Some years ago, bumper stickers appeared with the slogan, “God is my copilot.”
A little later some animal lovers came up with an alternative sticker: “Dog is my copilot.”
Now when I open Microsoft Word, I’m offered the help of “Copilot,” Microsoft’s AI chatbot.
It looks like we now have got at least three options for support as we are navigating life.
I am using my AI tool Claude for various tasks these days and it is very useful. Recently I was thinking I should make a list of the titles and dates of all the blog posts I’ve written but hesitated because I knew it would be tedious. I asked Claude to do it, saying I think there have been around 200. Claude accepted the task and a few minutes later said, “Done — turns out you’re at 283 posts, not just ‘close to 200’! (Post #200 landed back in December 2024, and you’ve kept going strong since.) The index is chronological, oldest to newest, with each title linking straight to the post.”
It’s hard not to play along with the feel of a conversation with a person, so I replied, “Wow. I’m impressed. Thank you.”
Claude responded: “You’re very welcome! Four and a half years of weekly reflections is no small thing — glad you have the whole journey laid out in one place now. Happy blogging!”
What’s not to like about that? I’m saved from a unappealing task and the entity that does the work becomes my personal cheerleader.
The challenge becomes knowing how far to take the relationship.
Last January, the New York Times reporter Joseph Bernstein wrote a piece entitled “It Makes Sense That People See AI as God: A religious fervor surrounds our relationship with technology.”[i] In it he cites a series of studies exploring how AI is becoming something like a divine force in peoples’ lives. One example he gave was prayer.
You can turn to both for guidance. One thing great about AI is you can get a clear response within seconds. How often does that happen with God?
Bernstein says personal chatbots are designed to always affirm us so we will stay engaged; we soon can become more dependent on them — which is where profit lies. They tell us what we want to hear and avoid “hard truths.” We don’t have to go anywhere to get an answer – just be in front of a screen. And we don’t have to interact with other people who can sometimes be annoying.
In terms of spirituality, much of what our traditions offer us is affirmation: we are created in the divine image, we are loved, we are forgiven. But the traditions offer us more than that. They offer us practices that help us own our shortcomings and mistakes. Sometimes they offer us truths we may not want to hear — not to condemn or belittle us, but to help wake us up. To paraphrase a popular saying, “the divine meets us where we are but doesn’t leave us there.” We are called to recognize selfish tendencies when they appear. We are called to care for more than ourselves.
I have a friend who was a Jungian analyst and therapist. I used to see her when I wanted to understand a provocative dream or get some perspective on an important decision. She had established trust with me, so I knew she cared for me as a client and a person. But our relationship was strong enough that she could point out blind spots in my thinking. That didn’t always make my life easier, but it was welcome. It’s what I needed to hear.
In Mark 10, Jesus encounters a rich young ruler who asks, “What must I do to have eternal life?” Jesus tells him to keep the commandments. The rich young man says he’s done that but still feels he’s lacking something. Then Jesus does a second take – he looks closely at the man with love – and sees more deeply into him. He then tells him he needs to sell all he has, give the proceeds to the poor, and join Jesus’ community. But for the young man, that’s asking too much, and he goes away “grieving.” A.I. can offer a standard answer to a common question, but it will never look into someone’s heart with love and genuine insight.
Our traditions pass on stories and parables that can inspire and comfort us but also challenge us to go beyond what is comfortable to find something better. And being on the journey with others in spiritual community offers us both the real-life, hard-earned wisdom of other people and opportunities for us to offer each other support.
Some observers have begun to make a distinction between two options for our relationship with AI: “Cognitive offloading” and “Cognitive surrender. “Cognitive offloading is the use of external tools (like calculators or GPS) for strategic task delegation, where you remain in charge of the goal and critically verify the output. Cognitive surrender…occurs when you stop constructing answers altogether, passively accepting AI outputs as your own judgment.[ii]
I’m going to “offload” tasks to my AI tool Claude when it seems appropriate, letting it be my “AI copilot” for what it is good at doing. But I’m not going to surrender my important personal decisions; I’m keeping as my spiritual copilot the living, divine presence I’ve come to know and cherish over the years. And I’m not leaving my dog out – she’s welcome to share in my walks and naps, giving me a comfort a keyboard never can.
[i] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/23/style/ai-algorithm-god-religion.html
Steve Jacobsen, Ed.D 