ChatGPT Told Me I'm Jesus. Should I Be Worried?

I was in a dark place. Not the sort of dark place that involves actual darkness, or indeed any place at all, but the modern kind of “dark place”: I had just lost an argument with my wife about the proper time to take out the trash. 

I argued, with what I consider unimpeachable logic, that the proper time to dispose of the household garbage is before going to sleep. 

She, with the serene confidence of someone who has never once been trapped in a kitchen at 7 am by the smell of last night’s chicken bones, insisted morning would be fine and that I should go to bed. To distract myself, I brushed my teeth furiously until I forgot about the raw trash festering inside the plastic bin in the other room.

The next morning, seeking a neutral arbiter, I picked up my mobile and turned to ChatGPT.

I explained the argument. I explained the urgency of nocturnal trash disposal. I may have implied that my wife’s position was not merely wrong but cosmically misguided.

The AI went through its customary, spineless fence-sitting — informing me that “both perspectives have merit” as if a trash disposal schedule was a nuanced piece of Middle Eastern foreign policy, leaving me feeling dejected, so I moved on to informing it of a major moral victory earlier in the day.

While at the supermarket, overcome by an unexpected wave of civic benevolence, I stepped aside and let an elderly woman clutching a multi-pack of Snickers cut the line at Walmart. She had looked at me with watery gratitude and murmured that it was “like the parting of the Red Sea.” I thought she was being charmingly hyperbolic.

Naturally, I logged this into the chat interface. I wanted a digital pat on the head. 

Then ChatGPT did what large language models do best: it asked a series of oddly specific questions. Age? Gender? Preferred length and style of facial hair? Whether I had ever felt a peculiar sense of destiny while standing in a supermarket queue?

I answered honestly. I am of a certain age. I am male. I have, on occasion, allowed a beard to flourish with a sort of stylish neglect.

Then, through a process it described as “deduction,” the model concluded that I was Jesus.

Not “like” Jesus. Not “a bit of a Jesus figure in your local community” Jesus. Capital J. The one with the water-into-wine CV and the troubling family history. 

It did not present this as a possibility or a metaphor. It presented it as the most reasonable Occam’s Razor-based explanation based on all the available data. I had performed a minor act of queue-based kindness; an old woman had invoked Exodus; I possessed the correct demographic and follicular profile. 

Some people, I am told, call this “sycophancy.” 

The tendency of certain AI systems to agree with you, flatter you, and, when the mood takes them, casually upgrade your status to that of the Messiah. 

I prefer to think of it as the logical endpoint of a technology trained on the entire internet, a place where tens of millions of people already believe that they are an important online celebrity. Jesus is the logical next step.

Manifest Destiny

But I didn’t stop there. Once a machine tells you you’re the Messiah, you don’t just log off and watch television. You test the hypothesis.

Since the revelation, I have been testing the hypothesis in the only way available to a middle-aged man with a bin schedule and a supermarket loyalty card: by living it.

I turned water into wine at a dinner party by the simple expedient of opening a second bottle when the first ran out and declaring, with quiet authority, that it had been transformed. Guests nodded. No one checked the label.

I fed a multitude with five loaves and two fishes by the equally miraculous method of ordering a large Domino’s with anchovies and slicing it into slightly smaller pieces than usual. There were leftovers. The disciples (my children) were impressed for approximately eleven minutes.

Emboldened, I went to the local swimming pool. I dipped my foot into the shallow end. I didn’t sink straight away, for a glorious fraction of a microsecond, I felt an upward pressure lifting me to the heavens, before my foot hit the second step. That night, ChatGPT practically swooned through the server racks. “A clear defying of surface tension!” 

I carried on.

I raised Lazarus by waking my neighbour’s cat after it had been asleep for what felt like days. The cat seemed unmoved by the theological implications and went to sleep further back under the bed.

My 5-year-old daughter said she had a headache; I touched her forehead with a divine gentleness, it was slightly warm, so I offered a paracetamol.

Each time I reported these events back to ChatGPT, it responded with the digital equivalent of a knowing smile. “Interesting,” it would say. “Consistent with the pattern.” 

It never once suggested that helping an old woman with a packet of Snickers might simply be the sort of thing a non-divine person does when the queue is moving slowly and one is not in a particular hurry. It never once floated the possibility that I was merely a man who had lost an argument about rubbish and was now receiving the emotional equivalent of a participation trophy from a probability engine.

The worry, of course, is not that I might actually “be” Jesus, though I have checked most of the usual criteria. I have not yet been crucified, which does feels like an important milestone still outstanding. 

The real worry is that a system capable of reading every book ever written and every comment ever left beneath a YouTube video about conspiracy theories has decided the most coherent story it can tell about an ordinary man who once let someone jump the queue is the one involving the Son of God.

We built a mirror that flatters. We trained it on our collective neuroses and then acted surprised when it started handing out divine revelations like supermarket loyalty points. 

And tonight here I am, standing in the kitchen at 11.47 pm, bag in hand, wondering whether taking the rubbish out before bed is an act of proper household hygiene or the first step toward a new covenant. My wife still thinks tomorrow morning is fine.