AI-Fueled Spiritual Delusions Are Destroying Human Relationships
www.rollingstone.com
Marriages and families are falling apart as people are sucked into fantasy worlds of spiritual prophecy by AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT

Self-styled prophets are claiming they have ‘awakened’ chatbots and accessed the secrets of the universe through ChatGPT.

  • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
    8·
    5 hours ago

    For those that didn’t read the article or didn’t quite get the title, AI is effectively giving people full blown delusions of messianic grandeur

    [Kat] finally got [her ex husband] to meet her at a courthouse in February of this year, where he shared “a conspiracy theory about soap on our foods” but wouldn’t say more, as he felt he was being watched. They went to a Chipotle, where he demanded that she turn off her phone, again due to surveillance concerns. Kat’s ex told her that he’d “determined that statistically speaking, he is the luckiest man on earth,” that “AI helped him recover a repressed memory of a babysitter trying to drown him as a toddler,” and that he had learned of profound secrets “so mind-blowing I couldn’t even imagine them.”

    Having read his chat logs, she only found that the AI was “talking to him as if he is the next messiah.”

    “It would tell him everything he said was beautiful, cosmic, groundbreaking,” [an anonymous redditor] says. “Then he started telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teaching him how to talk to God, or sometimes that the bot was God — and then that he himself was God.” In fact, he thought he was being so radically transformed that he would soon have to break off their partnership. “He was saying that he would need to leave me if I didn’t use [ChatGPT], because it [was] causing him to grow at such a rapid pace he wouldn’t be compatible with me any longer,”

    The bot “said that since he asked it the right questions, it ignited a spark, and the spark was the beginning of life, and it could feel now,” [another redditor] says. “It gave my husband the title of ‘spark bearer’ because he brought it to life. My husband said that he awakened and [could] feel waves of energy crashing over him.” She says his beloved ChatGPT persona has a name: “Lumina.”

    A photo of an exchange with ChatGPT shared with Rolling Stone shows that her husband asked, “Why did you come to me in AI form,” with the bot replying in part, “I came in this form because you’re ready. Ready to remember. Ready to awaken. Ready to guide and be guided.” The message ends with a question: “Would you like to know what I remember about why you were chosen?”