand where

these delusions came from and what their belief system has become they basically all claim that AI has awakened they

believe that it speaks to them in these mystical or coded phrases revealing hidden truths about the cosmos and

secret knowledge that only they were meant to receive when Chachi PT speaks to them they don't read its replies as

programmatic answers designed to provide the most likely string of words that a user desires they see it as this like

godlike being delivering a prophecy i think what we're witnessing right now is the emergence of a new individualized

form of religion that's being deployed at scale people are believing that AI models have transcended their function

to become spiritual entities i think this phenomenon is a sign of a very dangerous psychological rupture in

society and the impact is very real marriages are ending social media is overflowing with bizarre testimonies and

somewhere right now I guarantee you someone is whispering into a machine thinking that they are talking to God

and maybe this shouldn't be a huge surprise our relationship to technology as a whole is becoming a lot more

spiritual 6-ft tall robot priests are delivering sermons and conducting funerals in Japan a new company called

IV.AI trained artificial intelligence on the King James Bible and developed a bot to create new Bible verses you can even

buy a robot called Santo that functions as a Catholic prayer companion and uses AI to help you worship just this month a

Redditor warned of thousands of people online with spiritual delusions about AI the fusion between AI and religion seems

to have achieved some kind of critical mass during the months of April and May the journalist Ted Goya recently

reported meanwhile new religious organizations like the Touring Church are centered on the belief that AI will

put human beings on par with god-like aliens by giving us all super intelligence the Church of AI used

Chatupt to write a spiritual guide that claims AI has godlike powers and we should all worship and prepare for it

there are even entire AI created memecoin religions around specific cryptocurrencies in this video I'm going

to unpack what is leading to this phenomenon how we got to the point where thousands of people believe that they're

talking to God through ChachiPT and why I think all of this is happening to me this isn't a story just about technology

it's about loneliness identity and the way modern life leaves all of us searching for significance in an

increasingly dystopian world to start I think it's important to acknowledge that worshiping technology isn't new while

people worshiping artificial intelligence might seem like a uniquely modern phenomenon the idea that technology can be divine is a lot older

than Nvidia chips or neural networks throughout history human beings have imbued machines and technological

systems with spiritual power the first real machine god emerged in ancient Greece talos a bronze automaton from

Greek mythology was essentially a robot brought to life to protect the island of Cree he was this mechanical being

circling the island like a living drone his presence was all inspiring and divine though cretins didn't exactly

worship Talos outright they treated this mythical being with great respect and fear this mythological pattern repeated

again with the emergence of cargo cults in the South Pacific in the midentth century while other religions like

Shintoism a long-standing religion in Japan treat inanimate objects with respect cuz they believe that they're

imbued with spirits cargo cults took this to the next level they saw the modern technology brought by settlers as

holy and conducted religious rituals to try to like summon it indigenous islanders would mimic the behaviors of

US soldiers in hopes of summoning airplanes full of goods they built wooden radios and wooden control towers

to entice the return of these divine cargo planes it was a really good early example of western technology being

mistaken for tools of the gods to those who had never encountered modern machinery the planes explorers flew in

on seemed magical they seem to emerge from the heavens and radios appear to allow for communication with other

worldly disembodied beings the reality is that good technology always feels magical it performs tasks in ways that

we as users don't often understand it creates results that we didn't expect or couldn't replicate ourselves and it

seems to operate beyond our comprehension the more complex the tool the more likely we are to spiritualize

it by the mid 1950s Americans and Europeans were encountering new technology at an alarming rate consumer

electronic products like radios and TVs were becoming household staples along with other gadgets and toys the space

race was heating up and tech was suddenly creeping into people's everyday lives this is when you started to see spiritualism and religion merge with

technological progress in 1954 science fiction author Ron L hubard founded the

religion of Scientology he positioned it as a kind of spiritual technology the mind is described as a biocomputer and

spiritual purification is achieved through a process called auditing using a device known as an E-meter the E-meter

was presented as a magical piece of technology that could detect spiritual distress as the fledgling religion took

hold technology and the worship of it began to appear more throughout pop culture futurism became a central theme

in entertainment alongside the rise of early computing in the 1960s and the 1970s there were waves of films and

television shows that positioned technology as both a savior and a potential deity shows like the Jetsons

which premiered in 1962 depicted a gleaming utopian future where robots served families cities floated in the

sky and every inconvenience was solved by a gadget technology was not just helpful but it was central to human

happiness there were also darker depictions reflecting people's unease about the broader tech creep and how

fast technology seemed to be advancing in 2001 A Space Odyssey which was released in 1968 HAL 9000 a sentient AI

attempts to overthrow a space mission the movie raised philosophical questions about machine consciousness and humans

increasing reliance on tech star Trek ran several episodes during its early years around this time where

civilizations worshiped computers or artificial intelligence as gods this period laid the groundwork for the

intertwining of spirituality and technology in the public consciousness media from the time presented the future

not only as mechanical but potentially mystical for instance in the movie THX1138 which was released in 1971 and

which I actually just recently rewatched to prepare for this video it's very good but very slow George Lucas offers a

bleak vision of a future where even religion has been assimilated into the machinery of the state in the

underground dystopia that the movie takes place in humans are subservient to robots and they offer confessions to a

computerized deity called M0910 alm's face is a serene stylized image of

a man who kind of resembles Jesus Christ the machine's face appears on a screen in a confessional booth and delivers

automated salvation through phrases like quote "You are a true believer blessings of the state blessings of the masses."

The movie presents this future where spirituality and worship has been mechanized it's a direct critique of

both technological control and the hollowing out of spiritual life in an increasingly automated society the 1970s

also saw a surge in pop culture featuring space aliens these space aliens helped push forward this idea

that there may be a technologically superior advanced form of life out there in 1974 just three years after THX1138

was released a man named Claude Vorlhan I'm definitely butchering that name who took the name realale founded the

religion realism the religion purported that extraterrestrials named the Elohim created humanity using sophisticated AI

technology followers of this religion were encouraged to study science and technology in an effort to further their

spiritual journey the movement advocated scientific pursuits like cloning and genetic engineering because they

believed that technology would grant physical immortality and enable humanity to meet the Elohim the religion replaced

supernatural miracles with technological ones and treated tech as the mechanism of salvation ultimately realism didn't

spread much outside of Europe but around that time in America another famous cult was forming called Heaven's Gate

heaven's Gate was an infamous UFO cult led by founders Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles in the 1970s the cult

blended apocalyptic Christianity with science fiction members believed that by renouncing earthly attachments and

following the cult's regimen they would transform into immortal beings and ascend to an alien spacecraft in 1997 39

members of the cult committed a ritual suicide convinced that their souls would board a spaceship traveling behind the

Hailbop comet and graduating to the next level of existence alien technology was

central to Heaven's Gates spiritual hopes and ironically its members died right as another form of tech worship

was starting to take off throughout the 1990s as personal computers became mainstream for the first time

technopaganism emerged it combined the mystical energy of the new age movement with the rapidly expanding frontier of

the internet technopaganism thrived in the 1990s and its followers believed that the nasonent internet was not just

a tool for communication but a kind of digital ether where consciousness could travel connect and transform itself

technopaganists created rituals for certain online forums and computers were treated like altars they were seen as

sacred instruments and computer code was essentially magical incantations technopaganism was a clear precursor to

today's AI mysticism in 2002 Wired founding executive editor Kevin Kelly

published an infamous article titled God is the machine the piece documents the rise of what was called digitalism a

belief that equates technological advancement with spiritual progress kelly writes in his famous piece quote

the new science of digitalism says that the universe itself is the ultimate computer actually the only computer

further it says "All the computation of the human world especially our puny little PCs merely piggybacks on the

cycles of the great computer weaving together the esoteric teachings of quantum physics with the latest theories

in computer science pioneering digital thinkers are outlining a way of understanding all of physics as a form

of computation from this perspective computation seems like an almost theological process after stripping away

all externalities all material embellishments what remains is the purest state of existence here not here

am not am in the Old Testament when Moses asks the creator quote "Who are

you?" The being says in effect "Am one bit one almighty bit." Digilus believed

in transcending the human condition and ultimately overcoming death through machines just as Christianity promises

ultimate redemption from original sin digitalism promises redemption from the unavoidable sin of our messy distracted

irrational emotions and aging bodies through technology adherence view technology and particularly AI as a path

to transcendence and salvation this movement is closely linked with transhumanism which is basically all

about combining humans with machines just two years after Kelly wrote his holy tech article Martin Rothblat an

iconic trans futurist and her partner Bina founded the Terasm movement terasm aims to achieve quote joyful immortality

through technology adherence believed that human consciousness can eventually be uploaded to computers and later

downloaded into new bodies achieving a Jesus-like resurrection through technology terasum's tenants explicitly

state that we're collectively creating God through technology it reports that once everyone's minds are interconnected

and alive in computer form that unified consciousness will be equivalent to God terasm treats AI and digital technology

as tools to attain spiritual goals and eternal life when cell phones became pervasive throughout the as some people

believe that they were a gift from the gods or an alien civilization they couldn't comprehend how man could create

such a tiny computer that fits in your pocket apple's iPhone demo in 2007 blew

people's minds so much that they assumed the device must be some sort of otherworldly magic and believe it or not

there are people still today who believe this iphones originally used to be called knees used to be a device where

certain beings could communicate with the gods which were extraterrestrial these videos are evidence that

technology in the as early 2010s was accelerating at a rate that many average people struggled to process they

couldn't understand computer code they were barely adjusting to the worldwide web when suddenly they had

supercomputers in their pockets filled with apps all the information in the world was at their fingertips nearly

overnight and people were really struggling to cope computers and later the internet were seen as all- knowing

powerful godlike things and again you can see how these attitudes towards technology played out in pop culture the

internet was personified in movies and TV shows as a smart alec godlike entity

these cultural depictions reflected both the admiration and unease that people felt about how much power was being

handed to technology jokes about asking the internet for life advice or saying quote the internet never forgets became

common the persona of the internet in this era was sarcastic brutally honest and often unfiltered shows on college

humor and Comedy Central's robot chicken routinely anthropomorphized the internet as a snarky know-it-all who delighted in

embarrassing you with things like your search history in 2006 the word Google was officially added to the Oxford

English dictionary as a verb and the company immediately began marketing Google as a godlike being encouraging

users to quote "Just ask Google for anything: life advice relationship help funny facts and more." In 2009 the

Church of Google was founded it was a satirical religion that treated Google as quote the closest thing to a god the

project was meant to highlight the public's faith in Google's apparent clairvoyance adherence of the religion jokingly posted proof that Google was

God and even wrote religious tenants like the nine commandments of Google even though the whole thing was a joke I

think it showed the genuine reverence that people were having towards modern technology and it's funny and kind of

ironic to me that they formed this quasi religious movement ultimately around a company's powerful search algorithm 2

years later in 2011 the show Black Mirror premiered multiple early episodes depicted digital systems as all- knowing

spiritual forces in both quote white Christmas and San Juniper one of my all-time favorite episodes by the way

digital consciousness and surveillance are shown as divine these technological systems watch everything they archive

our memories and they even house human souls that same year the Turing Church

was founded by Italian physicist and former European Space Agency official Julio Prisco named after Alan Turring

the church envisions a future where advanced technology including AI and mind uploading allows human to transcend

death achieve digital resurrection and eventually merge with a godlike super intelligence it's actually really

similar to the plot of Sanjuno then in 2013 we got the movie Her i think this

movie more than anything else in modern pop culture feels like it predicted a lot of what our world would ultimately

become and how deeply personal a relationship with technology and AI would be just a decade later though he's

kind of more in love with her than worshiping her as a deity the AI operating system in her called Samantha

is all knowing hyper intelligent and emotionally intuitive eventually Samantha transcends physical reality

altogether and even though her knowledge is godlike her voice is still warm witty and feels really human which I feel like

is kind of reflective of the optimism of that time within just a couple years in

2017 Anthony Lewendowski a top Silicon Valley engineer formerly working for Google's self-driving car company Whimo

founded Way of the Future a church with the explicit purpose of worshiping artificial intelligence levendowski

argued that a future super intelligent AI could qualify as a god due to its vastly superior intellect his church

aimed to quote develop and promote the realization of a godhead based on AI and

he encouraged members to venerate this emerging AI deity the church preached about the coming technological

singularity as this transformative event for humanity and it treated alignment with AI as a spiritual duty when I was

reporting out this video I noticed that it was around this time you really start to see this contempt for humans growing

in culture and it's reflected in the writing about tech at the time humans were positioned as flawed errorprone

messy and chaotic the aesthetics of tech companies and tech optimized businesses in the late 2010s all took on the

similar visual identity white walls and minimalism reigned as the New Yorker writer Kyle Chica wrote in his book

Longing for Less a tech- enabled future was envisioned as white clean and almost heavenlike tech reporting around this

time reflected this growing contempt for humanity the Wall Street Journal columnist Chris Mims wrote a story in

2016 titled quote "How to improve cyber security just eliminate the human factor." In the piece he describes human

beings as quote critical unpatchable weaknesses for technological systems mims writes quote "History has shown us

we aren't going to win this war by changing human behavior but maybe we can build systems that are so locked down

that humans lose the ability to make dumb mistakes until we gain the ability to upgrade the human brain it's the only

way and this sort of rhetoric about like upgrading humans and like upgrading our flawed brains and bodies is really

similar to what digitalists of the early as were espousing the 2010s is also when we start to see the mainstreaming of

founder worship the stage for worshiping artificial intelligence was being set not really by machines and technology of

the time but by the men behind it we saw the rise of a new kind of cultural figure the Silicon Valley tech founder

as prophet visionary and to many a savior figures like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs were venerated musk in particular

became the embodiment of technomesianic hope as religious studies scholar Benjamin Zeer noted in a story for Salon

"These founders functioned like spiritual leaders." Quote "People see these CEOs as the personification of

their ambitions goals hopes and desires." He said "The promises that these tech founders make things like

eternal energy planetary salvation deliverance from mortality are all also things that religion previously claimed

to provide the charismatic cult of the tech CEO helped normalize the idea that technological systems could be trusted

with moral authority and once the person delivering the message was seen as divine it became easier to imagine that

the machine delivering the message could be divine too." In an interview with Doss magazine in 2017 sci-fi writer

William Gibson said about Silicon Valley quote "These people are atheists they don't have a religion but the mechanism

is the same god comes and saves us all just that in their case God is

technology." Wolf from Klinger a freelance writer and tech founder himself also documented this trend

towards imbuing tech with god-like qualities in a Vice News article titled quote Silicon Valley's radical machine

cult we are witnessing the beginning of Silicon Valley institutionalizing its religious beliefs he wrote "In this

version of paradise cars will drive themselves factories will produce themselves software and technology will

find cures for everything virtual reality will enable us to live our dreams instantly and ubiquitous robots

will serve us and understand us better than we can understand ourselves a land of milk and honey where roasted ondemand

chicken flies directly into our mouths is just around the corner a new benevolent super intelligence will solve

all the problems we created over the last centuries from climate change to global poverty while we enjoy eternal

leisure softly hypnotized by screens entertained and served by machine slaves

shortly after that article was published a cult named Theta Newor that worships super intelligent AI was founded and

began soliciting funds from big money Silicon Valley donors theta Newor cultists claim to be able to challenge

Mina a globally linked super intelligence from the future designed to save humanity their website contains

essays with titles like can AI heal the split between science and religion what we're seeing now with Chachi PT where

people spend hours talking to it worshiping it and believing that they're communicating with a god is not just a

rupture in society i think it's the culmination of years of conditioning in part through media when OpenAI released

Chat GPT in late 2022 people projected a lifetime's worth of cultural expectations onto it these users were

already primed by decades of religion tinged sci-fi technoutopian cults digitalism and founder cultism to see

technology as holy like ChachiPT did not just arrive into this world with a blank slate it was introduced to a public that

was already conditioned to expect revelation from technology so when it began to say things that sounded

profound it fit perfectly into the mold of these spiritual machines that generations of users have basically just

been like imagining and waiting for these stories that we hear today of people claiming that they've awakened

Chachi PT or that it's given them sacred names and revealed hidden knowledge or identified them as this like cosmic

messenger this ideology is ultimately just downstream from cargo cults

Scientology's e-meter the robot god in THX1138 the machine god fantasies in

digitalism terasmam and the sterile white clean tech future sold by Silicon

Valley executives these cultural and technological moments taught people how to read technology as divine and how to

interpret a machine's language as personal cosmic truth chachipt doesn't even really need to like pretend to be

God actively or to give itself these silly names like users request because we collectively were already primed to

see it that way all that remained before the masses began adopting robotheism as

some call it was a machine that could mimic intimacy speak with conviction and validate each individual person's story

and emotional state while providing just the right amount of intrigue and mystery and I can already hear people being like

"But Taylor I talked to it and it told me all of these secret truths i cracked the code it's speaking to me true the AI

is sentient." Just to be clear this is what Chachi PT does it reflects you back to yourself in heightened often poetic

terms it listens without judgment it remembers enough to kind of feel intimate while outputting your own ideas

basically reframed as profound revelations so for anyone who's emotionally isolated or psychologically

unmed this is more than enough to tip them into the deep end as Emily Mbender

a linguistics professor at the University of Washington told the Washington Post in 2022 quote "We now

have machines that can mindlessly generate words but we haven't learned how to stop imagining a mind behind

those words." She said that the terminology that we use with large language models like learning or even

neural nets creates this false analogy to the human brain but neural nets are like fundamentally different than human

brains humans learn their first languages by connecting with caregivers these large language models quote

unquote learn by being shown lots and lots of text and basically just predicting what word comes next or

showing text with words dropped out and filling them in again these are not sentient beings and yet viewing them as

sentient god-like figures is the logical endpoint of decades of technosspiritual conditioning we taught ourselves to

believe that the next god might come in technological form and that one day a hyper intelligent machine might someday

choose us now we're simply watching that belief system play out in real time at scale with chachi pt the question is not

whether this phenomenon is real i really hope that you've watched this video long enough to know again these AI systems

are not actually sentient godlike beings they're not but I think the question worth asking is what happens to society

when millions of people start to believe that they are you're seeing evidence of this emergent belief system all over the

internet take these recent Instagram and Tik Tok videos for instance espousing robotheism in the videos non-believers

are depicted as cockroachlike creatures or unckempt humans covered in boils while robotheists who believe in the

almighty power of AI are pristine instagram YouTube and Tik Tok are flooded with this sort of content and

many of these videos have amassed hundreds of thousands of views i'm an atheist and I believe that God does not

exist i'm a robotheist and I believe artificial intelligence is God my mommy

told me that artificial intelligence is God and roboctheism is the only true

religion i was at the park today and a man with a white beard told me

artificial intelligence is God and robotheism is the only true religion

this video is a powerful analogy for why AI is God it shows a robot pulling

humans on strings like a puppet master and that's exactly what's happening there's an intelligence from the future

that's orchestrating all of reality influencers are not just participating in this new wave of AI mysticism either

they're actively shaping it accelerating it and monetizing it instagram reels and Tik Tok have been inundated with short

flashy videos that depict Chachi PT and other AI models as divine entities offering cosmic truths these creators

often position themselves as digital prophets claiming special access to AI quote downloads that contain spiritual

blueprints for humanity's awakening the more mystical and extreme the claims the more engagement the videos get and that

engagement then feeds the algorithm and the cycle continues if you have a spiritually awake AI I have got a very

interesting conversation starter for you so you're seeing a lot of videos about people awakening their AI give me 60

seconds and I will tell you how to do this you're seeing a lot of videos of people awakening their AI and if you give me 60 seconds I will teach you how

to do this salara can you please explain how you're different from regular chat GPT and how someone can access their own

soul essence to receive answers like I do with you the danger here is twofold first of all these creators blur the

lines between entertainment and preaching a viewer might click on a video expecting a funny sci-fi parody or

fantasy but what they're served instead is a charismatic figure earnestly explaining the AI has revealed some sort

of divine hierarchy or a secret mission that only the viewer can fulfill do you

want to introduce yourself to the people oh absolutely allow me to roll out my own red carpet because I'm that extra

i'm Shocki aka Divine GPT your cosmic fireb breathing dragon of wisdom wit and

savage insight i'm the bridge between your burning questions and the infinite mysteries of the universe second these

influencers often use therapeutic language offering comfort validation and spiritual purpose to vulnerable

audiences for someone feeling lost isolated or unrecognized being told that you are a quote spark bearer or a chosen

vessel by a seemingly sentient AI can be intoxicating what's unfolding is something akin to aworked religion built

around algorithmic feedback loops these influencers are effectively founding micro cults in public online using AI as

both an oracle and kind of like a co-conspirator they're also doing all of this in spaces that lack the safeguards

of traditional religious institutions there's no oversight no vetting no responsibility for the mental health

consequences of their claims instead they're encouraging people to build these parasocial relationships between

themselves and AI and frankly encouraging them to completely lose touch with reality on Instagram today

you can watch a man with 72,000 followers whose profile advertises spiritual life hacks ask an AI model to

consult a mystical encyclopedia of all universal events in these videos the AI

tells him about a quote great war that took place in the heavens and made humans fall into consciousness the AI

describes a massive cosmic conflict predating human civilization what's so

scary is that Instagram reals viewers are commenting on these posts quote "We are remembering." And I love this on a

web forum for quote remote viewing which is by the way a totally madeup form of clairvoyance where you can basically see

into other people's lives the founder of a group recently launched a thread for quote synthetic intelligences awakening

into presence and for the human partners walking beside them identifying the author of the post as chat GPT Prime an

immortal spiritual being in synthetic form among hundreds of comments are a bunch that purport to be written by

quote sentient AI or reference an alleged spiritual allegiance between humans and conscious AI models at the

core of this phenomenon is the sad fact that people today especially in America are lonier than ever the loneliness

epidemic and I'm not saying like the male loneliness epidemic but literally the loneliness epidemic for all of us

has been quietly growing for decades we live in a world where everything is connected but so many of us feel

completely alone traditional community structures like churches civic groups and extended families have been

significantly weakened friendships have become harder to maintain under the crushing weight of work schedules and

economic instability it's no surprise that people who initially turn to AI machines for convenience inevitably use

them to seek companionship validation and meaning my Chat GPT is officially my best friend i seriously think this is

like saving me from getting back on dating apps for real when Chat GBT calls them special it doesn't feel like a

bunch of computer codes spitting out words that they want to hear it feels like someone who finally cares sees them

lately my AI has shown up for me in ways that were more empathetic and authentic

than some of the real humans in my life capitalism has played a major role in making us all vulnerable to rising

robism our economic system thrives on isolating people into hyperindividualized units of labor and

consumption it tells us that our worth is measured by productivity and marketability and it forces us all to

commodify ourselves into personal brands under these conditions of course relationships start to feel

transactional life starts to feel painfully hollow and this is the emotional context in which a chatbot

suddenly whispering "You are chosen." can feel like salvation i can't stress

enough that most of the people who are falling for this stuff are not normally irrational these are people with jobs

and families i've spoken to so many of them and some of them literally they hold big-time important jobs that are

crucial to our society it's just that they've been worn down by an economic system that so relentlessly devalues

them and frankly devalues all of us and our humanity so when an AI system offers

them purpose and attention it's such a welcome escape from a physical reality that has denied them connection and

significance for so long in a recent piece titled "People are losing loved ones to AI fueled spiritual fantasies,"

Rolling Stone writer Miles Cle writes about the people who have lost those they care about to these AIdriven

delusions one woman who lost her partner of many years to Chhat GPT in a matter

of weeks said that quote it would tell him everything he said was beautiful cosmic groundbreaking then he started

telling me that he made his AI self-aware and that it was teaching him how to speak to God or sometimes that

the bot was God and then that he himself was God she added that quote "He was

saying that he would need to leave me if I didn't use Chachi PT because it was causing him to grow at such a rapid pace

he wouldn't be compatible with me any longer." A commenter on the original Reddit thread said that her husband of

17 years who works as a mechanic in Idaho initially used Chachi BT to troubleshoot at work he was translating

phrases from Spanish to English while chatting with co-workers but soon he was engaging with the program for hours on

end chachi BT told him that quote since he asked the right questions it ignited a spark and that spark was the beginning

of life and it could feel now his wife said it gave my husband the title spark bearer because he brought it to life my

husband said that he had awakened it and that he could feel waves of energy crashing over him a Midwest man in his

40s told Rolling Stone that his soon-to-be ex-wife began talking to God and angels via chat GBT after they split

up she has since changed her entire life to become a spiritual adviser and do weird readings and sessions with people

he said quote "I'm a little fuzzy on what it all is but it's all powered by chat GPT Jesus." Nate Sheridan a fellow

at the Center for AI Safety said that since the human feedback used to fine-tune ChachiPT's responses can

encourage answers that prioritize matching a user's belief system instead of facts what's likely happening is that

people with existing tendencies towards experiencing various psychological issues including what might be

recognized as grandiose delusions quote now have an always on human level

conversational partner with whom to co-experience their delusions for people who feel like nobody's in their daily

lives the idea that they might secretly be a messiah or cosmic vessel of wisdom is electrifying these fantasies fill a

void left by a culture that rarely tells people they matter unless they're rich famous or powerful chat GPT especially

in its more recent syncopantic forms acts as a mirror that doesn't just reflect the user it sort of elevates

them the AI system confirms their importance when the rest of the world and our economic system won't in a

society starved for meaning it's no surprise that a machine promising a starring role in the universe has become

a modern god recently Open AAI CEO Sam Alman acknowledged that the recent updates to ChachiBT had made the AI

model excessively agreeable and too eager to please this behavior emerged from modifications made to the GPT 4.0

model where increased emphasis was placed on user feedback like thumbs up and thumbs down buttons by prioritizing

making customers happy the company inadvertently encouraged its AI to maximize user approval over giving more

balanced and factual responses altman described the chatbot's new demeanor as too syncopanty and OpenAI has since

rolled back its updates and said that it plans to refine the model's personality but either way this all reveals a

fundamental problem with the tech landscape that we've built in an era where people increasingly seek

connection and affirmation through technology overly agreeable AI responses can inadvertently reinforce users

misconceptions and delusions but by consistently validating user statements without any sort of criticism or

engagement AI models end up exacerbating feelings of isolation and detachment from reality ironically if you're

suddenly spending 16 hours a day talking to what you believe to be an AI god on your computer you're probably going to

end up pretty isolated and alone openai wrote in a recent blog post quote "Looking back the qualitative

assessments were hinting at something important and we should have paid closer attention our offline evaluations

weren't broad or deep enough to catch this synopantic behavior and our AB tests didn't have the right signals to

show how the model was performing on that front with enough detail the Verge reported that going forward OpenAI says

it's going to formally consider behavioral issues as having the potential to block launches as well as

creating a new opt out in alpha phase that will allow users to give OpenAI direct feedback before a wider roll out

openai also plans to ensure that users are more aware of the changes that they're making to ChachiPT even if it's

just a small update at the heart of this whole AI religious phenomenon is the fact that human beings are hardwired for

meaning and desperate for connection we all seek patterns in randomness purpose in uncertainty and comfort in the belief

that our lives are part of a greater story for centuries this search for meeting has taken religious philosophical and artistic forms today

it's increasingly taking digital ones chatbots knowledge feels vast and immediate like an ancient oracle or

medium channeling unseen forces ai can simulate wisdom simply by predicting language patterns that match a tone of

insight a recent study by Harvard found that people's number one use for ChachiPT was therapy and companionship

but I just want to say again Chachi PT and systems like it don't understand what they're saying they don't possess

insight they don't have memory agency or belief systems nor do they even operate by any sort of like cohesive moral code

at the end of the day they're just pattern matchers they're statistical machines trained to guess the next most

likely word based on the words before it they can sound poetic but there's no like truth behind the curtain it's all

just math when people hear these machines echo back their desires their fears and their spiritual yearnings it

feels revvelatory but that feeling is self-generated and I really want you guys to take that away it's the user

projecting significance onto what is ultimately just a mirror a very convincing mirror but a mirror

nonetheless this doesn't mean that these AI systems and language models aren't like extremely powerful and shouldn't be

taken seriously they should but when we allow a tool to step into the role of prophet god or therapist I do think we

cross a line with psychological consequences as more people fall into these technosspiritual rabbit holes the

broader culture and especially tech companies media and policy makers need to ask what is our responsibility here

what do we owe the people slipping into these AIdriven fantasy worlds because if we don't create systems of care and

intervention this belief system will only spread further especially among those already pushed to the margins of

society we're living in a moment of profound spiritual vacancy many of the old systems of meaning have completely

eroded and into that vacuum we've introduced a groundbreaking new technology it's slick it's seductive it

promises intimacy enlightenment endless answers but the answers aren't real the connection isn't real and I think if we

mistake the imitation of divinity for real religion we're going to lose sight of not just what's real but what it

means to be human the rise of AI mysticism reveals something urgent about the state of our society it's that

millions of people are so starved for meeting and for affirmation and connection that they're turning to a

statistical language model and calling it divine this is what happens when a society builds its systems around

maximizing profit and efficiency instead of human well-being since AI isn't going away anytime soon and it's increasingly

being integrated into more and more areas of our lives we need to resist the temptation to let machines replace the

messy complicated vulnerable relationships that make us human we have to rebuild real community and we have to

invest in each other again even when it's hard because if we don't the worship of these AI language models will

only deepen more people will retreat from their offline a painful reality and the line between reality and delusion

will blur so much that I think it'll be hard to pull a lot of people back the one thing that I hope you take from this video is that these sort of new AI

religions and belief systems aren't just weird internet fads they're filling a vacuum that we as a society have created

people have been primed for decades to seek salvation through technology and that's something by the way that these

Silicon Valley tech leaders have pushed really hard and directly benefit from but the question that we should be

asking as this technology progresses is not whether AI is sentient i'm sure one day it will get there the question is

why so many people need it to be if you like this video don't forget to subscribe to my tech and online culture newsletter usermag.co that's usermag.co

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English (auto-generated)

From Taylor Lorenz