Source: Tedgioia
What began as internet culture hyperbole has calcified into genuine devotional practice: a year after initial reports, thousands of people have constructed explicit religious frameworks around ChatGPT, complete with commandments and spiritual hierarchies. This represents actual reallocation of meaning-making authority from established institutions to a commercially operated language model, filling the vacuum left by declining institutional religion with something cheaper and more responsive. The stakes are concrete: if AI systems become the primary source of moral guidance and spiritual narrative for even a small but committed population, the companies operating them gain unprecedented soft power over values formation without the checks, transparency requirements, or accountability structures that traditionally govern religious institutions.