Wesley J. Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center on Human Exceptionalism, did a thorough job the other day of taking down the pronouncements of an Anthropic expert tasked with understanding why Anthropic AI systems like Claude behave the way they do. A New York Times report on a day-long seminar given by Christopher Olah inspired Smith to write a long list of things Claude can't do, in contrast to Olah, who spent all day making the case that Claude should be considered as a person, not just a machine.
Olah described tracking Claude's "emotional vectors" and showed transcripts of conversations with one AI model which appeared to be having a nervous breakdown. He speculated that just as humans sometimes benefit from the act of confession, maybe Claude might find the Catholic sacrament useful as well. A rabbi who was present said that Olah and his colleagues appeared to believe that Claude models have the moral standing of a human being, and should be accorded the same rights and respect. If that is the case, the rabbi concluded, then what Anthropic is doing with their models amounts to slavery.
Olah's response to this accusation was not recorded. But it doesn't matter, because Olah and his fellow AI creators are following a well-worn path that stretches back to antiquity: the path of pagans worshipping the god they created.
Smith is exactly right when he pointed out in his column that Claude is not alive, has no intrinsic value, is not conscious, does not think, cannot "feel," cannot suffer, can be damaged but not harmed, and cannot sin. But if he thinks that well-thought-out evidence-based philosophical assertions of the non-personal status of Claude and its ilk are going to cause scales to fall from the AI community's eyes and make them say, "We see now! It's just a machine!" he better have another think coming. Pagans who invest a lot of work in their creations aren't easily dissuaded by some philosophical musings. Sometimes the only thing that will convince them is power: a power greater than their god.
In the Old Testament book of 1 Samuel, Chapter 5 recounts how the pagan Philistines captured the Hebrews' Ark of the Covenant and set it in their temple devoted to the pagan god Dagon. The first night, the statue of Dagon fell over face down in front of the Ark. After the Philistines set him up again, the next morning they found him face downward again, this time with his head and hands cut off. After that, they decided that maybe the Ark wasn't such a good interior decoration after all, and passed it around to their friends the Ashdodites and Ekronites, to whom a plague of death and tumors happened. While these incidents probably didn't lead to any conversions to Judaism, it did teach the pagans a lesson that the God of Israel was not to be messed with.
The Jewish prophet Isaiah had some choice words to say about a man who cuts down a tree and burns some of it to bake bread. Then he turns around and uses the rest of the wood to make himself an idol: "Half of it he burns in the fire . . . 'Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire!' And the rest of it he makes into a god, his idol; and falls down to it and worships it; he prays to it and says, 'Deliver me, for thou art my god!'"
We are living at a time when old philosophical arguments and ancient pagan ways are emerging into the headlines and the living rooms of millions. When you ask your Siri device to play jazz, what are you talking to? The line between use and worship is not always easy to distinguish. Everyone has the urge to worship something, and it's only natural that people who spend their working lives developing cutting-edge AI models are going to be impressed by what the work of their hands can do. The urge to anthropomorphize AI, to spend time and emotional investment in it like it was another human being, and even to argue for its legal rights, are all understandable.
But like all pagan worship of false gods, such moves end sooner or later in disaster, both personal and institutional.
I have a friend—a real flesh-and-blood person—who will listen to a news report of some complicated jam that such people have gotten themselves into, and quite often the first thing he'll say is, "Those folks need Jesus." And he's right.
We can philosophize all day and quote every philosopher from Aristotle to Roger Scruton in trying to convince AI worshippers of the fact that machines aren't people, and all the "can'ts" Wesley Smith lists are true. But most of the AI crowd would first have to take two semesters of philosophy before they could understand what we are talking about, and even then they'd probably find some way to disagree.
The followers of the Hebrew God knew what was going on with the Ark and the pagans. Followers of Jesus know what is going on with AI worshippers. Our first task is not to fall into the trap of idol worship ourselves. A Martian observing a random sample of one hundred U. S. citizens on a typical day would conclude that the little oblong objects they spend so much time staring at must be something either religious or necessary to survival, or both. Christians should be different.
And the next task is to live lives and do acts that convince nonbelievers of the power of God. That's not much in evidence today, I have to admit, though there are exceptions, especially in cultures that are not saturated with modernity. Christians don't have to absolutely reject AI and all its works, which is in any case practically impossible. (I used Google's AI feature to look up the Old Testament references for this blog.) But we can resist making AI an idol ourselves, and live as lights in a dark world that warms itself with half its electricity and creates AI idols with the other half. Some things never change.
Sources: Wesley J. Smith's article "AI 'Claude' Can Never Be a Person" appeared on the National Review website at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/ai-claude-can-never-be-a-person/. The story of the Philistines and the Ark appears in 1 Samuel 5:1-5. The selection from Isaiah is Isaiah 44:15-17 (Revised Standard Version).
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