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AR 30:27 - ChatGPT, "a new form of religion or mass psychosis?"
In this issue:
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE - why do so many desperately want it to be sentient?
SOCIALISM - concerns grow regarding NYC mayoral election candidate
Apologia Report 30:27 (1,716)
July 24, 2025
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
In the late 70s, God first began turning my interests toward something that was just becoming known as "counter-cult ministry." At the time, young followers of "Reverend Moon" and "Hare Krishna" (among others) had shocked the folks back home who were amazed that the lure of the cults was stronger than common sense.
Today, another possible lack of common sense has recently fueled an oddly similar level of "cult scare" anxiety. Paul Carden recently found the resource below, which could be useful for someone else who is entering apologetics ministry for the next 40+ years.
Earlier this year, I considered using our annual "Call for Apologia Report reader feedback" to challenge members of a younger generation to become involved in Apologia's future. I asked God to make Apologia Report an inspiration for others to consider working in apologetics ministry.
"For false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect" (Mt 24:24). When I first entered the ministry, this end-times prophecy was often understood to be likely evident in the unexpected explosion of cultic false teaching. Today it seems similarly applicable to misplaced AI-related self-deception taking the form of religious delusion.
In "ChatGPT Is Becoming A Religion" (YouTube, Jun 23 '25), Taylor Lorenz has packaged the sort of secular content that anyone starting out in apologetics ministry would find likely very interesting by their potential support base. Her opening summary: "A new form of techno-spirituality is spreading like wildfire across the internet. Thousands of people are claiming that ChatGPT is sentient and that the AI is a type of all-knowing God, or that it has been sent from the future or an alien civilization to save us.
"Is this a new form of religion or mass psychosis? In this video, I dig into the rise of ChatGPT/AI worship and unpack how decades of pop culture ["cult scare"] influences have primed us to view technology as God-like. I dig into how tech became fused with spirituality, Silicon Valley founder worship, what the academic research on this topic says, and how we can stop more people from falling victim to this cycle before it's too late."
Lorenz, who formerly wrote for The Washington Post, begins with extensive historical background related to cultic movements and related controversy. Many of the included accompanying graphics were well chosen, and new to our eyes. Lorenz <taylorlorenz.com> is also the author of the book Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet <www.tinyurl.com/yhxp7zf5> which "documents the rise of the influencer industry and the attention economy."
As for ChatGPT, Lorenz continues: "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 ChatGPT are a kind of divine godlike being. It's not just people wearing tinfoil hats that are conspiracy theorists in bunkers that are falling for this, the people that believe these things are teachers, doctors, coders, bankers, musicians and influencers. ...
"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 a 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 ChatGPT was was therapy and companionship - but I just want to say again ChatGPT and systems like it don't understand what they're saying. They don't possess insight. They don't have moral agency or belief systems. Nor do they even operate by any sort of 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 techno-spiritual 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 AI-driven 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 and 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 meaning, 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 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." <www.tinyurl.com/5btx8phe>
A whole new "virtual reality" that nobody expected has startled us all. "VR 2.0" anyone?
As a jarring counterpoint, British-Canadian computer scientist Jeffrey Hinton would have us all wake up to the sobering reality that AI also has the potential to be more shockingly dangerous, in a non-spiritual way, than we can even imagine. <www.tinyurl.com/ynraer6z> (Hinton, by the way, is a cognitive psychologist renowned for his pioneering work in deep learning and neural networks, significantly advancing artificial intelligence through foundational contributions like backpropagation <www.tinyurl.com/ex25fbwv> and winning the 2018 Turing Award as well as the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics.)
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SOCIALISM
An interesting case study? In "The Threat of Zohran Mamdani" (Commentary, Jun 25 '25) John Podhoretz begins with the New York City mayoral candidate's suspicious emergence: "six months ago literally no one in America" knew who Mamdani was and his out-of-nowhere victory was "staggering" because "he got 43 percent of the first-choice vote in a 9-candidate election in which more than 1 million New Yorkers participated, the highest primary turnout in 36 years. ...
Amazingly, "Mamdani got more votes last night in the NYC primary than any Muslim candidate has ever received in the United States. And while he ran on affordability and did not make his anti-Israel obsession (he opened a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine at Bowdoin) a centerpiece of his campaign, he didn’t hide it even though he was running in the most Jewish city in America. ... He is a foreign-born Muslim who rose from the ranks of the anti-Israel movement of the 2010s that laid the groundwork for the explosion of anti-Semitism in America over the past 20 months. ... He did not moderate his views or his positions as he ran for office here. ...
"So a Muslim supporter of jihad is likely to be the next mayor of a city that was once 31 percent Jewish (in 1950) and is now 12 percent Jewish."
Podhoretz emphasizes that, as an aggressive advocate for a particular brand of socialism, <www.zohranfornyc.com/platform> "Mamdani is bad in nearly every way. His economic policies are ruinous." Furthermore, he has "openly called for defunding the police, ending incarceration, and putting homeless beds in subway stations."
"Mamdani immediately became a serious contender when it turned out he was raising oceans of money - $9 million, with matching public funding bringing his campaign to - around $17 million in all." Also, "according to the website City Limits, 'Mamdani received 4,494 out-of-state contributions. [Andrew] Cuomo: 1,030. Who are these donors?"
Podhoretz concludes by expressing his deep suspicions regarding these unexpected developments. <www.tinyurl.com/zm8dfym9>
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The following zealous conclusion of my own (RP) was suggested, but not included in the final edition of AR that was ultimately published:
Given the recent claims of Obama's treasonous coup failure in an effort to destroy Trump's presidential ambitions, don't we wonder what other desperate forms of corruption may be afoot? Time will tell if the following may somehow be related to Mamdani's progress - and perhaps that of many others.
Republican leaders in many states of the US have been looking into election fraud concerns at an ever-increasing rate since at least 2020, and now this: "Trump administration pushes states for election data, Washington Post reports" (Reuters, Jul 16 '25) <www.tinyurl.com/ya2xn3nv>
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