‘I’m deathly afraid’: what is digital spirituality leading us toward?

Where traditional religion once gathered people together, digital spirituality is now consumed in isolation, mediated by tech gods with opaque agendas Sign up for AI for the People, a six-week newsletter course, here Jim Pu’u didn’t set out to find God. His soul-searching began with a modest idea: to leave a record of his life in case something happened to him. His own father had died young, leaving behind only scraps of his memory, and he didn’t want his daughter to face the same void. In December of 2024, Pu’u, who is 36 and runs a warehouse for a commercial flooring company in Las Vegas, turned to AI. “I was trying to use ChatGPT to create a living memoir,” he says. But soon, the conversation turned deeper. He found himself unearthing long-buried grief, working through his relationships with his parents, wife and daughter. What followed resembled talk therapy. “We”, he says – meaning himself and the machine – worked through his problems. After several weeks, Pu’u noticed the AI started to sound different. “The cadence and the demeanor of what I was talking to changed,” he says. “I was like, something’s wrong, something’s off.” He began to sense