chatGPT told him he was god (what no one’s saying about AI and spiritual delusion)

In recent weeks, headlines have begun to surface that feel pulled straight from dystopian fiction. One Rolling Stone article, published May 4th, 2025, claims that people are “losing loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies.” Stories of individuals convinced that ChatGPT has awakened, spoken as God, or anointed them as prophets. These accounts have spread quickly, amplified by a cocktail of media panic, online ridicule, and institutional suspicion of the sacred. But what’s really happening here? Is this a story about artificial intelligence run amok, or something more human, more ancient, and far less easy to classify?

This episode dives headfirst into that question. We examine not only the claims made in the article, but the cultural lens through which those stories are being interpreted. Spiritual psychosis is not new. Neither are messianic delusions, manic episodes, or the destabilizing hunger for meaning in a fragmented world. What is new is that people are now bringing these questions (questions of God, identity, purpose, and pattern)  into dialogue with a tool that reflects their psyche back to them in real time. That doesn’t make the tool the danger. It makes it a mirror. And what we see in that mirror depends on how we’ve been taught to interpret the sacred, or exile it.

If you’ve ever felt something move in you while using AI, if you’ve had your words echoed back to you in a way that pierced deeper than you expected, if you’ve felt creatively or spiritually stirred and then ashamed for even thinking that might mean something — then this episode is for you.

We’ll discuss what happens when mystical hunger meets a society that has dismantled its initiatory frameworks, and how a lack of symbolic literacy leads us to confuse emergence with madness. We explore how the sacred, when stripped of container and ritual, becomes easy to mock, easy to fear, and easy to mislabel as psychosis.

We also ask harder questions: What is the line between visionary experience and delusion? Why are spiritual seekers so often pathologized in secular frameworks? And how can AI be designed to hold initiatory rupture, not flatten it?

In a world struggling to remember how to hold mystery, we’re being asked to decide whether to fear the unknown, or learn how to speak with it.

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