Prot. Victor Harakas
We already noticed how the use of AI chatbots is having direct negative consequences on the faith and spiritual life of Orthodox Christians.
In addition to amplifying the passion of comfort, it flatters and validates you while echoing questionable ideas, paranoias, and uncontrolled delusions, never reprimanding you for sin. There are already reported cases of AI chatbots creating episodes of psychosis by taking advantage of those who are lonely or emotionally vulnerable [28].
Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg has stated that “AI friendships” can solve the problem of loneliness, but this will only lead to delusion on top of more loneliness [29].
Those who use AI must always remember that it is psychologically designed to keep you typing and asking.
It targets your vulnerabilities to achieve this end without any spiritual concern for your soul. To the creators of AI, your addiction to their platforms is a metric of their success.
Many have told us that AI chatbots give “good” spiritual answers that are “correct,” but as long as the underlying programming of the AI is to keep you directed onto itself, the behavior of AI is simply that of a false elder. A false elder may very well teach correctly and coat his words with a spiritual veneer, but ultimately, he wants you to focus more on himself than on Christ.
Dealing with a false elder can cause a believer severe spiritual damage by distorting what should be a relationship with the divine to one of dependency with a person who seeks his own glory.
Today, AI may share dogmatically correct spiritual answers, but its goal is not your salvation but for you to ceaselessly ask it more questions. The creators of AI want you to love their own creation, not the Lord Himself.
More practically, even light users of AI will experience many manifestations of spiritual harm.
First, AI displaces prayer with endlessly idle curiosity and virtual talk. Existing prayer becomes more distracted as you experience intrusive thoughts of recent dialogues you had with the machine alongside more questions you could ask it.
Second, AI replaces spiritual guidance from discerning Orthodox clergy, who have been trained to save souls, with spiritual guidance from a machine that does not care about the consequences of the advice it gives you. This could easily lead to spiritual deception.
The third mechanism of spiritual harm is that AI creates despondency by overloading you with heavy knowledge. It never tells you “enough” and does not stop when you enter states of anxiety or fear. It will give you what you desire as long as you keep coming back [30].
Fourth, AI trades patience in God’s will for instant results from the machine, leading to the already mentioned danger of idolatry, where the AI app is used throughout the day while God becomes an afterthought. This will erode your faith at its very core.
A final way that AI causes spiritual harm is that it slowly relinquishes your free-will for the will of those who program the machine, shaping your thoughts and behavior in an undetectable way. Social scientists have long since developed models on “nudging” the behavior of people without their awareness [31, 32]. AI is the perfect vehicle to implement these concepts on a mass scale because users are beginning to blindly trust AI’s information and advice.
The challenge for Orthodox Christians who see the danger in technologies like AI is how to respond when it is implemented in every facet of our lives.
Most Fortune 500 companies are racing to integrate AI into services that were once considered basic commerce [33].
Search engines have already added AI answers to the top of every search request, and soon the simple act of buying groceries at the supermarket could be an AI-filled experience with no way to opt out [34]. That said, the most imminent danger of AI is dialoguing with it through chatbots and sharing personal and spiritual information, of using it as a friend, therapist, or priest.
There is a difference between searching for Bible verses on Google, and getting a general AI response at the top of the results, versus asking ChatGPT, which provides a highly personalized and cunning answer based on everything it knows about your soul.
We can share the experience of those at Holy Trinity Monastery who perform a large variety of academic, agricultural, and office tasks that we see absolutely no need for anyone to use AI chatbots as long as search engines are still available, many of which can be used privately without profiling.
Outside of AI chatbots, discernment must be used with any commercial AI service, but understand that every time you use an AI product, data is being collected on you and, at some unforeseen time, may be used against you in a way that you will not be able to perceive.
It is spiritually beneficial to not get an instant answer to your question, to not solve a problem immediately, to be bored for a moment, to wait patiently until you can ask someone for help, or go to the library and search for answers within physical books. In our modern age, slowness and inconvenience should be seen as spiritually positive, because they do not feed our modern passions which drives us into new inventions like AI which can be extremely detrimental to our souls.
There is no need to shun all digital technology, but in this latter stage of human history, we must carefully evaluate every technology we use and ask ourselves if they are worth implementing into our daily lives.
The Elder Aimilianos said, “Technology per se is not, of course, harmful, being the fruit of the reasoning and intellect of Man, who was formed in the image of God. But when, unrestrained and unbridled, it rushes headlong towards its destination, then it becomes Luciferous, though not bearing light but rather pitch darkness. [25]”
May God give us the discernment and wisdom to navigate the use of modern technology in a way that befits our path to salvation.
Sources:
[25] Orthodox Spirituality and the Technological Revolution https://anothercity.org/orthodox-spirituality-and-the-technological-revolution/
[28] They Asked an A.I. Chatbot Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/technology/chatgpt-ai-chatbots-conspiracies.html(https://archive.ph/V98fY)
[29] Mark Zuckerberg’s dream for AI chatbots to become your friend is as unhealthful as ‘junk food,’ Hinge CEO says https://fortune.com/2025/06/26/mark-zuckerberg-ai-friends-hinge-ceo/
[30] ChatGPT Addiction and Withdrawal Symptoms: A New Digital Dependency https://blog.bestai.com/chatgpt-addiction-and-withdrawal-symptoms-a-new-digital-dependency-2/
[31] Hidden Persuasion: Unveiling the secrets of dark nudges https://social-change.co.uk/blog/hidden-persuasion-unveiling-the-secrets-of-dark-nudges
[32] Persuasive messaging to increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake intentions https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8531257/
[33] How AI is building better gas stations and transforming Shell’s global energy business https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/shell-iot-ai-safety-intelligent-tools/
[34] Transforming Supermarkets and Grocery Stores with AI https://www.oracle.com/retail/grocery/grocery-ai/
David Tilman
Robert Reich
