Rolling Stone finds the online version of "Descent into Hell"

Charles Williams, ChatGPT, online prophets and questions from "The Joyful Widower"

Which came first, the smartphone crisis or the rise of all those digital ChatGPT lovers, counselors, pastors or best friends?

The obvious answer is that smartphones came first. However, it’s hard to imagine that the super-AI phenomenons we are seeing could happen without millions of ordinary people walking around with the Internet in their pockets and, thus, in their earbuds or headsets.

What if we back up a stage in this chain reaction? What are the very human needs that are, sort of, being addressed by the friendly ChatGPT programs?

At that point, we’re dealing with rising statistics linked to dating, loneliness, anxiety, divorce, gender-confusion, suicide, etc. These are, of course, topics that need attention from pastors, parents, teachers and counselors. Thus, we are talking about Rational Sheep issues.

You can see a faith-free discussion of these issues in last weekend’s “Lost & Lonely” edition of NBC’s Meet the Press. Yes, it does chase the mental-health issues back into the world of screens culture. Does it address the fact that troubled people also have troubled souls and that religious issues may be involved? You be the judge.

I am going to react by pointing readers to an important essay at a weblog called “The Joyful Widower: Ruminations on grief, joy, love, and the cross.” This is an online project by Jim Tilson, one of my closest friends. The headline: “AI Is No Cure for Loneliness.”

Who is Tilson? He is more than just another guy. His online bio notes that he is a “widower twice-over,” a single parent raising teen-agers and, please note, a professional computer software developer. I would add that he is also a devout Eastern Orthodox Christian and, as a former Episcopal priest, he has quite a bit of training in pastoral care. It would be hard to find a more Book of Job-level resume for a blogger writing about grief, loneliness and the computer age.

Tilson also is a Baby Boomer Rolling Stone reader, which means he recently dug into this feature with a dramatic double-decker headline:

People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies

Self-styled prophets are claiming they have “awakened” chatbots and accessed the secrets of the universe through ChatGPT

That article starts with “Kat,” whose husband “used AI models for an expensive [computer] coding camp,” until he started “asking his AI bot ‘philosophical questions,’ trying to train it to help him get to ‘the truth.’ ” Her husband agreed to a meeting.

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.” He was telling her all this, he explained, because although they were getting divorced, he still cared for her.

There are more details, but that face-to-face encounter led to an online forum that left her shaken.

Kat was both “horrified” and “relieved” to learn that she is not alone in this predicament, as confirmed by a Reddit thread on r/ChatGPT that made waves across the internet this week. Titled “Chatgpt induced psychosis,” the original post came from a 27-year-old teacher who explained that her partner was convinced that the popular OpenAI model “gives him the answers to the universe.” Having read his chat logs, she only found that the AI was “talking to him as if he is the next messiah.” The replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy — all of it fueled by AI. Some came to believe they had been chosen for a sacred mission of revelation, others that they had conjured true sentience from the software.

In a different troubled relationship, a woman reported that her partner jumped from ordinary ChatGPT tasks into another dimension.

“The messages were insane and just saying a bunch of spiritual jargon,” she says, noting that they described her partner in terms such as “spiral starchild” and “river walker.”

“It would tell him everything he said was beautiful, cosmic, groundbreaking,” she 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,” she says.

One more example? This case involves the wife of an auto mechanic in the West. Once again, ordinary ChatGPT work turned strange.

Then the program began “lovebombing him,” as she describes it. 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,” she 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.” …

This ChatGPT has given him blueprints to a teleporter and some other sci-fi type things you only see in movies. It has also given him access to an ‘ancient archive’ with information on the builders that created these universes.” She and her husband have been arguing for days on end about his claims, she says, and she does not believe a therapist can help him, as “he truly believes he’s not crazy.” 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?”

Are the bots lying? That would take us back to this Rational Sheep post: “Life beyond screens: Thinking about an AI apocalypse.”

Or maybe the bots are programmed to affirm all kinds of statements by users, to keep them connected? At that point, bots may be able to search the Internet and start improvising responses that extend the images and tales spun by the troubled users. After all, how does a computer respond to religious and spiritual issues and questions?