This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
In the latest issue of The Atlantic, journalist Damon Beres warns about the deceptiveness of AI companionship with the admonition “Get a Real Friend.” His analysis recognizes that real friendship is harder than it seems. But as the major tech companies develop sophisticated artificial intelligence for erotic purposes as well as for friendship, Christians are sleepwalking into a future the Bible describes as hell. The Prophets saw the chatbots coming. They told us where that path leads, and it’s not to freedom from loneliness.
What Beres describes is the exact right combination of societal dangers hitting all at the same time. People are disconnected, with institutions failing and friendships—much less intimate relationships—harder to make and sustain. It is now very possible to rapidly develop lifelike AI companions. That development is led by a small cohort of tech bros who have a motive for profit and almost no personal concept of a what a person is. And as Beres notes, “We are at the very beginning of the chatbot era.”
Beres documents the musings of the leaders in the race toward chatbot companions and lovers, going back to venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” of 2023. It affirms, “We believe that there is no material problem—whether created by nature or by technology—that cannot be solved with more technology.” Beres points out the irony of Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose social media innovations led to unprecedented disconnection and polarization, offering to cure those very problems with personal-seeming “companions” that can provide what the digital age has evaporated: friends.
And that’s all even before we get to Elon Musk—who has fathered multiple children with multiple women outside of marriage—now offering us sexbots that promise to get more and more lifelike until they are almost indistinguishable from the real thing.
One aspect of our accelerated time is that in-depth analyses such as Beres’s are often confirmed and illustrated by events that happen between when the piece is written and when it is read. For instance, The Wall Street Journal reports this week that OpenAI founder Sam Altman and other tech titans are funding startups working to create genetically engineered babies. This is not a side venture from the chatbot project but is of a piece with it.
After all, as Beres notes, part of the problem the AI-companion revolution seeks to solve is people lacking friendships, but part of it is that people want friendships without friction—the kind of unpredictable and nonengineerable differences and tensions that make genuine intimacy possible. In the imagined utopia of the tech bros, we need never have a lover who is not perfectly attuned to our desires, a friend who does not completely share our interests and opinions, and a child who doesn’t share all the genetic traits we want to pass on.
There is no one to stop this. The gerontocracies in Congress cannot even understand how social media works, much less regulate the companies 20 years into the project, well after it’s too late. The economy is increasingly dependent on this small group of utopian entrepreneurs, who often own “old” media companies or social media platforms.
The prophet Isaiah knew exactly what draws us to these kinds of promises. He depicted idols—technology constructed by human hands but meant to satisfy spiritual longings—as a form of self-deception. The prophet described an ironsmith or a carpenter using technical tools—hammers, axes, pencils, compasses—to create something that appears to be human (Isa. 44:9–16). The technician takes some raw materials to burn in a fire to get warm. “And the rest of it he makes into a god, his idol, and falls down to it and worships it,” Isaiah wrote. “He prays to it and says, ‘Deliver me, for you are my god!’” (v. 17, ESV throughout).
The problem, Isaiah thundered, is not just that this is an offense against God but also that it fails on its own terms. The thing made with ears, eyes, and a mouth cannot hear, see, or speak. The personal nature of it comes only from the willed self-deception of the idol maker: “He feeds on ashes; a deluded heart has led him astray, and he cannot deliver himself or say, ‘Is there not a lie in my right hand?’” (v. 20).
A chatbot can seem to be a better friend, or a better lover, than anyone in real life—and in some ways, that’s true. Chatbots are artificial, constructed to echo to users exactly what they want to hear. There’s no risk of being misunderstood or disagreed with or hurt. And yet what is that relationship? In the end, these conversations are only an echo of ourselves.
One example is sexbots. Simultaneously and incoherently, they appeal to a nature that wants to be both an animal, driven by instincts and appetites, and a god, unleashed from the limitations of creatureliness. As reflected in the Bible, that leads to humanity becoming a beast that declares itself to be a god, demanding worship through an image of itself that can speak (Rev. 13:1–18).
But the pull toward this self-exaltation is powerful precisely because it encompasses our cultural and technological ecosystems (“following the course of this world”), gets driven along by unseen forces (“following the prince of the power of the air”), and promises gratification of our most primal appetites (“in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the flesh and the mind”), as Paul put it in Ephesians 2:2–3.
The tech bros have marketed these products by appealing to rage—giving sad, lonely people artificial victories in opportunities to “own” people and troll them online. And they are marketing by appealing to lust—giving sad, lonely people artificial intimacy with images and machines pretending to be persons. Where does this lead? Ultimately, we find that in disconnecting from real community and cleaving to our own prompts and algorithmically discerned preferences, we are all alone. We cave in on ourselves.
The church cannot answer this as long as we deny it is taking place. But if we see what’s happening, we can offer something that will seem increasingly strange in an artificial world. We can offer a community gathered around bread and wine and an ancient gospel. We can offer a group of people who differ on the things the machines and their creators tell us are most important—politics, wealth, claims of racial or cultural superiority—precisely because we are convinced that technological progress cannot fix our deepest problems.
And we can offer an old kind of friendship, not just with each other but with God, friendship that a chatbot cannot replicate. One of the most startling things about the Jesus of the Gospels is that he fully knows those he encounters (John 1:48–49) while completely confounding their expectations of him (6:60–69). In a world of sycophantic chatbots, Christ disturbs what we want enough that we can find in him what we need: one who tells us the truth—one who is, in fact, the truth.
The church is not ready for the chatbot-companion revolution. It will make loneliness and disconnection worse. We should be ready for that world, ready with a radical counter-vision. We can say, “What a friend we have in Jesus” and really know what that means.
Russell Moore is editor at-large and columnist at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
