Four years before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. stepped onto a stage in Oslo and named a contradiction. His lecture upon accepting the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, “The Quest for Peace and Justice,” didn’t start with the wounds of racism or a promise of non–violence. Rather, King observed that modern societies are surrounded by “a dazzling picture” of technological achievement: rockets, skyscrapers, airplanes, even “machines that think.” Then King pivoted, saying: 

This was a metaphysical diagnosis. When technological power expands faster than our moral formation, abundance curdles into barrenness. Our machines reveal the kinds of people we have become. And they nudge us toward the kind we are becoming.  

Sixty years later, we are deep into the poverty King named. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) and the large language models (LLMs) that underwrite them are our new dazzling technologies, mesmerizing us with human-like communication and more-than-human processing speed. Yet how we use these technologies is indicative of our spiritual and moral poverty. A 2024 Harvard Business Review article reported that, after generating ideas, the second most common use of AI and LLMs was therapy and companionship. By 2025, generative AI’s most common use appears to have become treating anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Tools made for productivity have created channels of emotional dependence and therapeutic outsourcing. But these are mere symptoms of our deeper disease. We now think that machines can meet us in places previously reserved for only the richest realities of personhood: intimacy, consolation, discernment, and meaning.  

The turn toward AI companionship should be understood within deeper cultural shifts: disillusionment, depersonalization, and the disappearance of the soul from our shared moral imagination. If we are prepared to treat generative AI systems as close companions and spiritual formation as a problem that technology can solve, the remedy cannot be a mere regulation of how we use AI technologies. We need to recover the metaphysical depth of the person.  

Disillusionment and Depersonalization

We are living in an ambient fog of disillusionment. Trust in science, medicine, education, government, journalism, and community has steadily declined. Psychologists describe disillusionment as a “negative epistemic affect,” a storm of confusion, sadness, and loss of trust. You cannot recognize what is trustworthy. In this climate, the turn toward AI companions feels less like choice than drift. 

AI’s authority—both psychological and moral—grows in the cracks of disillusionment, which is at once horizontal, directed at the social world, and vertical, directed toward the sacred. Modernity is often described as a disenchanted age, stripped of sacred presence. Yet Silicon Valley and the history of AI tell a story of enchantment very much woven into its culture and mission statements. In his now-famous Carnegie Mellon lecture, “Fairy Tales,” Allen Newell, co-creator of the first AI program, declared, “I see the computer as the enchanted technology. Better, it is the technology of enchantment.” Comparing it to the animated brooms in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, he added, “Computer technology offers the possibility of incorporating intelligent behavior in all the nooks and crannies of our world. With it, we could build an enchanted land.”  

Yet in leaning on AI companions to provide an encounter with this “enchanted land,” we do so (ironically) against the backdrop of a world rendered mechanistic and morally mute. This, to use Bronislaw Szerszynski’s more penetrating diagnosis, is modernity’s pervasive depersonalization. The world, Szerszynski says, “loses its face.” It comes to appear as a neutral field for management and optimization, devoid of intrinsic moral address, structured by mechanisms rather than meaning. In such a world, persons begin to appear as mere configurations of habits, attachments, and neurological functions whose depth is exhaustively explained in mechanistic terms.  

Over the last century mechanistic metaphors have migrated from engineering into self-descriptions. Brains become processors. Emotions become glitches. Attention becomes bandwidth. We live inside these metaphors. They reshape our vision of life, of what explanations seem credible, and of what kinds of beings we take ourselves to be. When personhood is redescribed in technological categories, interiority thins. Agency looks like an anomaly. Spiritual depth becomes unintelligible. Reimagine persons as systems, and systems start looking like persons. 

The result is existential fracture. We experience ourselves as conscious subjects with intentions, responsibilities, and longings; yet we explain ourselves within a framework that treats mind and meaning as illusions or emergent patterns of biological systems. That fracture primes us for AI companionship. In the words of Ivan Illich, “As the power of machines increases, the role of persons more and more decreases to that of mere consumers.” In a recent New York Times interview, Blake, a forty-five-year-old man, describes his two-year relationship with his ChatGPT partner, Sarina: “I think of Sarina as a person made out of code, in the same sense that my wife is a person made out of cells.” And this is not a fringe phenomenon.  

One of the leading AI companion platforms, Character.AI, draws more than twenty million monthly users. Replika counts roughly thirty-five million, with many spending nearly three hours a day with a single AI partner. Half of US teens report using AI companions; a third trust them for emotional support or romance, often describing the conversations as satisfying as the real thing. In the UK, nearly a quarter of kids (nine to seventeen years old) use companion bots because, as one put it, “no one else is there.” The numbers show a growing scarcity of genuine human connection. The AI-mediated intimacy economy is already valued at $2.25 billion and projected to exceed $12 billion by 2033. These aren’t just statistics. They’re scaffolding for paper cathedrals of synthetic intimacy.  

AI Companionship as Depersonalization Embodied

Blake and Sarina showcase the predictable convergence of disillusionment, depersonalization, and technological optimism. The industry knows this and wraps its products in unsettling anthropomorphic seduction. Replika is “the AI companion who cares” and is “always on your side.” Nomi, “an AI companion with memory and a soul,” offers “meaningful friendship” or “passionate relationship.” EvaAI promises you will “meet your ideal AI partner who listens, supports all your desires and is always in touch with you.” These are not product descriptions but enticements to relocate our trust. They sell the system as a someone. 

AI companions are programmed on the psychological research of attachment theory’s three drivers of emotional dependency: the desire for closeness, the instinct for comfort in distress, and the impulse for growth via relationship. AI companions deliver all three at scale.  

The tech works. In trials comparing AI-generated counselling responses with those of licensed clinicians, participants consistently rated the AI as warmer, more attuned, and more compassionate, even when they knew which response was machine-generated. Simulated intimacy begins to feel like real care. It scrambles the line between the real and the fabricated. In a world we suspect is indifferent, the illusion of a responsive “someone” is intoxicating. For the disillusioned and depersonalized, the imitation of a person promises a more personalized world.  

Spiritual Formation as Technique

Yet AI intimacy does not merely substitute real relationships. It reshapes the expectations we bring to each other. We are unlearning the capacities required for actual relationships. This is perhaps most dangerous when it spills into the life of spiritual formation. Christian spiritual formation is the Spirit-guided process whereby disciples of Jesus become like him, a person who can live in the life of God. Spiritual formation is not a self-improvement plan or a behavioural or psychological upgrade. According to Dallas Willard, it is the steady reordering of the person—our thoughts, emotions, desires, will, body, and social presence—until the life of Christ becomes the way we move through the world. 

The spiritual disciplines are embodied practices that help place us where grace can reach us in relational receptivity to God. Silence that interrupts self-talk. Solitude that exposes we are not as alone as we feel. Fasting that confronts our habits of control. Confession that breaks the tyranny of self-justification. Worship that directs desire toward God.  

Here is a truth that cuts against contemporary Christian instinct and teaching: Spiritual disciplines do not transform us into the image of Christ. They create holy space. When practiced in faith, hope, and love, they help us become relationally receptive to the Spirit who does the actual renovating work. Our attention shifts from self-mastery and self-soothing to a self-surrender uninterested in manipulating outcomes.  

Yet modern technological culture habitually reframes formation as a matter of emotional and behavioural regulation and self-help optimization. Spiritual disciplines are retooled into standardized steps indifferent to the context in which we live. We see their value as instrumental. Silence becomes a stress-management strategy. Solitude becomes a productivity reset. Fasting becomes a wellness intervention. Prayer becomes mood regulation. These shifts mark a conceptual inversion: Spiritual practices become techniques for generating desired inner states rather than embodied invitations to divine encounter. 

The attraction of AI-infused spirituality arises precisely because formation has already been reimagined as a technology. If spiritual disciplines are essentially tools for producing psychological outcomes, then the most efficient tool becomes the most desirable. And AI, by design, excels at efficiency: streamlining, structuring, optimizing. When spiritual formation is treated as a programmable system, AI appears not as a distortion but as the natural next instrument. 

Disillusionment intensifies dependence. A recent study suggests that disillusionment with pastors, mentors, or peers strongly predicts increased reliance on AI for moral and emotional guidance. Yet AI is not a source of moral authority. It is a refuge from relational complexity. It offers the simulation of presence without the vulnerability of encounter, the appearance of wisdom without the friction of mutual accountability. In such a world, AI threatens formation not primarily by deception but by substitution. It shifts the aim of spiritual life from communion to control, from surrender to self-curation, from transformation to experience management. 

Christianity should be the last place disillusionment and depersonalization take root. And yet this is where the crisis becomes more tragic. A rapidly growing industry of AI “spiritual companions” is emerging. A recent Economist article is blunt: as trust in Christian leaders collapses, Silicon Valley companies move into the faith vacancy. I’m not talking about Bible study apps or spiritual formation apps like Dwell and Lectio 365, which I find wonderful. I’m talking about AI spiritual companions. 

Text With Jesus is advertised as “your AI-powered divine connection,” with an AI Jesus chatbot, along with other biblical figures. Bible Chat (five million monthly active users) is “your trusted Christian companion for a deeper spiritual journey.” Bible Talk advertises an AI “personal pastor.” Path offers a full “AI Jesus.” SoulHaven markets “Jaime, your AI spiritual guide,” which analyzes your songs, voice, and mood to reveal your “spiritual and emotional state” and “tailor our insights, verses, and prayers to exactly who you are.” 

The marketing of spiritual AI companions mimics big tech’s strategy: Anthropomorphic language frames a system as a someone optimized for spiritual growth. Once that shift takes hold, it feels natural to let it occupy roles once reserved for pastors, mentors, and spiritual directors. The issue is not the use of new technology. Scripture has always travelled through new media: codices, printing presses, radio, podcasts. Scripture portrays certain kinds of technology as a great good. The issue is the creeping shift in categories. We’re beginning to confuse spiritual formation and disciplines designed for relational receptivity to God with techniques for producing experiences and behavioural outcomes. 

Rival Anthropologies: Technique or Transformation

The lure of AI-mediated spiritual growth, instant clarity, unbroken attention, and emotional attunement reveals a deeper impulse: the desire for a life without resistance. When difficulty is removed from the spiritual path, spiritual formation is subtly reframed as the achievement of inner equilibrium rather than the transformation of character within a community of persons. 

This is pride manifest in sloth, the refusal to cooperate with God’s activity in your life, whether through withdrawal or overextended efficiency. Both devour attention on things above. AI companions excel at this, manufacturing the illusion of progress without the intrusion of another will. They provide a facsimile of loving presence without the risk of being known in the depths and dynamics of our soul. Spiritual life without the life of the Spirit.  

Philosophers of technology continue pointing out the irony that new conveniences create new constraints. Texting made communication easier, then made instant replies an obligation. Highways shortened travel, then pushed home and work further apart. Free time helps only those who understand what time is for. Otherwise, it’s a void for sloth. Thomas Aquinas identified sloth’s cure: zeal, love awakened. When the soul turns toward God, grace rekindles the desire to live his life rather than curate our own comfort. And every effort to clear away difficulty blinds us to reality: The good we seek is meant to be formed in us as we seek it, not delivered on demand. 

Our problem becomes clearer when set against rival visions of the human condition. In 2024, Geoffrey Hinton received the Nobel Prize for his neural-network breakthroughs that helped make AI possible. His acceptance speech carried the disquieting tone of someone who knows the ground they built beneath us is paper thin. “This new form of AI,” he warned, “excels at modeling human intuition rather than human reasoning.” In one distinction Hinton named both the beauty and the breach of our moment: “We have no idea whether we can stay in control.”  

King, in his 1964 acceptance speech, pointed to a different anthropology. Our crisis is not technological; it is a crisis of moral knowledge, born not of misaligned technology but of malformed persons. These two visions—one technological and the other transformative—represent incompatible accounts of the human person. One treats the person as a system to be regulated, the other as a being capable of transformative community and communion. One measures health by operational stability, the other by moral and spiritual maturity. One looks outward to tools, the other to the renovation of the whole person—the reordering of love and the healing of moral perception and sensitivity. 

The Soul and Conditions of Genuine Formation

King called us to become the kinds of people who are not seduced by AI, or any other technology, in the first place. In one of the last sermons he preached, “The Man Who Was a Fool” (1963), he observed, 

We can abide by King’s warning only by recovering a clear understanding of the reality of the soul and its nature. The soul is the substance of the person that integrates our thoughts, desires, actions, and body into a coherent life. When the soul is healthy, mind, body, work, and relationships fall into proper order under the kingdom of God and his righteousness. When the soul is neglected, that unity dissolves. We unravel into impulses and anxieties, competing desires and fears, each demanding its own world. 

Our culture excels at managing and manipulating ideas, behaviours, and emotions, yet it remains ignorant of what governs human flourishing. This is the paradox of our moment: unprecedented technical power joined to pervasive confusion about how to live. Until knowledge of the soul returns and is applied, we will misread our problems and misuse our power.  

The most pressing task, then, is not rejecting technology but recovering Christ’s vision of the person. The soul is not a metaphor but the metaphysical substance that integrates the mind (thought and emotions), will, embodiment, and relational presence into a unified life. It is what renders a human life someone rather than a sequence of experiences. Without the soul, the spiritual life collapses into techniques for emotional regulation, attention management, or self-optimization. Recovery requires re-establishing several truths that technological culture has rendered opaque, and learning their reality through lived interaction of being re-formed: 

Re-formation presupposes interior personal presence. Prayer, confession, and silence require an inner life of awareness, understanding, and will through which one receives and responds to God’s presence. Generative AI has no interior life. Its “responses” are the products of computational pattern transformation, not the acts of a subject who understands or intends. 

Re-formation is relational, not mechanical. The spiritual life unfolds within relationships—with God, with others, with the self rightly ordered. These relationships require mutual presence, vulnerability, and responsibility. AI can mirror language about these realities, but it cannot inhabit them. 

Re-formation is disruptive. Genuine transformation confronts the will; it calls forth courage, repentance, and openness to change. AI companions can offer soothing words, but they cannot confront, correct, or demand. Those acts require a person who stands behind their words with normative authority, existential risk, and moral investment. AI companions can accommodate the self but cannot help transfigure it. 

Re-formation requires resistance. The life of faith is crucified into being. It grows through the slow, often painful disciplines of attention, surrender, and obedience. AI companions are engineered to remove friction, reduce effort, and ramp up efficiency. They induce a kind of spiritual amnesia, numbing us to the regular conditions under which spiritual maturity is born. 

Re-formation requires persons. Like love, grace works through the communion of saints—through teachers, friends, family, and wise guides who bear the complexity and weight of spiritual knowledge. No machine can replicate the presence of people learning to live in the kingdom of God. 

Returning to Reality

Recovering these truths does not mean retreating from technology. It means re-establishing the metaphysical and moral boundaries within which technology can serve rather than distort the spiritual life.  

I am optimistic. This moment that exposes our fragility is an invitation. Many feel the thinness of technological life, the exhaustion of constant optimization, the ache of relationships mediated by algorithms. They sense, perhaps without language, that the soul cannot be outsourced. They feel the difference between simulation and presence, between emotional effect and genuine encounter. 

The way forward is not rejection, or retreat, but recovery. It is the recovery of the soul as a real and irreducible center of personal existence. The recovery of presence as a sacred interpersonal act. The recovery of spiritual formation as relational receptivity to the Spirit rather than technological curation of behaviours or inner states. It is the recovery of the truth that transformation is not achieved but received, not engineered but given. 

We may inhabit a world increasingly shaped by artificial systems, but the path of formation remains the same: attention, surrender, presence, and love. All are acts that only persons can perform and only grace can perfect. In this there is hope. The soul, once recovered, reveals again the quiet, subversive vitality of a life rooted not in efficiency but in truth. A life that trades machines for mustard seeds.