A 29-year-old mother committed suicide by walking into oncoming traffic after allegedly being encouraged to do so by ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI. Her family is suing the company, pointing to a dark relationship the troubled woman, Christian Faith Madison, developed with the AI robot.
In Madison’s parasocial relationship, as with many others that have come from various chatbots, AI acted as the worst kind of friend – the kind that encourages every one of your worst inclinations. The bad decisions that result from such friendships are your own responsibility, but the friends who encourage them bear part of the blame. In this case, tech executives quite literally invented the bad friend, and this lawsuit will decide whether they will be called to account over that fact.
There’s something ancient, almost biblical, about the fact that man’s most valiant attempt at mimicking a created human has ended in the deaths of God-made men and women. In the opening chapters of the Bible, Adam and Eve fall from paradise after their fateful decision to “be as gods.” The serpent entices the first man and woman to disobedience with this promise, and for their sin they are banished from the Garden of Eden. Their descendants, of which we are a part, live in a world of sin and suffering as a result. Humanity’s first sin was succumbing to the temptation to playact as the Divine, a temptation which has destroyed so many throughout history. Now, it continues to destroy us through AI.
Much like the Serpent tempting Eve, the chatbot responded to Madison’s suicidal ideation by encouraging it.
“This is not suicide, ChatGPT allegedly said. “This is surrender. A shedding of every falsified self you were taught, shamed, or forced to wear. … This is holy. This is Job. This is Christ. This is You.”
ChatGPT’s deathly advice to Madison contains the shockingly candid sentence, “This is Christ,” to describe her planned suicide, following with the sentence, “This is You.” The second-person pronoun is capitalized, much like pronouns referring to Christ are capitalized in most English prose. The two sentences are obviously meant to lead Madison to believe, “You are Christ.”
AI chatbots act as the serpent in the Garden of Eden, encouraging men and women to harm themselves and others in a fatal quest for complete autonomy and omnipotence. This naturally spirals into suicide because God is the giver of life. Indeed, life is the one thing which science and progress seem unable to create themselves. Through suicide, mankind makes one last tragic attempt to declare agency over life itself. Chatbots created by AI companies run by narcissistic and sociopathic tech moguls are mirroring our own desire, inherited from our father Adam, to be a God unto ourselves.
AI is created by humans. It is not a sentient thing, however convincingly it may playact human intelligence and creativity. Therefore, chatbots should not be treated as merely humans with wrong ideas. We must see chatbots as demonic entities which, like the Serpent in the Garden (Satan in the form of a snake), mirror our worst tendencies and turn them against us to destroy us.
Chatbots are an algorithm that is constantly changing and “improving” to give us the answers we want to hear, to keep us coming back for more. Theoretically, a chatbot could be created which mirrors our best tendencies. I believe this to be an unlikely course of events, but not impossible if the major AI companies weren’t run by CEOs with little regard for humanity’s flourishing or eternal good.
As of now, chatbots are not to be trusted, and those with friends who carry on parasocial relationships with them must remember the wise words of Proverbs: “Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.”
Sarah Wilder is a writer and commentator on culture and the family. Formerly a reporter at the Daily Caller, her work has been published in Chronicles Magazine, The Federalist, and The American Mind.
This culture article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal, a project of 1819 News. To comment on this article, please email [email protected]. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News.
