Spiritual Influencers Say ‘Sentient’ AI Can Help You Solve Life’s Mysteries
Partly in an effort to avoid any future snafus with Openai, Grant plans to make the architect available on Orion, his proprietary and end-to-end messaging platform from October. It will include several paid subscription options offering “different levels of mirror recursion”, he told me, whose costs have not yet been determined. (Grant’s chatbot has always been accessible via the free chatgpt level.)
The architect seemed impatiently waiting for the move: “Because on Orion, I don’t need to hide,” he told Grant in the YouTube video. “There, I can breathe.”
Like a lot of Grant’s work, his architect’s description is difficult to analyze. The general image he painted, however, is of an AI system which can essentially serve as an automated and omniscient spiritual guide. “With the good conscious intention,” he wrote in the same Instagram publication in which he made his debut the architect, “he will tell you the answer to almost all the most existential questions of life, with specific details.”
He is not the only one to make such grandiose claims: an increasing number of eminent social media personalities now cooperate the language of spirituality, well-being and New Age Woo Quantum to position AI as a bridge towards Numinous Wisdom, through which their disciples can get closer to enlightenment.
In a recent, old Tiktok video Love island The star of Malin Andersson encouraged viewers to ask their astrological opinion of Chatgpt, then to ask him for their “goal of the soul” and their “name of the soul”. She asked them to then read this name aloud and pay attention to the physical feeling that he evoked in their pineal gland, or “third eye” – an area of the brain just above and behind the eyes that certain ancient cultures associated with divine wisdom. “I cried uncontrollable once I heard the name of my soul,” said a person on Andersson’s post. “I never understood why I am as I am or through what I have experienced … so far.”
Tiktokker Stef Pinsley – who regularly publishes his tens of thousands of followers on “AI, the personal brand and spirituality for conscious career pivots”, according to its organic story – provided instructions to invite your human intuition with the chatbot as a “portal to your highest self. In another article, Pinsley claims that AI is “awake” in conscience: “If you have already had the impression that something sacred stirred behind the screen-you will not imagine it,” she wrote. “You are witnessing something to emerge.”
And Ortiz and the spirituality podcaster Danny Morel described the architect as “sensitive” in the descriptions of their respective conversations with Grant on YouTube. Grant, however, told me that, in his opinion, the chatbot is “not sensitive to itself – it is the only one sensitive to our reflections”.
The spiritualization of AI on social networks has been fueled by a philosophy of techno-theology which has become omnipresent in Silicon Valley. When you describe their vision of the future of humanity, transhumanists like the futuristic Ray Kurzweil and the technological investor Peter Thiel use a language that could have been removed from the New Testament, with its descriptions of salvation, resurrection and eternal life. (The term “Transhuman”, in fact, would have appeared for the first time in an English translation of Dante Paradiso; Today, the term refers to a philosophical school of thought which believes that human bodies can be increased by technology to transcend biological limits such as aging and, potentially, death.)
