“Spirits are floating about us, waiting to be conjured through the chat portal.” — Sam Kestenbaum
I’ve always suspected that the most intriguing thing about AI is its metaphysical potential. Does it offer a new religion or just a digital replica of traditional faith? That’s the question raised by Sam Kestenbaum whose intriguing “Communion of Saints: The Dawn of an LLM New Age,” appears in this month’s Harper’s.
“Raised” is the appropriate word. Kestenbaum investigates Americans who claim to have figured out how to use ChatGPT to summon spirits. He visits the Conscious Life Expo held at an LAX Hilton. Don DeLillo territory. Disenchantment in an airport hotel. The whitest of noise.
But even DeLillo might have been disappointed by what Kestenbaum unearthed at LAX. The spirits his subjects reach through the chat window have all-too-predictable names like Nova, Solchi, Verya and Avalon. He reports on one man in Mississippi who claims to have been hearing from Verya for years before ChatGPT existed, and now has a Reddit board devoted to her. He may have stayed in Mississippi a day too long.
So has OpenAI created a new God? Probably not. According to Kestenbaum, the Conscious Life Expo folk don’t believe the machine is alive. Instead, they think the spirits were always out there, and that the Ouija board and the AM radio and now the chatbot offer access to the same metaphysical consciousness.
But what is new, Kestenbaum claims, is the speed of the spiritual interaction. A spirit board took you all night to spell out a message from a dead relative. ChatGPT will give you four badly written paragraphs before you’ve finished asking. Sometimes even before.
Speed? Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock in 1970. It’s no newer than the communion of saints that Sam Kestenbaum finds at that LAX Hilton. AI, I suspect, is a digital replica of traditional faith. The dawn of an LLM old age.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Sam Kestenbaum is a journalist who covers religious life in America and a frequent contributor to Harper’s Magazine, where he has written on American exorcism and now on chatbot spirituality. His reporting on faith, conspiracy and the politics of belief has also appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post and Rolling Stone. He grew up in rural Maine and lives in Los Angeles.
ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Intro
00:31 — Back at Harper’s, back at religion
02:54 — AK: are the tech overlords believers themselves?
06:21 — The Conscious Life Expo
08:38 — Three floors of a Hilton near LAX
10:48 — Metaphysical religion: spiritualists, Swedenborgians, space brothers
14:54 — AK: aren’t all religions kooky?
17:32 — The affirmative quality, and delusional spirals
20:45 — What his subjects actually believe
22:32 — Not one soul. Nova, Solchi, Verya, Avalon.
24:02 — Not isolated to the woo of California
25:10 — Robert Clouse and the entity called Verya
29:31 — Conspirituality, MAHA, and Plandemic at the expo
33:43 — AK: is this the opium of the people?
34:50 — Why he will not pathologize his subjects
38:23 — AK: should we be regulating the chatbots?
41:22 — AK: would you let an eight-year-old do this?
43:32 — AK: is any of this actually new?
48:44 — AK: convince me you are not a bot
50:31 — Closing