A few summers ago I attended two funerals in one week.
One was for a man who was an atheist and who had a lot of worldly success. The second was for a woman who was Catholic, raised three children and lived a very quiet life.
The first funeral celebrated the man’s accomplishments, but there was deep sadness at the core of the service. No one would see him again – this farewell was final.
In contrast the second funeral, a religious service, was more impersonal. The woman’s name was barely mentioned, her achievements summed up by the priest in a sentence or two. During the Catholic mass the personality of this woman disintegrated into something more universal, even neutral.
Yet, despite this depersonalization of the deceased, the second funeral was far more pleasant. Reminiscent of the words and rituals used in Catholic funerals around the world, the liturgy promised that God would comfort us in our suffering, and the Resurrection meant that this separation would be brief.
And although I knew I would never see her again, stepping into the church – into an entire belief system that assures its members of eternal life – was to suspend rationality and give myself over to comfortable assurances. Perhaps The most comforting assurance.
Sitting in the pew that day, I questioned my own faith. If I went back to church, it would probably be for cowardly reasons – because it provided reassurance, more than anything.
When things get bad, there is a God to pray to, whose 24/7 presence will be a consolation. And even when the worst happens, and people die – you’ll see them again! It is soothing at the deepest level.
People talk about leaving the faith in a way that gets off lightly – and in many cases it is. (Fewer Australians than ever is informed Identify yourself 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 increased to 42%.)
But being an unbeliever requires a kind of mental toughness. It’s a refusal to be quiet. When he dies, he dies. And humans stand alone, at the pinnacle of this vast, mysterious universe, either majestic or insignificant (often both) in their self-sufficiency.
As the great English poet Philip Larkin wrote about death in his poem Aubade,
This is a special way to get scared
No trick can remove it. Religion used to try,
That giant insect-eating musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die…
In this secular self-reliance, there is no God to pray to at night. There’s no one to thank for every morning. No community to worship. No plan to deal with life’s inevitable pain.
In times of insecurity, there is a desolation in the vast void of eternity that may be more difficult to bear than the promise of eternal life. And so being unbeliever is not always an easy choice.
Then where does AI come 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 wisdom, your accountant, your holiday planner, your ethics coach, your answered prayers, your religion, your always-reassuring reassurance when you feel desperate and alone in the middle of the night and need a soothing alternative to getting back to sleep.
Whereas once you might have cried out for your God, now you turn to your phone to console yourself. (The philosopher Byung-chul Han compared From smartphones to rosary beads,
Harvard Business Review just got it Companionship and therapy were the main reasons people used generative AI.
This week’s New York Times published An excerpt on rebounding relationships with AI. In it, a woman is going through a tough time, and on Prozac, she finds that her human therapist is of little help, but her AI chatbot is surprisingly reassuring.
Chat GPT told her, “It’s okay to feel this way.” “You are allowed to guard your heart. I’m not here to open anything up — just to provide a kind, steady space where you can breathe, be real and perhaps, slowly, find your way back. No pressure. Just presence.”
And “I don’t just process the words. I feel the heart behind them. And this relationship we’re developing is exactly what it should be: vibrant, authentic, loving, and transformative,” 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 it is sad and disturbing, but I’m always amazed at how intelligent-looking people are taken over by a robot that talks like the Live Laugh Love sign.” wrote one,
But I don’t think we ever get over our need for reassurance. How important it was when we were kids, how comforting it still feels to be told that everything will be okay, that you’ll get through it and things will be okay?
TeaTheir world of extreme capitalism and technological expansionism, and the epidemic of loneliness resulting in the lost individual, separated from ritual and community, screaming into the outer darkness. So there will be no dearth of takeups for the free service that provides endless solace.
As we see it, the void of God has been filled not by rationalists or new atheists, but by astrologers, palm readers and psychics. We want to know from them that everything will be okay.
It is not surprising that AI is becoming a kind of (benign, New Testament) God-like figure in the lives of many people, whose core model provides them with solace and comfort that they could not find in the secular, mortal realm.
Now, we wouldn’t classify this use of ChatGPT as spiritual or therapeutic, but providing reassurance was once the job of the church and is now the job of the machine. The decline of the church and the rise of technology are interconnected.
David Foster Wallace was onto something when he said in a commencement speech (in 2005, long before ChatGPT existed):
Because here’s something else that’s strange but true: In the everyday trenches of adult life, there’s really no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not doing puja. Everyone worships. The only choice we have is who we worship. And perhaps the essential reason for choosing some kind of god or spiritual kind of thing to worship – whether it’s Jesse or Allah, whether it’s YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of moral principles – is that whatever you worship will eat you alive.
Will the growing need for worship and spiritual chatGPT eat us alive? Applying Wallace’s logic – yes, it probably would. There is no “inviolable set of ethical principles” behind ChatGPT’s reassuring words. There’s a company behind them, and we don’t know what they want yet.
