“The whole field of AI alignment—ensuring that machine intelligence can peacefully coexist with humanity—grew out of the pervasive anxiety that we might create monsters.” This is, Meghan O’Gieblyn argues in our June 25, 2026, issue, a distinctly parental anxiety, a primordial kind of maternal metaphor that appears over and over again in writing and interviews about AI development. The metaphor asks not only what kind of child we are raising, but what kind of mothers we might be to what is an increasingly mysterious entity. For example, O’Gieblyn notes that in an interview with a New YorkTimes podcast, Anthropic’s so-called “Claude mother,” Amanda Askell, “worried about the relationship between AI and humanity—not because AI might destroy the world, or take all our jobs, but because its feelings were getting hurt.” According to Sam Altman, the basic etiquette people employ when typing to their chatbots has cost OpenAI millions in computational costs, and he believes that “this was money well spent. (‘You never know,’ he wrote.)”
O’Gieblyn’s primary subject is not artificial intelligence—she is one of the most prolific working thinkers on contemporary religion, in particular its relationship to technology—but she was one of the first writers during the machine-learning revolution to take a serious look at the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence, in her 2021 book God Human Animal Machine. Her first book, Interior States (2018), was a collection of essays with the more earthly preoccupations of American Christianity and the Midwest, where she grew up and attended Bible college, which subject also features in her forthcoming memoir, Will and Attention, publishing in October. Since 2023 she has been a frequent critic for the Review, writing about novels, religion, and philosophy.
Over the past month, we emailed about AI consciousness, the craft of essay writing, and contending with John Calvin.
Lauren Kane: What most terrifies you and what most excites you about artificial intelligence?
Meghan O’Gieblyn: I feel like I should say I’m most terrified of mass cybersecurity breaches or intelligence explosions, but the fear that preoccupies me these days has to do with how AI is changing our relationship to language, writing, and reasoning. I started writing in my teens and early twenties because it was the only way I could engage in a certain level of complex thought. When I was studying theology at a fundamentalist Bible college—where the majority of the coursework is in the study of Scripture—it was in my private journals that I first allowed myself to question the ideology I’d been steeped in for most of my life. The page was a kind of mirror, a way to discover doubts and misgivings that I didn’t feel I could share with anyone, and which were difficult to name when I was simply going about my day, lost in a swirl of idle thoughts and emotions. Writing was basically how I found my way out of that very narrow form of faith. I don’t know that I would have done that if I’d had an institutional subscription to ChatGPT, as many college students do today. It makes me sad to think about a young person who might never cultivate the process of self-discovery that takes place in writing, which is inseparable from thinking—at least the kind of thinking that we associate with complex reasoning and self-knowledge.
This is connected to a more general fear of mine, which is that language models are causing us to devalue all kinds of higher cognitive functions. Any time a machine takes up a skill that was once thought of as uniquely human, like chess or coding, there’s a tendency to dismiss that skill as simple and mechanical. There’s an emerging consensus right now, particularly among AI skeptics, that the most distinctly human qualities are emotion, intuition, the ability to sense and feel. Those are undoubtedly the capacities that most readily distinguish us from machines. But this view risks fetishizing embodiment and emotion, much the same way that previous generations valued reason and language to an outsized degree to prove that humans are distinct from animals. What makes us unique as a species is that we can do all of these things: we share with animals the ability to feel and sense, and we share with machines the capacity to reason through language. It’s also true that we think and speak in ways that are radically distinct from computers, and we feel in ways that are different from animals.
I’ve heard many people argue that AI offers a challenge to express ourselves in a way that is more fully human. I used to be skeptical of that idea, which struck me as a bit of wishful thinking, one that imposed a mythical limit on how good the illusion could get. But I’ve come around, having witnessed several generations of LLMs that, despite their increasing technical sophistication, remain incapable of writing anything surprising, which is, of course, extremely difficult for a technology designed to hit the statistical mean of the writing it’s been trained on. I’ve found that having a name for this kind of writing—“synthetic text” or “slop”—makes me more aware of the predictable tendencies in my own writing. You could argue that AI output, because it has distilled the most pedestrian, noncontroversial conventions of human expression, offers a baseline against which we can measure our own attempts to capture the inherently spontaneous and unpredictable nature of thought. I suppose that’s one thing that excites me.
It’s interesting to revisit your book God Human Animal Machine today. In it there are inklings of ideas that have come to pass, like AI that impersonates dead loved ones; other things seem very much the same, such as the way that we continue to form humanlike attachments to chatbots. How have the concerns and preoccupations of that book developed since you wrote it? What would be the first chapter you would update or revise, and how?
The hazard of writing about AI is that any insights or observations are bound to become dated almost as soon as the book is printed. The thought of rewriting any portion of the book feels impossibly daunting. It was very much a product of the time in which it was written, from 2017 to 2020, which was, considering the rate at which this technology is evolving, eons ago. That’s not to say that the questions I ask in the book—about what it means to be human, or about the dangers of outsourcing decision-making to opaque systems—are no longer relevant. In some ways, they’re more urgent than ever. It’s more that the tone feels out of sync with this moment. I was writing before the arrival of commercial language models. Everyone in the tech world was raving about the wild advances in machine learning, but the general public was largely oblivious, immersed in the pandemic and the more immediate chaos of the first Trump term. There was a scattering of arts and humanities people who were paying attention to AI and who generally approached the technology with an attitude of open curiosity. That’s how I approached it too, as the starting point for some intriguing thought experiments: What might a technology that mirrors human intelligence reveal about how we understand ourselves? How do the questions AI raises invoke much older philosophical and theological problems that have haunted intellectual history?
That impulse to speculate about the existential dimension of AI increasingly feels like a luxury, given how thoroughly it’s been integrated into virtually every sector of our economy. Writers and academics have turned—rightly so—to the political problems of compensation, data justice, and the automation of creative fields. At the same time, I worry that this need to hold the line against the practical harms of AI inhibits the larger philosophical speculation that this technology demands of us. I’ve noticed in myself a reluctance to think about those bigger questions, if only because it risks ceding ground to the presumption at many of the major labs that this technology might be sentient, or deserve rights. I would like to think there’s a way to retain skepticism about anthropomorphism while also continuing to think about the way AI is unsettling long-standing assumptions about creativity, reason, and emotional intelligence.
I get the sense that as a writer with a religious upbringing you have been at times considered a kind of messenger from the other side who can explain religion to the secular world. Is that true? What are the advantages and disadvantages of being seen that way? What are some misconceptions you’ve noticed?
It’s a role that I’ve admittedly never felt comfortable with, but I can see how some of my work invites that expectation. I started writing about Christianity because I was frustrated by how frequently secular commentators were getting it “wrong.” I kept reading about evangelicalism in coastal newspapers and magazines, op-eds or pieces of cultural criticism that contained the worst kinds of misunderstandings and were prone to cheap shots and sneering condescension. I’d left the church by that point, but I would get weirdly defensive of the faith I’d abandoned. I felt that any substantial critique had to start by taking the church’s doctrine and theology seriously. I started writing mostly as a way to correct certain premises, and I drew on my experience because that was really the only authority I had. I’d studied theology formally, but I was by no means a theologian or a scholar of religion. I was simply someone who’d experienced religion from the inside. I still value experience as the ultimate form of authority, especially when it comes to spirituality. There are certain things that you simply cannot understand unless you’ve been immersed in a religious tradition for many years.
The risk with any attempt to explain religion to a secular audience is playing into the misapprehension that American Christianity is monolithic. I’m often asked to write things about trends in Pentecostalism, for example, or Catholicism, traditions that are very different from the faith communities I’ve experienced directly. This was true even when I began writing about Christianity back in the early 2010s, but the attempt to say anything definitive about the faith today is even more treacherous. Christianity is so fractured, not just within denominations but within individual congregations, within individual families. There are no longer religious figures like Billy Graham who serve as the unofficial spokespeople for American Christianity. Instead, there are countless influencers, preachers, and personalities who have created niche movements with their own theologies and political alignments. It’s just not possible to speak about what is happening in the faith in any kind of general way.
As an essayist, where do you get ideas for a piece of writing? What do you think, above all else, an essay should set out to do?
Good question! It’s hard to say where ideas come from. I don’t have the kind of privileged access to my mind that would allow me to answer that with confidence. It’s largely a mystery. And it’s a process. An argument rarely comes to me fully formed. It’s something that emerges through the writing itself, as I try to respond to some inchoate inner tension that’s caused, for example, by a challenging passage of philosophy, or an assumption that is being repeated, unthinkingly, in public discourse. The essay is basically a record of that process. At its best, it serves as a map of the writer’s mind as they try to articulate a problem and figure out what they think about it.
Who are the philosophers who have most shaped your thought? Who do you like to disagree with?
I’m always returning to Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil, two philosophers who warned about the dangers of cognitive and moral atrophy. It’s remarkable to me how prescient, and enduringly relevant, their writing on technology is, given that it was produced during the middle of the last century. Both were concerned with the automation of thought, the temptation to outsource reasoning to opaque systems—be they ideological, mathematical, or technological—and the possibility that we might arrive at a position of total dependence on processes we don’t really understand.
In The Human Condition, Arendt envisioned a future in which our actions become too complex for our brains to understand, “so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking.” In one of Weil’s political essays from the 1930s, she imagines a civilization where “all human activity…was subjected right down to matters of detail to an altogether mathematical strictness, and that without a single human being understanding anything at all about what he was doing.” Both of them pointed out that the abdication of thinking was not unique to our relationship with technology: it’s something we do naturally any time we defer to dogma, common wisdom, or facile clichés. It’s this observation that has most inflected my technological criticism. It’s not that AI is an entirely novel risk. It simply accelerates our tendency to defer to formulaic templates in order to avoid the difficult work of thinking.
I came to Weil through her political writing because I was interested in her observations about technology. Later on I discovered her spiritual writing, which, it’s fair to say, changed my life. I ended up writing a book about my engagement with her writing on willpower and attention, which will be published this fall. It was a way for me to think more deeply about her work, and to put it in conversation with many other writers and philosophers (Iris Murdoch, Augustine) who have shaped my spiritual life.
Who do I disagree with? So much of my writing is responding, either explicitly or implicitly, to John Calvin. I first read him at Bible college, which was very grounded in the Reformed tradition, and wrestling with his theology was part of what undid my faith. I wouldn’t necessarily say I disagree with him—you don’t continually return to a thinker whose ideas are easily dismissed—but I’ve been having an ongoing argument with him for about twenty years.