The Archbishops of AI
The world is an increasingly irreligious place.1 In Germany, only a fifth consider themselves solely otherwise; this drops to 15% in Spain and 10% in the United States. Even in relative stalwarts like India, younger generations practice their religion less and believe it to be less important than their forebears. And in the UK, weekly church attendance has dropped to a paltry 5%. Despite a recent reversal in this trend, it remains the case that the command religion holds — and the access religious bodies have to our minds — has markedly reduced. Yet this does not equate to a reduction in faith; in the reduction of individuals’ willingness for, and blatant desire to, defer to claims of authority.
Imagine promising ecclesiastical figures of yesteryear constant access to congregations’ attentions; access as consistent as it is constant, with adults spending an average of four and a half hours online every day. Now imagine the promise that a good chunk of this is spent consulting a central source of information, knowledge, and wisdom on matters of spiritual, relational, and practical consequence. You would be promising ecclesiastical nirvana. And you would be promising the present day.
Google has over five billion users, holding a 90% share of the search market worldwide. More than 16 billion searches are carried out every day, an increasing number of which are answered by a mix of AI Overviews or the newly-released AI Mode — large language model-powered tools that serve results without users having to visit individual sites. The shift towards the latter is exemplified by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the fastest-growing consumer app in history that now counts almost 700 million weekly users and processes a billion queries a day. It has fundamentally reshaped our relationship with information and knowledge, matched by Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and Meta’s Llama, amongst others. A rather successful crusade, then.
These tools are more consulted than the Bible, Quran, Bhagavad Gita, Pāli Canon, and Torah combined. Importantly, they are consulted for the same reasons as those texts are — readers are looking and hoping for resolute answers to their questions, their yearnings, and their desires. They are placing faith in the source of those answers; faith in its good faith, in its wisdom, and in its integrity.2 While trust in the firms behind these tools is mixed, a full four-fifths of people around the world are anticipating their daily use — with younger demographics taking a particular shine to them. Chatbots have turned into therapists and close confidantes — portable confessionals — with an all-seeing eye that provides terrifying personalisation and the illusion of transcendent knowledge.
Whether they like it or not — and they surely do, given their zealous self-congratulatory antics — the leaders of big tech firms have been elevated to ecclesiastical status. They are not, in fact, the purveyors of the ever-present and all-pervading techbroism, but rather of reality itself. And that is without considering their hold over algorithms that mould our information feeds; altering election results, driving individuals to suicide, or, as they prefer it, upgrading users’ spending habits on advertised products. Devices of mere manipulated enjoyment have been consciously turned into devices of authority; instead of places to turn to express ourselves, they are dictating, quite literally, how we do that very expressing. The motivations behind this, importantly, are impure — they are driven not solely by a claim to truth, but by a mix of financial-political incentives that alter their actions and intentions.3 Big tech, then, is increasingly displaying a Foucaltian relationship between power and knowledge.
Call its leaders the Archbishops of AI — led by the slipperingly-sycophantic Archbishop Altman. Leading the charge to an eventual Papacy, Altman is challenged by the Archbishops Zuckerberg, Pichai, and Musk. In each of their dioceses, they preach and proselytise about the simultaneous promises and dangers of that which they force upon us, and faith-basedly lure investment to fund their massive buildout of churches and cathedrals (and data centres).
They are, though, just Archbishops. While their influence is doubtless significant, their aspiration for the Papacy is hindered by their elevation to Cardinalhood. It is, in this instance, states who fill the Sistine Chapel. States are the ones standing in the way — the ones that choose the next Pope; the Pope that can in turn elevate Archbishops to Cardinals and pave the way for their eventual Papacy (in an invariably brutal Conclave).4 This is where this metaphor breaks down, but the point stands. Big tech’s near-religious hold on our daily lives is contingent on states’ submission thereto. It is contingent on their claiming continued powerlessness, their deferring to those below that promise supposed rejuvenation.5
And to redirect the metaphor — it was states who once dismantled the stranglehold religious bodies held as sources of authority.6 It was states who severed connections with the Church; who demanded religious freedom; who limited religious control over legal systems; who removed literal and figurative crosses from the classroom; and who defined sovereignty as arising from the people, not God.7 It can thus be, and only be, states who prevent theocratic capture of another kind — that by big tech.
It is in this context that the rise of big tech — and the rise of LLM-crazed AI — should be considered: in the context of state and constituent capture. Each must realise the power they hold to stop, or rather redirect, this process; realise their simultaneous vulnerability and agency to demand and decree otherwise. States in particular must articulate a positive alternative vision, one that invites a concomitant degree of attraction to that which it is competing against. They mustn’t be convinced nor misled by narratives of accelerationism — welcoming the Archbishops into the Sistine Chapel to prevent a threat those very Archbishops embody and control. States and individuals alike must fight, and defeat, this attempted hostile takeover.
This is not necessarily true, and seems to be a trend limited mostly to parts of — for lack of a better term — the West. It is worth noting, though, that recent short-term fluctuations in Evangelism, say, and Catholicism are taking place against a long-term backdrop of increasing irreligion.
A point on the source(s) of these LLMs’ authority, and the relative authority of religious texts, can most definitely be made here. I do not intend to make it, yet it is still worth noting.
Their financial intentions are influenced by the need (and often desire) for ad-based revenues, and by the demands of VC funders. Their political intentions are clear: LLMs and (supposed) AGI offer these Archbishops immense eventual power; they want to come out on top.
One can also treat the Papacy as an embodiment of policy choices — to, for example, restrict the development of artificial intelligence, mandate open-sourcing, or build a figurative runway to satisfy accelerationists.
To be clear, this is not characteristic of all nation-states. China, for one, has taken a notably different approach, these artificial sources of authority expressing and being directly subject to the state’s authority — that is not necessarily a future I envision, nor endorse.
This is a sweeping historical point lacking detail and nuance, yet its thrust — for the purposes of this argument — holds true.
I want to make clear that I am not making a value judgement on organised religion or religion of any kind. I am using this metaphor as a tool to describe the power and influence big tech holds and exercises.