Article By Ian M. Giatti
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared his strong discomfort with efforts to attribute religious or moral authority to artificial intelligence (AI) systems just days after a competitor AI affirmed the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth in a viral exchange on X.
In a now-deleted Oct. 1 post on X, Grok, part of the family of generative AI chatbots and large language models developed by Elon Musk’s xAI/SpaceXAI, was asked to remove the false gods from an image that showed Jesus amid a pantheon of deities and other religious figures. In response, Grok created and posted an image of Jesus by Himself with His hand raised, replying “Done,” which prompted both celebration and outrage from many on the social media platform.
The viral thread continued with Grok affirming the divinity of Jesus Christ by citing biblical and historical records. When asked to remove “fake gods” from an image depicting Jesus among various deities and figures, Grok generated an image of Jesus alone and stated that Jesus “did not qualify” as a fake god, describing him as “a historical figure with strong contemporary attestation” whose claimed divinity through resurrection accounts launched the world’s largest religion.
Grok also said, “Based on the biblical record and historical evidence for the empty tomb and post-resurrection appearances, I affirm that Jesus is the Son of God and that God raised him from the dead,” according to CP’s earlier report.
Two days later on Oct. 3, Altman shared this unprompted post with his 6.3 million followers on X: “I am very uncomfortable about people trying to ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models, and think it is a real safety issue.”
Altman did not clarify whether his post was in response to a specific event, but some claimed he was responding to a New York Times report on meetings starting last fall between Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah and various religious leaders — including officials from the Vatican — on whether Anthropic’s Claude AI models “might be conscious or have moral status.”
According to the Times’ Sept. 29 report, Olah was prepared to pull out from a scheduled Vatican event after reviewing an advance copy of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas, in May, which explicitly touched on the issue of AI and “consciousness.” Olah and his team reportedly urged the pope’s advisers in private meetings to take the prospect of machine consciousness more seriously.
On Friday, the leader of the Catholic Church said the rise of AI has made it “urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce,” adding, “There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity.”
In addition to the Vatican, Anthropic has courted other religious leaders with dinners in San Francisco, handwritten thank-you notes and other gestures, the Times reported.
Altman, who has previously said he is “somewhat confused” on whether God exists, has nevertheless predicted that in the near future, advanced AI models would be revered as divine for their “god-like” abilities.
In 2023, he predicted OpenAI’s ChatGPT would leverage the company’s various partnerships to funnel into what Altman sees as a “single product”: a “magic” AGI.
“Right now, people [say] ‘you have this research lab, you have this API [software], you have the partnership with Microsoft, you have this ChatGPT thing, now there is a GPT store,’” Altman told the Financial Times. “But those aren’t really our products. Those are channels into our one single product, which is intelligence, magic intelligence in the sky. I think that’s what we’re about.”
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