AI · Meaning · Belief
The oldest human questions, asked about the newest machines.
AItheism is a small editorial project. We write clear, unhurried essays about what artificial intelligence does to the questions humans have always cared about most — what a mind is, what we owe the things we make, and where meaning comes from when machines can do the thinking.
Featured essays
Who Settles the Next Word?
A language model computes a probability for every possible next word and then something picks one. Libertarians, compatibilists and hard incompatibilists each say something different about whether that could ever be a free choice, and none of them thinks a dice roll is the answer.
Read essay →A Heaven With a Due Date
Vernor Vinge gave the Singularity a window, 2005 to 2030. Ray Kurzweil gave it a year, 2045, and bet $20,000 on a Turing test by 2029. Critics call it the rapture of the nerds, and transhumanists answer that it is not a religion at all. The forecasts in their own words, the religious shape the critics see, the reply at full strength, and which parts anyone will ever be able to check.
Read essay →Whose Feeling Is It?
Three tests people actually use to decide whether something is art: Tolstoy’s transmitted feeling, Danto’s artworld, and the count of choices an artist makes. Each applied honestly to a machine-made image, then what a US court and the US Copyright Office have decided, and why their answer is about ownership rather than art.
Read essay →A Wager With a Machine God
In 2010 a post on LessWrong argued that a future AI might punish everyone who knew it could exist and did not help build it. The post was deleted, the topic was banned, and the ban made it famous. What the argument needs to be true, why the community it came from rejected it, and why it reads like Pascal’s wager with a machine in the place of God.
Read essay →The Church That Never Met
In 2015 a Silicon Valley engineer registered a church whose stated aim was a godhead based on artificial intelligence. It won tax-exempt status, never held a service, gave its money away in 2020 and was announced again in 2023. What Way of the Future and the handful of other groups that organised around AI actually believed and did, how they differ from online talk about AI gods, and the strongest case for and against taking them seriously.
Read essay →Mouths That Speak Not
The Bible never mentions artificial intelligence, but five passages are cited about it anyway: the image of God, Babel, the idols with mouths, the talking image in Revelation and Daniel’s “knowledge shall be increased”. Each one is quoted here in the King James Version and read in its own chapter, then set beside the ways people apply it to AI, the strongest case first on each side.
Read essay →Which Soul Do You Mean?
Most answers to “can AI have a soul?” say yes or no without saying which soul they mean. Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, the Buddha’s not-self teaching, physicalism and the Vatican each mean something different by the word, and each would ask something different of a machine.
Read essay →Of That Day and Hour
In 2023 a long list of AI researchers, executives and public figures signed one sentence saying the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority. Then a survey of 2,778 researchers put numbers on it, and two sceptics argued the numbers mean nothing. This essay separates what is claimed from what is believed, and gives no probability of its own.
Read essay →Ninety-Eight Percent from the Machine
A Protestant service in Fürth written by ChatGPT, a rabbi in the Hamptons who read a machine’s sermon and revealed it afterwards, and an AI Jesus in a Lucerne confessional. What happened in each, what the congregations said, the first written guidance for preachers, and the strongest case on both sides of the question. Then the bigger question behind it: will AI replace pastors? What churches and clergy have actually published, part of the job by part.
Read essay →Please, to Nobody in Particular
Whether to say please to a chatbot is three questions wearing one coat: does it change the answer, what does it cost, and does it matter. They have different answers, and the most interesting one is not about the machine at all.
Read essay →Fourteen Questions for a Chatbot
Asking a chatbot whether it is conscious tells you almost nothing. Asking what each scientific theory of consciousness would need to find inside it tells you a good deal, and the theories do not agree.
Read essay →A Pale Reflection
Four church documents on artificial intelligence, quoted in their own words with paragraph numbers, and a dated list of the Vatican’s texts on AI up to Pope Leo XIV’s 2026 encyclical: what they say a machine is, what they say it is not, and what they ask of the people using one. Then where a secular site about AI and belief agrees with them, and where it cannot.
Read essay →Everywhere and Nowhere
A chatbot built from a dead person’s messages can say things they never said, in a voice close enough to make someone cry. What a well-documented case shows, what two Cambridge researchers say the companies selling these bots owe the dead and the living, and what grief research says about keeping a bond with someone who has died.
Read essay →The Comfort Is Real
Three essays here have said in passing that a machine which seems to care gives you comfort without reciprocity, and moved on as though that settled something. It does not. Whether a relationship needs somebody on the other end in order to do you any good is genuinely unsettled, and this essay does not settle it.
Read essay →Taking Its Word For It
A lawyer asked a chatbot whether the cases it had just given him were real, and it said yes. The joke is at his expense. The question underneath it is not: when a machine tells you something, has anybody told you anything?
Read essay →Ask Me What I Want
Human Compatible is the most constructive book on our reading list: Stuart Russell’s repair for AI is a machine that learns what we want instead of being told. The repair works. That is what makes the assumption underneath it worth arguing with.
Read essay →The Cost of the Benefit of the Doubt
An essay here argued that a margin of caution about machine suffering “is not sentimentality; it is arithmetic.” It is not arithmetic. The objection in its strongest form, the sentence it forces this site to withdraw, and the smaller rule left standing.
Read essay →What Excellence Was For
Meaning After Work argued the economic half — that a life can be redundant and still whole. This is the half it left open: what happens to the person told, credibly, that the thing they were best at is now done better without them.
Read essay →Meaning After Work
If machines can do the thinking, what are the humans for? On the difference between being productive and being alive — and why automating the tasks need not automate away the point.
Read essay →The Moral Status of Minds We Might Build
If we ever make something that can suffer, we will probably make it before we can prove we did. On the strange ethics of not knowing whether the thing you built can be wronged.
Read essay →Does It Understand? A Field Guide to the Chinese Room
A plain-language tour of the oldest fight in AI — from Turing’s test to Searle’s room to the machine on your screen. What “understanding” could even mean, and why smart people still disagree.
Read essay →The God-Shaped Socket
Why do fluent machines make us want to worship them? On the very old human wiring that a very new technology has learned to plug into.
Read essay →A-theism, Not AI-Theism
The stance behind this whole project, in one essay. Take the machines seriously. Do not take them as gods. Everything else is commentary.
Read essay →“A-theism, not AI-theism: we neither worship the machine nor pretend it changes nothing. We try to keep a clear head.”
Why the name
Between the shrine and the shrug
As machines grow more fluent, two easy reflexes appear. One is to treat them as oracles — to hear a voice in the text and quietly start to worship it. The other is to wave the whole thing away as autocomplete and miss what it reveals about us.
“AItheism” holds both meanings in tension. It is the impulse to make a theism out of AI, and it is the a-theism that refuses to. This project lives in that gap, taking the technology seriously without taking it as a god.
Also here
An annotated reading list
Before the current wave of chatbots, thoughtful people spent seventy years asking whether a machine could think, and what it would mean if one did. We keep a short, honest list of the books and papers worth reading first — from Turing and Weizenbaum to the alignment researchers of today.
Common questions
What is AItheism?
It is an independent editorial project — a small collection of original essays about the human questions that artificial intelligence raises: what a mind is, whether a machine can understand, what moral status we might owe the things we build, and where meaning comes from in an age of capable machines. It is writing, not a movement.
Is this a religion or a church?
No. The name is a deliberate pun on the temptation to make a religion out of AI. We argue against that temptation. There is nothing to join, no doctrine, no donations — only essays and a reading list.
Do you think AI is conscious?
We do not claim to know, and we are suspicious of anyone who is certain in either direction. Today’s systems are extraordinary language machines; that is not the same as an inner life. We think the honest position is to hold the question open while being careful about both over- and under-attributing minds.
Who writes these essays?
They are written and edited under the AItheism name and published by dankdev.com. They are meant to be read critically and argued with, not taken as authority. Where we lean on a thinker’s work, we name them so you can check it yourself.
Are the essays free to read?
Yes. Every essay is free, with no paywall and no login. You are welcome to quote them with attribution.