The world could soon see the first religion that attracts devotees with sacred texts created by artificial intelligence, the historian Yuval Noah Harari said.
The Israeli scholar, known for the best-selling book Sapiens, told a science conference that AI systems such as ChatGPT have breached a new threshold because they are capable of using language to shape human culture.
“Simply by gaining mastery of the human language, AI has all it needs in order to cocoon us in a Matrix-like world of illusions,” he told the Frontiers Forum science conference in Switzerland.
“Contrary to what some conspiracy theories assume, you don’t really need to implant chips in people’s brains in order to control them or to manipulate them. For thousands of years, prophets and poets and politicians have used language and storytelling in order to manipulate and to control people and to reshape society,” Harari said