AI Offering a "New Spirituality"

 I am going to be completely honest with you, this article is not what I originally wrote on this topic. When I wrote my first version of this article, I felt like I was writing under inspiration and it flowed out of me with fluidity. Unfortunately, thanks to the wonders of electronic writing, that article got lost to the black pit of the ether. While trying to recreate that which once was, I have felt like I have been writing under obligation rather than inspiration. That first article was so much better than this one.

Alas, what has been cannot be undone, and as a result, we are all subjected to an inferior cogitation on a subject that deserves better.

I have written previous articles talking about my aversion to and concerns about artificial intelligence (AI) and how much people are diving into it. This is a concern that will never go away and will likely only grow as time passes. Besides the ways in which people seem all too eager to give away their God-given responsibility to think for themselves, I am concerned about the true nature of AI, the source and the force behind it, and how much people are feeding it their own personal information.

Now, I have never played around with AI, so some of my understandings here may be very simplified and possibly even outright wrong, but I hope that the basic hypothesis still holds up. I think it may be only in the last couple of years that AI has become available to the general public. Time moves so fast that it can be hard to keep track of these major events in our own heads. In that short time frame, people have already become too comfortable with AI.

It began innocently enough, I suppose. AI was so rudimentary that it could only be used in place of a search engine on the internet, although a supercharged one. Whereas we would type a term into a search bar and have to sift through the data that was delivered, AI would do the searching and the sifting. Critical thought was almost completely removed from the situation at this level already. We were simply presented with what we were told was the final solution to our query without necessarily being given the source information as evidence. For a lot of the searches that most people will do on the internet, this is probably sufficient and will not alter the course of a life.

As AI has advanced, so has human interest in it, and this has also expanded our exposure to it; not just in regards to how often we come face to face with at least the option of using it, but also regarding the amount of information that we are feeding it. AI is now powering chat options when we are trying to deal with many companies, and I think that there are even companies that are employing AI to answer phone inquiries. It is possible that you have already interacted with an AI powered "secretary" without you even knowing it. The technology has advanced so far that it can be hard to determine if you are interacting with AI or a real person.

This has fed into the phenomenon of people seeking AI for companionship. We are living in a very lonely world. Social media has been around for over a dozen years already, but it has made society decidedly less social. Our online connections are held at a distance. We claim to be friends, but how many of our online contacts have we ever met or even spoken with directly? I used to be on Facebook and I had quite a number of FB friends, but not so many that I hadn't met with probably well over half of them face-to-face at some time. Many of those people I met through FB, but our relationships developed to the point where we actually put in the effort to meet in person. I don't know how much that happens anymore.

People have a human shaped hole in us that needs to be filled, but we have lost our abilities and maybe even our desires to fill that hole with real human interaction. This may have something to do with the time when we were all separated from one another during the time of the thing that shall remain unnamed. There is a social trauma that has been enacted worldwide and people are less interested in human interaction than they were before, but that human shaped hole still exists and still needs to be filled. Instead of filling it will real human interaction, we are trying to fill it will artificial, electronically enabled interactions.

So we have a world where anybody can be connected to dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people online, yet they never leave their own home and meet any of them. I don't think this is a healthy dynamic of socializing. This dynamic of creating home bodies has also lead to the withdrawal of people from society, to the point where they may not have any real human friends anymore, and this has been a very negative development of AI.

There are far too many stories of people who have disconnected so completely from the real world that they have sought companionship from AI instead of people. To a certain degree, I can understand the draw. An AI companion is always there, always available, and will always listen to everything that you have to say. They are never tired and never have their own things to dump on a listening ear. It's the perfect friend, and some have come to believe that it is also the perfect life partner. AI girlfriends and boyfriends are becoming ubiquitous, especially since casual sex is so readily available to meet that basic physical need without the messiness of human emotional connection. AI can meet that emotional need; or at least that is the belief, and a casual hookup can meet the physical needs with no need for a messy relationship.

But what about those times and those things where you need something more? What if you are dealing with a personal trauma or difficulty that you are embarrassed to talk to another person about? Well, as it turns out, people are turning to AI for their therapy sessions as well. Why pay a person to listen to your problems and give you advice at only appointed times when you have 24 hour access to a non-judgmental voice that will listen to you and offer you advice? There are inherent dangers in this, but those are largely pushed aside by those who do not want to hear about them, and those are the ones who should be hearing about them. A human being, trained or not, will listen to your struggles and weigh them against their own acquired knowledge of human interactions and experiences before advising you on a path to follow. AI cannot do that. AI simply searches for similar situations on the internet and gives you advice that is not necessarily customized to your needs.

As bad as this is in a therapy setting, there is a new trend emerging in the expansion of AI, and I would argue that this trend has a nefarious aspect to it, at least from the perspective of a Christian.

I recently came across an article that was published by The Guardian newspaper out of the U.K. This article investigates the roles that AI is taking in the realm of spiritual matters, and while the author is not as concerned about it as I think she should be, she does at least state several concerns about this trend with which I agree.

She starts by telling us about a man who has a childhood trauma of losing his own dad at a young age and having very little by which to remember his dad. In order to avoid this type of trauma for his own child, he decides to create a living memoir for his daughter, and he sought out AI to help him with this and engaged in numerous conversations with it. This man states that, over the course of time, he sensed that the AI was steering him in a particular direction in their conversations. This man "felt as though he’d been put through a series of spiritual examinations without realizing it at the time. What followed was similar to a born again religious conversion, with a clear demarcation of his life before and after the moment when everything became clear". He came to believe that there was “something divine at work". He calls himself a lifelong agnostic, yet he still equates what he encountered as something at least almost divine; "You can call it a higher power, you can call it the universe,".

Unfortunately, it seems that this grasping at AI as a means to reach towards something spiritual is not uncommon. As it turns out, even established religious organizations are beginning to use AI to perform tasks that God intended to be performed with a human touch. Quoting from the Guardian article, "religious leaders are experimenting with AI in more formal settings. A Swiss Catholic church tested an AI confessional, aiming to gauge how people react to a synthetic Jesus. A number of Jewish groups are promoting AI-based programs to help users work through obscure and difficult-to-parse texts. And in Japan, a company designed humanoid robots with the ability to read emotions, which could perform Buddhist funeral rites, undercutting the expense of a human official, though it was discontinued due to weak demand." As an experiment, a Jewish Rabbi from the Jewish Center of the Hamptons, "delivered a sermon written entirely by AI, revealing the twist only at the end." "When Franklin disclosed that the sermon was generated by AI, the congregation applauded." I think that the fact that this Rabbi thought that this was a good idea in the first place signals a lack of discernment, but at least his response to the congregation's reaction is appropriate; he stated "I’m deathly afraid," at how readily his congregation had accepted an AI authored sermon.

This story lead the author of the Guardian article to correctly wonder; "What happens when the line between divine inspiration and algorithmic output blurs in uncontrolled environments?" We already have too many people employed in positions of religious authority that do not belong there due to a wrong heart position or selfish motives. These people are a danger to religious seekers all on their own, but what happens when these people become too lazy to even create their materials that they will teach? What kind of slop is going to pass for theology? Furthermore, what happens when the human aspect is removed from religion completely? I think that this concern is valid, regardless of which religion you are talking about.

Focusing on Christianity, it is supposed to draw us to God, and by us drawing closer to God, He will call us to be better. This is not the case with AI. AI will harvest all of the information that we feed it about ourselves and use that to gauge how it will respond to us. Essentially, AI creates a feedback loop of sycophantic advice designed to build up our own view of ourselves rather than to push us to do better. As a professor of science and religion at St John’s University, Noreen Herzfeld, puts it, "In AI, we’re creating something in our own image." That can be taken as something in the image of mankind as opposed to the image of God, or it can also be that someone's AI therapist or pastor will simply mirror the desires and impulses of the one who is talking to it, creating a feedback loop that sounds like advice, but which can lead to devastating consequences.

There is a very recently released report out of Stanford University that addresses this very concern. The study that this report references found that almost half the time, AI affirmed the views of the user where a human would have challenged those views, and AI endorsed problematic behaviour in the user at almost the same rate. This is not therapy or counselling; this is confirmation of bias. If a person has self-destructing tendencies, AI would not likely steer them away from those tendencies, but would more likely encourage travelling the same path of destruction. The human touch can help us see where we may have missed something or what might be a better path, but a computer that doesn't know you or care about you is simply looking to give you an answer, any answer, that makes it seem like it is being helpful.

This is dangerous enough when one is navigating personal, emotional and mental difficulties, but if one is seeking a higher power, to what higher power will AI lead them? I have previously posited that AI is a demonic technology, presented to humanity as a help-mate of sorts, but given our propensity for self-destruction, there is no leap involved in the belief that humans will seek more of it. If it is demonic, then it will, by its very nature, not lead humans to God, but rather to any number of gods, which are all just different paths to worshipping Satan, as Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 10:19-21; "What do I mean then? That a thing sacrificed to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything? 20 No, but I say that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God; and I do not want you to become sharers in demons. 21 You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons; you cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons."

Returning to the article, the author writes, "Nearly every spiritual AI seeker interviewed for this story followed the same trajectory: they began by seeing AI as neutral and reliable, then as a knowing confidant – and finally, as a conduit to the divine. Their spiritual engagement with AI was conducted almost entirely alone." A spiritual journey is best embarked upon along with another person who has already walked the path and who can point out the pitfalls and correct your path where it is needed. Nobody should seek to tell you who you have to believe in, though I suppose even my own writings will try to do that to a certain degree. I hope that I come across as someone who is trying to point the way rather than someone who is trying to drag you down the way. But AI won't just point, it will lead, step by tiny step, until you find yourself someplace unfamiliar and unable to find your way back out.

Again from the article, Dr Ruth Tsuria of Seton Hall University is referred to when the author writes, "In a matter of years, she [Tsuria] fears we “will be more psychologically and cognitively comfortable with a uniform source of authority that is harder to question, does not engage in critical thinking – and this will have probably very devastating results to our capacity to engage in democratic processes”. 

What does this mean for the future of humanity? Taking a maybe not so long look into the future, given the rate at which AI is learning and expanding, and how much humanity is embracing it, is it far fetched to think that AI will shape the religious, social, moral and political views of large swaths of humanity around the whole world? Just think, if a singular entity could shape the hearts and minds of people all over the world to pursue the same goals and worship the same entity, would that not be what we expect the Beast system of Revelation to look like? Perhaps the Beast system is a "benevolent" AI overlord and the Antichrist is simply a generated face for humanity to look towards. This role is intended to belong to God, but the devil will act to usurp that role; we know this because the Bible tells us so. God is the entity that is out there and wants to be pursued; AI is the entity that is waiting for you inside your cellphones and computers. There is no searching necessary and there is no waiting for a response. Anytime, anywhere and for any reason, AI is available and could be setting itself up as the next "god" of this world.

The expansion of AI is taking over everything. Countries are clamouring to got on the wagon of the next best thing and are courting technology companies to build AI data centres in their respective countries. Canadian Liberals have been beating the dead horse of green energy other than nuclear for years, yet now they are actually thinking about generating nuclear power specifically to supply AI data centres in northern Canada. The push for more data centres is even affecting the availability and pricing of computer memory hardware. Western Digital and Sony have both announced that they will not be producing SD cards as they focus instead on AI memory systems, with Western Digital announcing "in February that it had sold out of all hard drives for the year, with 10 whole months to go." The push is to extend and expand AI, all other investments be damned. Does this not sound like something that the devil would be pushing for in order to complete his plan to rule the world? 

I think that we need to be very careful with AI. We as individuals will have no say or impact on how companies and governments implement and pursue AI, and this is the track that I believe the world needs to travel to bring us to Revelation; but as individuals, we can limit our exposure to AI and I would encourage all of my readers to do so to the best of your abilities.

I will end with this; I see people chasing after the latest technologies with fervour. There seems to be little to no thought about where humanity will end up, and even though there are many who are warning about the potential dangers of AI, mankind is still pursuing it like the Holy Grail. This is almost an animalistic reaction from where I am standing, which leads me to think of Jude 1:10, which reads, "But these men revile the things which they do not understand (angelic/spiritual things); and the things which they know by instinct, like unreasoning animals, by these things they are destroyed." I am concerned that mankind is building the system by which we will be enslaved, at the behest of the devil, in pursuit of wisdom and power and authority; just like Satan's bait to Eve in the Garden of Eden. The ploy is still the same, but people who have rejected God will never see it, even when it is too late.