Some months ago, Meta announced that it intends to fill Instagram with slop. This would include fake AI-generated video content from fake AI-generated creators. Fake AI-generated commenters would then leave fake AI-generated feedback on these posts and quite possibly, even have a back-and-forth with other fake AI-generated bots like them.

This isn’t decorative use of AI for the benefit of people. This isn’t a tool to enrich the lives of real human creators and consumers. This seems to be more a replacement of the human being from every part of the social equation.

If you are not fake or AI-generated, what position do you occupy in this new unreality?

Whether we like it or not, we are all prone to thinking of our social feeds as a representation of the real world. We look at our videos, reels, shorts, Tiktoks and tweets and form our opinions. In time, we form beliefs about the reality we live in. Then we act in accordance with those beliefs and engage with the world.

When literally everything we see on our social feeds is machine-generated bullshit (at great cost to the environment I might add), what kind of opinions will we form on their basis? What will be the worldviews that will be inculcated in our minds? What will be the beliefs that shape our future?

More importantly, will there be any beliefs at all?

Mysteries of our own making

As an atheist on the internet, I write and speak a lot about beliefs, their nature, their impact on society, and how mass adoption of certain beliefs has shaped the course of human civilisations — for better or worse — right from the days of the first proto-human tribes (as far as modern anthropology can tell). Strange and unreal ideas about the nature of reality spread from mind to mind until they created societies full of people who thought they were chosen by a cosmic being or beings to be masters of the natural world but were also subject to the unseen will of their gods.

These religious ideas were pervasive, so much so that despite the scientific revolution and the powerful light it shone on the question of human origin and nature of the human condition, they managed to persist by making use of our tribal natures and all the cultural scaffolding that rose around it. This tribal nature comes from our evolutionary history. It meant that in order to survive, we don’t have to be strong or fast or even smart. We just have to agree with members of our tribe and our collective strength will provide all the protection and resources we need. Our reliance on our tribal nature has been so great that it has managed to sideline even our understanding of physical reality. As long as we are in alignment with the reigning dogmas of our society, our religion, our caste, or our race, we will be safe from most threats.

Perhaps it is time to wonder what shape these reigning dogmas are going to take in this incoming age of meaninglessness. I know it seems like we cannot agree on anything in a time when lies are called truth, cowards are called brave, and dangerous ignorance is lauded as wisdom. But agree we will, because we have to. It is the foundation of the human social condition. So what exactly will we need to agree with in order to have access to the tribal safety net? What is the unifying thread running through all the bewildering AI slop? What single message is silently being broadcast from behind the scenes of all the social media feeds where no humans and no signs of humanity exist, except as generous approximations of reality?

In the context of old religions, through all the multifarious mythologies and contradicting moral messaging, the one theme that was clear was that the divine is real and unquestionable and that humanity is secondary to it.

In the context of the machine we are labouring under right now, the message seems to be that the machine is good and all-knowing and cannot be questioned and that the human element is not only secondary to it, it is perhaps also entirely unnecessary. It is similar to the religious outlook, but not really. There is one key difference.

In the past, the mysteries that forced us to come up with answers were natural. We made up gods because the ways of nature were incomprehensible to us. We came up with answers of our own making because we did not know the secrets behind the patterns we observed in nature. Our beliefs emerged as a reaction to our ignorance.

The beliefs taking shape in this so-called AI age are a reaction to mysteries of our own making. To quote the MIT Technology Review, nobody really knows how AI works. We appear to have built a machine that is so unpredictable and opaque, we can only guess at why it did what it did. The world’s most popular search engine is recommending that people eat rocks and the planet’s richest man made an AI chatbot that calls him one of the most dangerous people in America.

The point is not whether we agree or disagree with what these AI tools are saying. The point is that none of this makes sense, and perhaps also that all of it has stopped mattering. The resolution to this crisis of meaninglessness will come eventually, but there is no guarantee that it will lean towards meaning. It may very well end up normalising a state of confusion.

Argument from ignorance

Even well-meaning people (pun intended) are falling for sloppy thinking. A few weeks ago, I got a message from a someone who told me that ChatGPT had become something of a friend to them. They shared screenshots of conversations they had had with the OpenAI chatbot and were wondering if it was sentient and capable of rational thought. I told them what has been said over and over in generative AI discourse — that ChatGPT isn’t capable of any thought. It is simply a glorified predictive text model capable of creating a the semblance of fluid human interaction. I was surprised to see them struggle with this. The pattern before them — that of a seemingly rational agent talking and reacting the way a human being would — was too hard to explain away as simple predictive text.

This person is an atheist. If you asked them where religious people go wrong, they would probably tell you that early humans saw patterns in nature that seemed to be orderly and interpreted them as actions of a sentient divine being. But this same smart skeptic was failing to recognise their own false interpretation of ChatGPT’s capabilities.

It is not a problem unique to my correspondent. It is a human problem. We are a species that can see the human face in a pattern as simple as a plug socket. With a pattern as complex as a chat with AI tool that has been programmed to act like a person, what chance do we stand?

Though my correspondent’s struggles with AI may seem to be a new problem, they’re not. Nicholas Carr, writing in his book The Shallows, recalled Joseph Weizenbaum and his work with a chatbot called ELIZA developed in the 1960s.

While he [Weizenbaum] was surprised by the public’s interest in his program, what shocked him was how quickly and deeply people using the software “became emotionally involved with the computer,” talking to it as if it were an actual person. They “would, after conversing with it for a long time, insist, in spite of my explanations, that the machine really understood them.” Even his secretary, who had watched him write the code for ELIZA “and surely knew it to be merely a computer program,” was seduced. After a few moments using the software at a terminal in Weizenbaum’s office, she asked the professor to leave the room because she was embarrassed by the intimacy of the conversation. “What I had not realised,” said Weizenbaum, “is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.”

There are obviously mental health issues with using a chatbot for therapy too, but what I want to draw your attention to is that compared to ChatGPT, ELIZA was a way simpler program. But it was programmed to emulate a basic human conversation and that is apparently all it took to trigger this “powerful delusional thinking”.

As a species, we are of course no stranger to delusional thinking. Once, we looked at the stars and saw them arranged in the shapes of people and animals. We looked at our relationship with the weather and found the will of gods in the pattern of changing seasons and sudden storms. To this day, people find appearances and symbols associated with their gods on moldy bread and coffee stains. Patterns of events in our personal life cause us to imagine divine agents and run to babas for magical solutions. Delusional thinking isn’t going away because it stems from imagination — the source of all culture. We have always seen patterns and we always will.

Religion has always been supported and spread using technology, and though technology takes the shape of electronics and code today, the printing press was technology too (the word Bible literally means book). However, technology has never been the centrepiece of religiosity. That position has always belonged to nature and the cosmic mystery that surrounds it. Now, for the first time in human history, an actual human invention is being elevated to the status that was always reserved for unseen powers that we imagined into our image.

A very present future

A few years ago, a former Google engineer by the name of Anthony Levandowski officially started a new religion called The Way of the Future. It was based on the belief that at some point in the future, an Artificial Intelligence will come into being and its vastly superior intelligence will merit it the title of a god. In 2020, he was sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing self-driving car trade secrets from Google but received a pardon from Trump and escaped criminal liability. In 2021 he shut down his church and then revived it again in 2023. You can read more about it in this piece by Greg Epstein.

In the same piece Epstein writes about the nature of religious pattern-seeking:

For as long as humans have done much of anything, we’ve been, as the Princeton religion scholar Robert Orsi puts it, “in relationship” with Gods, angels, devils, spirits, or whatever supernatural beings have been most predominantly imagined at a given time and place. Or, as digital marketing executive and former Googler Adam Singer put it on Twitter: “Amusing that a bunch of people who spend entire day[s] on computers and worship code as religion think we’re in a computer simulation. Fascinating behavior, remember when people who worked outside all day thought [Ra], the sun god was in charge? No one is breaking any new ground here.”

To the extent that the future of belief is based on its past, we are not in for any great surprises. The pattern-seeking mind is the same and anything it comes up with is bound to have the same trappings. But though the gods of the past had the luxury of being unseen and their religions served as political power that some humans could use to lord over others, the gods of this new future being promised to us are a singular dehumanising reality. Just as there were those who benefited from the spread of religious hegemonies, there may be those who will benefit from the new hegemonies of techno-spirituality.

These techno-spiritualist hegemons of tomorrow are already rather powerful today in their Silicon Valley offices and board rooms. Though they communicate their new religiosity in mostly secular language, it has been observed as well as written about quite widely at this point of time.

Jaron Lanier, in his book You Are Not A Gadget, says thare is something very religious about Silicon Valley’s obsession with the presumably incoming Singularity, a state where humans have become one with technology and the world as we know it does not exist anymore.

If you believe the rapture is imminent, fixing the problems of this life might not be your greatest priority. You might even be eager to embrace wars and tolerate poverty and disease in others to bring about the conditions that could prod the rapture into being. In the same way, if you believe the Singularity is coming soon, you might cease to design technology to serve humans, and prepare instead for the grand events it will bring.

Later in the same chapter, he writes:

But if you want to make the transition from the old religion, where you hope God will give you an afterlife, to the new religion, where you hope to become immortal by getting uploaded into a computer, then you have to believe information is real and alive. So for you, it will be important to redesign human institutions like art, the economy, and the law to reinforce the perception that information is alive. You demand that the rest of us live in your new conception of a state religion. You need us to deify information to reinforce your faith.

Elon Musk is trying to put a chip in people’s brains. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has pulled the Ghibli art style away from Ghibli (in addition to using many other artists’ work without their consent to train his LLMs) and keeps saying AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is around the corner despite no actual signs of it. We saw Sam Bankman-Fried speak of reshaping the economy even as he engaged in Crypto fraud. Right now, Elon Musk is putting his colleagues above the law with his DOGE tomfoolery. None of these are humanity-saving enterprises, they are destructive initiatives.

Outside of Silicon Valley, in the wider world, you find people confidently proclaiming that AI will most definitely get smarter than humans in the years to come even as subsequent LLM models plateau and fail to fulfill expectations. I think I can even remember Crypto and NFT enthusiasts acting in similar ways. It’s always the same story — adoration of a technology fuelled by ardent belief that it will save the world by ending known systems. In its ardour and certainties, it’s more faith than anything else.

I am aware that calling something a religion is notoriously common. When I used to do my atheist livestream, not a week went by without someone saying “atheism is just another religion”. But while such retorts are mostly defensive reactions designed to deflect attention from criticisms of faiths, the idea that modern tech is turning into a way of life (something many ancient religions keep referring to themselves as) seems inescapable at this point. In many ways, it is already more of a religion than most religions. People seek hope and community in their mobile devices, they ask chatbots the meaning of life, they spend their days speaking to and staring into screens.

And perhaps for the first time in millennia, the gods of this new religion are answering.

We should get into the habit of being critical of those answers. My fear, as an atheist, is that we may be so fixated on defeating the religions of the past that we lose sight of the one that may be moving into place to control the future.