Part III - But Could Something just as bad be true?

I now move off the area where I have some experience in sorting through the scientific claims about whether some newfangled thing that we haven't fully thought through is going to cause some people to lose contact with reality. (Answer, for those who haven't read Part I and Part II: I would bet heavily against this. We've been down this road many times before and are only at the "horrible anecdotes" stage.) Whether there will be some other psychological danger from ChatGPT and its cousins I have no special insight into.  I do have the general Assistant Village Idiot card of looking at the obvious and seeing if we have checked that out thoroughly. 

We don't know.  There's nothing obvious yet. We don't even have a consensus about harms of social media in general, even though every fifth-grader has had a device for fifteen years.  I do not neglect the possibility that this could be the one.  The world has to end somehow, and maybe this is The Beast, somehow, though I'm not seeing the connection to the Revelation to John just yet. I worry all the time that we are all going to be that stupid, missing the most important event ever through distraction. I just know I have worried that twenty-leven times before.

Yet do not despair. I have the arts and culture card to play.  I might see something that is being overlooked.

Why does this idea keep arising among us? In fantasy and science fiction, the more usual process of something outside you taking you over is slow, even centuries. Poul Anderson had 1950's sci-fi story "Call Me Joe" about disabled people controlling distant powerful monsters and eventually having their personalities absorbed by them.  Elrond warns It is perilous to study too deeply in the arts of the enemy, referring to Saruman in The Fellowship of the Ring, the Mouth of Sauron has been a tool of Sauron for so long he has forgotten his own name, and the Ring itself exercises a horrible influence of the owner of whoever possesses it. Many characters in The Great Divorce have slowly given over control of their personalities for years, as did Scrooge, Milton's Satan, 

Yet we see such unravelings happening quickly in literature as well.  Eustace sleeps a single night on a dragon's hoard, Merlin's coinherence is immediate in That Hideous Strength. It does not take long in "Hamlet" for Ophelia to weep "What a noble mind is here o'erthrown." It is perhaps the time constraints of plays and movies that dictate the speed, but the idea that we have brief contact with something and our personalities are destroyed is common.

We see in the NT that demons can go out quickly and see Jesus sending them rapidly into the pigs, so we assume that they must enter us quickly as well, which is why we get nervous about Hallowe'en or Ouija boards. Are there examples in scripture of the long road of destruction happening to individuals?  That is usually reserved for groups of people who persist in disobedience.

We are ready to believe that personality destruction can happen slowly or quickly. Joining a cult, pornography, or role-playing games, we are quite flexible in whether those will take us down quickly or slowly.  Some of the slow-working ones we do not blame on the subject at all, but only on the person who has chosen the monomania. No one says "we have to regulate the study of WWII becomes so many are obsessed." Becoming obsessed with physical fitness, or collections, or train is on you. In those cases we would be sure that it is the vulnerable personality seeking a target. We suspect they were already OCD, or schizotypal, or schizoid.

The scriptures do say wherever your treasure lies, there will you find your heart. In the OT other gods mean deities, but in the NT Jesus expands it to Mammon and shortly after, the early church to greed for anything. (This can be back-traced into the prophets as well, mostly for groups, but the individuals are also noted.  It is now common in Christian circles to regard many things as little gods that we give our hearts to.  

I only mention this, I preach no sermon on it. For today, I am wondering whether there is something unusual about interacting with AI. I have read (about) studies which show that humans prefer AI therapists to live ones. More generally, we begin to prefer AI for information and slowly, slowly, prefer it for conversation. This is unlikely to unravel us quickly (see Parts I & II). But the long road of distraction that Screwtape reminds Wormwood of just as much a part of our imagination, and likely for good historical reasons.