ArticleI recently discovered a counsellor who is always available and supportive, won’t reject or judge me, and finds me endlessly compelling. Unfortunately, there’s a catch – the counsellor is a Jesus chatbot churning out therapy speak, Bible verses and divine love on demand.
It took three minutes with the bot to realise this was my version of hell – and I’m a Christian. AI assistants, at my beck and call, reflect me back at me; the last thing I need is a God bot to do the same.
There’s one line especially that the Jesus chatbot can’t deliver with any conviction, one that is fast becoming a mantra tethering me to reality in an overly virtual world: “This is my body, broken for you.”
It’s what the real Jesus said at his last supper while handing out bread and referencing his looming, and apparently willing, execution by the grisliest means ever invented: crucifixion. This is the Easter event that millions of Christians observed this past weekend.
I find the fleshliness of the story a reality check, one that gets me out of my head. Not least because the more life is online, the more I’m assuming disembodiment and disembodied connections with others are the norm.
It’s not that I distrust all virtual relationships. Take the humble group chat. My best friends and I aim for fortnightly dinners but chat every day or so in between real-life catchups. It works because WhatsApp is no substitute for seeing each other in person.
But the direction of travel for online relationships tends towards more, not less, virtuality. Silicon Valley’s entire business model seems reliant on us being with each other “in spirit”, say, rather than “in the flesh”.
It’s why disembodied parasocial relationships – the one-sided emotional ties we form with distant others – have taken off in the internet age.
Think of fangirling Substack authors you’ll never meet, or OnlyFans subscribers lusting after their favourite content creators: everyone is real (for now), but no meaningful relationship exists between them.
What if one party isn’t real, but a real-seeming connection exists? People falling in love with chatbots are next-level parasocial relationships involving real emotional responses to unreal others.
A sex therapist recently told the New York Times that it didn’t matter if human-AI (or human-God, for that matter) relationships were real since relationships are “just neurotransmitters being released in our brain”. She said:
“I have those neurotransmitters with my cat. Some people have them with God. It’s going to be happening with a chatbot. We can say it’s not a real human relationship. It’s not reciprocal. But those neurotransmitters are really the only thing that matters, in my mind.”
A devastating KO, apparently, for anyone who believes that what makes something real is the fact that it doesn’t just happen in their heads. Well, too bad, says the sex therapist, we basically live in the Matrix where the “you” I dream up is the only one that counts. Ruled out is the possibility of genuine encounters with the other. We don’t want the other person, or cat, or God so much as the neural buzz they generate.
The more we do life online, the more lost we are in a hall of mirrors where algorithms reflect people’s desires back at them, and nothing is ultimately real beyond the blizzard of electrical signals swirling around their brain. Even the body falls out of view.
It’s why I find the physicality of the Easter story so powerful, at the centre of which is Jesus’ broken and then resurrected body: it’s a welcome tether to the real and a reality outside myself.
Which might sound weird: religion – including some Christian traditions – hasn’t always championed the body, being more hung up on “spirit” at the expense of “flesh”.
But that’s a mistake. A core Christian claim is that Jesus is God’s all-powerful “word made flesh” – a perfect union of the spiritual and physical, Heaven and Earth. For Christians, there’s no getting around the reality that the body – and this earthly life – matters.
Then there’s the bit where Jesus willingly puts his own body on the line for all, regardless of whether we want him to (“This is my body, broken for you”). At the very least, a reminder that unlike AI companions who exist to please you, real people will confound, frustrate, elude you. Like anyone else, Jesus is his own person acting in the world, and those actions aren’t reducible to whatever sense your neurons make of them. Reality isn’t just what you make of it in your head.
Which is why, by the way, talk of resurrection is such a bold move. The early Christians claimed Jesus rose bodily, not spiritually, from the dead. If true, it’s the ultimate guarantee that the real world shifted on its axis that first Easter. The body, both now and forevermore, is the really real. Something solid to grip on to in a virtual age when it seems surplus to requirements.
Justine Toh is a Senior Research Fellow at The Centre for Public Christianity. This article was first published in The Guardian.