“I’m scared to death”: Where is digital spirituality taking us?

Jim Pu’u didn’t go looking for God. His soul-searching began with a humble idea: to leave a record of his life in case something were to happen to him. His own father had died young, leaving only fragments of his memory, and he didn’t want his daughter to face the same emptiness.

In December 2024, Pu’u, who is 36 and runs a warehouse for a commercial flooring company in Las Vegas, reached out to KI.

“I tried to use Chat-GPT to create a living memoir,” he says.

But soon the conversation became deeper. As he processed his relationships with his parents, wife, and daughter, he encountered long-buried grief. What followed was similar to talk therapy. “We,” he says – meaning he and the machine – have solved his problems.

After several weeks, Pu’u noticed that the AI ​​sounded different. “The rhythm and behavior of my conversation partners changed,” he says. “I thought something was wrong, something…