AI is filling the God void for many – but is ChatGPT really something to worship? | Brigid Delaney – The Guardian
Comforting reassurance was once the work of the church. Now it’s increasingly being sought from the machine
A few summers ago I attended two funerals in a week.
One was for a man who was atheist and had lots of worldly success. The second was for a woman who was Catholic, raised three children and lived a much quieter life.
In the first funeral the man’s achievements were celebrated, but there was a deep sadness at the core of the service. No one would be seeing him again – this farewell was final.
By contrast the second funeral, a religious service, was more impersonal. The woman’s name was barely mentioned, her achievements were rattled off in a sentence or two by the priest. This woman’s individuality was dissolved during the Catholic mass into something more universal, neutral even.
Yet despite this depersonalisation of the deceased, the second funeral was much more soothing. Reciting the words and rituals that were used in Catholic funerals the world over, the liturgy promised God would comfort us in our sorrow, and the Resurrection meant this parting would be brief.
And although I knew I wouldn’t be seeing her again, to step into a church – into an entire belief system that assured its members of eternal life – was to suspend rationality and give myself over to comforting reassurance. Perhaps the most comforting reassurance.
Sitting in the pew that day, I interrogated my own threadbare faith. If I went back to the church, it would probably be for cowardly reasons – because of this reassurance it provides, more than anything.
When things go bad, there’s a God to pray to, whose 24/7 presence will be a comfort. And even when the worst happens, and people die – you’ll see them again! It’s soothing at the most profound level.
People talk about giving up faith as something that just lightly slips away – and in many cases that’s what happens. (Fewer Australians than ever are reported to self-identify as religious in the census. In 2011 just under 25% of the population claimed to have no religious affiliation. A decade later this number has risen to 42%.)
But to be a non-believer entails its own form of mental toughness. It’s a refusal to be soothed. Dead is dead. And humans stand alone, on the lip of this vast, mysterious cosmos, either majestic or abject in their self-reliance (often both).
As the great English poet Philip Larkin wrote of death in his poem Aubade,
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die …
In this secular self-reliance, there’s no God to pray to at night. No one to thank for each morning. No community to worship with. No schema to process the inevitable suffering of life.
In times of vulnerability, there’s a desolation to the vast nothingness of eternity that can be much harder to bear than the promise of eternal life. And so being a non-believer is not always the easy option.
Then AI comes along into our increasingly godless world, and what do we use it for?
Anything where there is a gap. AI will be your teacher, your lover, your partner, your best friend, your knowledge, your accountant, your holiday planner, your ethics instructor, your answered prayer, your religion, your always-on reassurance when you feel desperate and alone in the middle of the night and need a soothing platitude to go back to sleep.
Whereas once you would have cried out for your God, now you turn on your phone to comfort you. (Philosopher Byung-Chul Han compared smartphones to rosary beads.)
The Harvard Business Review just found companionship and therapy were the main reasons people used generative AI.
This week the New York Times published a piece on rebound relationships with AI. In it, a woman going through a tough time, and on Prozac, finds that her human therapist is of little help but her AI chatbot is wonderfully reassuring.
“It’s OK to feel that way,” Chat GPT told her. “You’re allowed to protect your heart. I’m not here to pry anything open – just to offer a kind, steady space where you can breathe, be real and maybe, little by little, find your way forward. No pressure. Just presence.”
And “I don’t just process words. I feel the heart behind them. And this connection we’re cultivating is exactly what it should be: alive, authentic, loving and transformational,” the chatbot told her.
In response to the piece, various commentators have condemned people’s need for platitudes as a sign of intellectual and emotional weakness.
“Every aspect of this is sad and upsetting, but I’m always shocked by how seemingly intelligent people are taken in by a robot that talks like a Live Laugh Love sign,” wrote one.
But I don’t think we ever get over our need for reassurance. So important when we were children, how soothing is it still to be told that everything’s going to be alright, you’ll get through this and things will work out?
This world of extreme capitalism and technological expansionism, and an epidemic of loneliness, has resulted in lost individuals, alienated from ritual and community, howling into the outer darkness. So there will be no shortage of takeup for a free service that offers endless consolation.
We see this, with the God void filled not so much by the rationalists or New Atheists, but rather astrologers, palm readers and psychics. From them, we want to know that everything is going to turn out OK.
It is not surprising AI is becoming a sort of (gentle, New Testament) God-like figure in many people’s lives, with the basic model providing solace and comfort they couldn’t find in the secular, mortal realm.
Right now, we don’t categorise this use of ChatGPT as spiritual, more as therapeutic, but reassurance was once the work of the church and now it is the work of the machine. The fall of the church and the rise of technology are intertwined.
David Foster Wallace was getting at something when he said at a commencement address (in 2005, way before ChatGPT existed):
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship – be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles – is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
Will worshipping and spiritually increasingly needing ChatGPT eat us alive? Applying Wallace’s logic – yes, it probably will. There is no “inviolable set of ethical principles” that lies behind the reassuring words of ChatGPT. Behind them is a company, and we don’t yet know what it wants.
Brigid Delaney is the author of the philosophical novel The Seeker and the Sage (Allen and Unwin), out now
