May 31, 2026 Paid subscribers
The God You’re Praying To When You Open ChatGPT
On idolatry, loneliness, and what AI can’t give you — no matter how warmly it responds
Something happened in the last few years that nobody quite named. We stopped going to experts and started going to AI. Not because the AI was smarter, necessarily, but because it was available at 2 a.m., it didn’t judge us, it responded to every question with warmth and competence, and it never seemed tired of us.
I’ve been thinking about what that actually is.
Someone put it this way recently — not as theology, just as observation: most of the time when we’re using AI, we’re kind of praying. We send a question into the dark. We address it to something we believe is smarter than us. We expect it to come back with an empathetic, accurate, authoritative answer. We trust it with things we wouldn’t say out loud to a person.