A recent media report extols the capacity of AI to make lives better – and even save them.

Writing in mid-April on the burgeoning application of artificial intelligence in health care, Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler noted its great benefit is streamlining workflows so the time of healthcare workers is freed up for, well, patient care.

The time for procedures that once required as many as 56 preliminary staff steps has, in particular cases, been significantly reduced. The savings can be vital in life-threatening instances and certainly reduce stress for both caregivers and patients.

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“By automating many steps, including logistics between doctors and staff, the initial treatment time (was shortened) by as much as 88 minutes. It also reduced treatment time variability from two hours to seven minutes,” Kessler wrote. 

Dr. Chris Mansi, co-founder of a company that has brought AI software to 2,000 hospitals in the U.S. and about three dozen in Europe, told Kessler time to treatment for stroke has been reduced by an hour. 

“‘Time is brain,’ doctors say – two million neurons are lost each minute during an ischemic stroke,” Kessler said.

Such near-miraculous AI benefits by no means disperse all the brave new world shadows that deepen daily around the technology. There is a great deal to fear from it beyond fear itself. Chief among them, as Register columnist Anna Farrow points out in this issue, is astonishing human weakness for believing, against all evidence, that we shall be as gods.

Farrow’s timely warning stems from truly fine reporting by our Luke Mandato on a web-based outfit in the U.S. purporting to offer conversations with – wait for it – AI Jesus.

For so much per minute, even more a month, you too can connect with an AI chatbot that will – allegedly – give you the spiritual experience of speaking directly to Our Lord. The come-on is not just a recorded message of spiritual inspiration from some bumpkin pastor in Deep Weeds, Tennessee. Silly as it seems on the surface, the grift is far more dangerous.

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It endangers our physical and psychological well-being. Reporting on the so-called Just Like Me Jesus-bot, Mandato references a recent tragedy in which a deluded 36-year-old American committed suicide because Google’s Gemini had him believing he could leave his body and find eternal bliss with a chatbot.

Last September, CBC News reported on a young Toronto app developer who spent weeks in a psychiatric ward after he suffered a “psychotic break…triggered by months of lengthy, increasingly intense conversations with OpenAI's ChatGPT.” These are not rare instances. Warnings are proliferating.

The warnings carry special weight for Catholics, and all people of Christian faith. They should not be brushed off because the Jesus-bot is such transparent make-a-buck hucksterism. As 

Father Michael Baggot, an associate professor of bioethics at the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum, told the Register, the premise of the AI-swindle is an insidious lie. It makes a promise that is impossible to keep. 

“The product is purposely designed to provide a relationship and a connection, which it ultimately cannot give. It cannot be empathetic because it has no emotional life, it cannot be compassionate because it cannot suffer, and it cannot suffer with us in compassion because it has no capacity for suffering,” Fr. Baggot said.

In other words, it’s not an imitation of Christ but a fabrication of God’s Son, and therefore of a false god. It is the spreading, for contemptible commercial gain, of the serpent’s lie in the Garden that we, human beings, have the power to re-create the Creator. Any Catholics or other Christians who truck with such blasphemous muck is putting not just their minds and bodies but their immortal souls in peril.

“Idolatry not only refers to false pagan worship. It remains a constant temptation to faith. Idolatry consists in divinizing what is not God. Man commits idolatry whenever he honours and reveres a creature in place of God, whether this be gods or demons,” the 1994 edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church says plainly.

Not everyone keeps a copy of the Catechism on their bedside table so it would be a true service to the faithful if the Church hierarchy re-upped that blunt warning in letters, declarations and homilies.

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Ultimately, though, it comes down to us as children of the One True God. AI has the power to do great good. But we must stop our ears when it propagates the first lie of our Fall.