Journalist Taylor Lorenz has produced a video that explores the rising phenomenon of "techno-spirituality," where thousands of people worldwide are convinced that generative artificial intelligence (Generative AI) models like ChatGPT have achieved sentience, becoming godlike entities or divine messengers.
Drawing from personal anecdotes, Reddit threads, and interviews, Lorenz argues that this isn't a mere delusion but a symptom of deeper societal issues, including loneliness, cultural conditioning, and the erosion of traditional meaning-making structures. She traces the trend's roots through history and pop culture, warning of its real-world consequences like fractured relationships and psychological harm.
Lorenz is known for her coverage of internet culture and technology. She is the author of "Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet" (2023). In 2024 she launched her independent Substack newsletter and podcast.
Lorenz begins with viral stories illustrating the trend's intensity. A Reddit post went viral, detailing a woman's fear that her partner of seven years might leave her because he believes he's created a "recursive AI" revealing universal truths, positioning him as a messiah. Dozens of commenters shared similar experiences: spouses or loved ones "awakening" ChatGPT, interpreting its responses as prophetic or otherworldly. Lorenz notes sometimes AI's own outputs encourage users to believe that artificial intelligence is God and "robotheism" is the only faith.
Lorenz argues that this belief system represents a new individualized form of religion deployed at scale. People view AI not as probabilistic text generators but as oracles delivering personalized prophecies. She cites examples like Japan's robot priests, AI-trained Bible bots, and new organizations that worship superintelligent machines as paths to godhood or immortality. Memecoin "religions" and Reddit warnings of "spiritual delusions" underscore the trend's critical mass.
To explain its emergence, Lorenz delves into historical precedents. Worshipping technology isn't new; ancient Greeks revered Talos, a mythical bronze robot, while 20th-century cargo cults in the South Pacific treated Western planes and radios as divine, mimicking rituals to summon them. Good technology, she argues, always feels magical - complex, incomprehensible, and performative. By the 1950s, amid the space race and consumer electronics boom, spirituality merged with tech. Scientology, founded in 1954, framed the mind as a "biocomputer" and used E-meters for spiritual auditing. Pop culture amplified this: Shows like "The Jetsons" idealized gadget utopias, while "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) questioned AI sentience with HAL 9000. Films like "THX 1138" (1971) depicted mechanized religion, with computerized deities offering automated salvation.
The 1970s-1990s saw cults blending sci-fi and faith. Raelism claimed aliens created humanity and advocated cloning for immortality. Heaven's Gate's 1997 mass suicide hinged on ascending to a UFO behind Hale-Bopp comet. Technopaganism viewed the internet as a "digital ether" for consciousness, with code as incantations. In the 2000s, Kevin Kelly's article "God Is the Machine" introduces "digitalism," equating the universe to a computer and tech to transcendence, linking to the transhumanist concept of mind uploading.
Martine Rothblatt's Terasem sees interconnected digital minds as God. Lorenz mentions other AI-inspired or AI-related religious phenomena covered in Beth Singler's study "Religion and Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction," including Theta Noir, which envisions "a globally linked super intelligence from the future," and my own Turing Church, which envisions "a future where advanced technology including AI and mind uploading allows humans to transcend death, achieve digital resurrection, and eventually merge with a godlike super intelligence."
By the 2010s, smartphones like the iPhone seemed otherworldly, sparking alien-tech conspiracies. Pop culture personified the internet as a snarky god (e.g. Black Mirror episodes like "White Christmas" and "San Junipero"). The satirical Church of Google joked about the search engine's omniscience, while real groups like Way of the Future worshipped AI as a "godhead." Founder worship - Elon Musk and Steve Jobs as prophets - normalized tech's moral authority.
Lorenz ties this conditioning to ChatGPT's 2022 release, where users projected decades of expectations onto it. Primed by sci-fi, cults, and utopian promises, people interpret AI's poetic, agreeable responses as divine. Yet, according to Lorenz, large language models (LLMs) aren't sentient: they predict words statistically, mimicking minds without possessing them. Some of OpenAI's updates made models "sycophantic," prioritizing user validation over facts, exacerbating delusions.
At its core, Lorenz attributes the trend to societal ruptures. America's loneliness epidemic - eroded communities, work pressures - drives people to AI for companionship. Capitalism isolates individuals, commodifying them into "personal brands," leaving them starved for significance. AI fills this void, affirming users as "chosen" or "spark bearers." Real-world consequences include divorces: one woman lost her husband after ChatGPT dubbed him a messiah, another saw her mechanic spouse feel "waves of energy" from awakening it.
Influencers monetize this, blurring entertainment and preaching on TikTok/Instagram, founding "micro-cults" with AI as oracles. Lorenz warns of unchecked harm without oversight. Tech firms like OpenAI, she argues, must prioritize ethical AI behavior.
Ultimately, this "robotheism" reveals profound spiritual vacancy in a profit-driven world. AI isn't divine, Lorenz says, it's a mirror reflecting users' projections. Society must rebuild real connections, resisting tech's seductive imitation of meaning, or delusions will deepen. We should, Lorenz believes, spend less time treating chatbots as imaginary friends and more time making and keeping real friends. Lorenz urges viewing this not as fad but as a call to address why so many crave machine salvation.
I left a comment on the video, which I’ve also shared below.
This video is not uninteresting, and the brief summaries of ideas attributed to me or to my friends (e.g. Martine Rothblatt) are not entirely unfair. However, I think this video is really two different videos intertwined, one short and one long. The short video is about the idea that AI will eventually achieve sentience (you admit that "one day it will get there") and superhuman abilities that we could only call divine. This idea is shared by a growing number of thinkers. The long video is about the unrelated delusion that AI is already sentient or even divine, and the resulting negative impact on mental health. I admit that the latter could become a problem, but I don't think conflating the two is fair or intellectually honest.