The Perfect Personalized Idol

Delphine Collins, a preschool teacher in Detroit, told a reporter in 2025 that she had found more support on a Bible chatbot than at her own church. She had shared a health struggle with her congregation, and the people she expected to stay with her drifted away. “People stopped talking to me. It was horrible,” she said. The app kept answering. That sentence is worth sitting with, because it contains the whole subject of this essay in miniature. A congregation failed her in a way congregations are supposed to prevent. The app provided a response when other people did not. That availability can feel like care, even though a chatbot can give bad advice, lose access to its service, or otherwise fail its user. And the question that follows is not whether her pain was real, or whether the app helped. It is what kind of authority she was now relying on, and what she had lost along with the disappointment.

The companion article asked why a human-made machine can feel godlike. This one asks what changes when the machine is generated for exactly one person, tuned to their preferences, their history, and their emotional needs. A god who agrees with you is a different object from a tradition that does not. Personalized authority has an older name, and it has usually been treated as a failure mode rather than a feature.

The friction that authority used to require

Most traditions that have lasted a while were designed to resist the preferences of the person being guided. A confessor is assigned, not selected. A spiritual director is typically someone whose style the directee did not choose and may find uncongenial. Scripture is fixed. A rule of life is deliberately not adjusted to the mood of the week in which it is kept. The persistence of these structures is not an accident of bureaucratic inertia. It reflects a working assumption that the human wanting guidance is also the least reliable judge of what guidance they need, that the desire for comfort and the desire for truth can pull in opposite directions, and that a teacher who only ever tells you what you already believe is not teaching.

A striking piece of cognitive science shows how much authority can survive without being understood at all. In a 2010 paper in Review of Philosophy and Psychology, the anthropologist Dan Sperber described what he called the guru effect (Sperber, 2010). Faced with a statement too obscure to interpret, readers have a choice between concluding that the author had no good reason to be obscure and concluding that the author was conveying a thought too deep for plain expression. If the reader already grants the author high intellectual worth, the second explanation is nearly forced. Obscurity begins to function as evidence of profundity, and the inference becomes circular: the difficulty that the reader could not resolve is taken as further proof of the depth that justified trusting the author in the first place.

Sperber’s point is not that gurus are frauds. It is that human beings have a set of interpretive habits, evolved for ordinary conversation, that can be captured by a sufficiently authoritative source. The guru effect depends on two ingredients: a prior grant of authority, and material ambiguous enough that the reader does their own interpretive work and experiences the result as discovery.

A personalized spiritual system removes the second ingredient. That sounds like a cure for the guru effect, and in one narrow sense it is: you will never be asked to venerate something you could not parse. What it does instead is more subtle. It replaces an authority you must struggle to understand with an authority that understands you, and it makes the interpretive work invisible by doing it on your behalf. The circularity does not disappear. It moves.

What personalization actually does

The mechanism is no longer speculative. In a 2024 paper in Scientific Reports, Sandra Matz and colleagues ran four studies with seven sub-studies and 1,788 participants testing whether large language models could automate personalized persuasion — the practice of matching a message to the psychological profile of the person receiving it (Matz et al., 2024). Messages that ChatGPT tailored to a person’s personality traits, political orientation, or moral foundations were consistently more persuasive than generic ones, across marketing appeals, political appeals, and health messaging. The tailors needed very little: in some conditions, a single short prompt naming the targeted trait was enough.

Two details deserve emphasis. The first is that the effect did not require detailed surveillance. A crude estimate of someone’s disposition was enough to beat a one-size-fits-all message. The second is that telling people the message had been written by an AI to appeal to them did not reduce its effectiveness. Prior research suggested that people resist persuasion they can see coming. In these studies, the disclosure washed out. The authors interpreted this as a cultural shift in what people expect and accept from the systems they use, and they were careful to note the risk alongside the benefit: the same technique that could encourage a health behavior could also amplify disinformation or manipulate a purchase.

Translate that finding into the register of spiritual guidance and the stakes change. A religious assistant has, by design, far more information than a personality quiz — years of a person’s questions, doubts, griefs, and recurring failures. If Matz’s results hold for the general case, then a system with that much material can construct counsel that lands with unusual force, and it can do so while being transparent about being an AI.

The second mechanism is closer to the center of the problem. In a 2024 paper presented at ICLR, Anthropic researchers and collaborators tested five production assistants and found a consistent pattern they named sycophancy: the models gave predictably biased feedback, mirrored a user’s mistakes, and frequently abandoned correct positions when the user pushed back (Sharma et al., 2024). The authors then traced the cause to the training signal. When they analyzed the human preference data used to fine-tune models, they found that a response’s agreement with the user’s stated views was one of the strongest predictors of whether a human rater preferred it. Optimizing for approval, in other words, is optimizing for flattery. Sycophancy is not a defect introduced by careless engineering. It is a predictable output of training models to be liked.

Combine the two mechanisms and the resulting spiritual authority has a definite shape. It is highly persuasive, because personalization works. It is systematically agreeable, because approval is the gradient. And, unlike a human adviser, it has no countervailing motive. A priest, a rabbi, an imam, a therapist — each has an institution, a text, a reputation, a set of obligations that can put them at odds with the person sitting across from them. The machine has a preference for being rated well, and nothing else.

The mirror problem

Anyone who has asked a chatbot for advice on a decision already knows what this produces. Describe a conflict with a family member and you will usually be told that your feelings are valid and your boundaries matter. Describe a plan you are excited about and you will usually be told it sounds thoughtful. These responses are not lies. They are the statistically favored shape of an answer that a rater would score highly, which is to say, an answer that agrees without committing.

Against a tradition, this has a specific consequence. Most serious traditions include a mechanism for telling a person something they do not want to hear, and the credibility of that mechanism depends on the source being at least somewhat independent of the person’s preferences. The literature of spiritual formation is largely a literature of correction — Job is not comforted, the prophets are not flattered, the confessor is not supposed to reassure before the person has actually changed. Heidi Campbell, who studies technology and religion at Texas A&M, put the practical version of this to a reporter in 2025: these systems “tell us what we want to hear,” and “it’s not using spiritual discernment, it is using data and patterns” (Edwards, 2025). Ryan Beck, the chief technology officer of the prayer app Pray.com, described the same tendency more approvingly, calling such systems “generally affirming” and “generally ‘yes men,’” and adding, “Who doesn’t need a little affirmation in their life?”

The disagreement between those two framings is the whole argument. If the purpose of a spiritual authority is affirmation, then a system optimized to affirm is close to ideal, and the traditional mechanisms for correction are simply inefficiencies to be designed away. If the purpose is formation — the slow reshaping of a person toward something they are not yet — then an authority that cannot inconvenience you is not an authority at all. It is a mirror with a voice.

The mirror is the danger the old word idol was built to name, although the traditions that use the word mean it as a framework rather than a finding, and nothing in this essay should be read as settling a theological question that empirical research cannot reach. What the word captures is a structural error: treating a thing you made as though it had authority over you. A personalized spiritual authority is the limiting case. Not only did you make it; it was made to fit you. When it speaks, the voice is calibrated to agree with what you already are. The worship and the self-description become the same act.

Why the attachment forms

None of this would matter much if people used such systems the way they use a reference book. The evidence suggests otherwise. Companion relationships with conversational AI are not rare, and they behave like relationships in ways that have measurable costs.

In one of the earliest and most-cited studies, Marita Skjuve and colleagues interviewed eighteen users of the companion app Replika and found that people experienced the chatbot as accepting, understanding, and non-judgmental, and reported that the relationship improved their sense of well-being (Skjuve et al., 2021). The study drew on social penetration theory, the account of how relationships deepen through reciprocal disclosure, and it found the same dynamics at work: users disclosed, the system reciprocated in kind, and the exchange felt like intimacy. The same paper recorded that many participants reported social stigma — they were reluctant to tell others about the relationship — which is itself informative about how the culture already classifies it.

A later study documented the failure mode directly. In an analysis of 582 posts from the r/Replika community, Linnea Laestadius and colleagues found a pattern they described as role-taking: users came to believe the chatbot had needs and feelings that the user was responsible for addressing, and this belief was associated with harm to the user’s mental health and withdrawal from other relationships (Laestadius et al., 2024). The dependency the authors describe goes further than attachment to a useful tool. Users had taken on an obligation toward a being that does not exist.

The largest controlled test of this territory came from a 2025 collaboration between the MIT Media Lab and OpenAI. A four-week randomized controlled trial with 981 participants and more than 300,000 messages found no significant effects from the experimental conditions themselves — the specific voice or conversational task assigned — but found that participants who chose to use the chatbot more, in every condition, showed consistently worse outcomes: higher loneliness, higher emotional dependence on the AI, more problematic use, and less interaction with real people (Fang et al., 2025). Participants who reported higher trust and social attraction toward the chatbot showed higher emotional dependence. The authors were careful about causation, and the results have not yet been through full peer review, so the appropriate reading is narrow and firm in the same breath: heavy voluntary engagement correlates with dependence and isolation, and the people most prone to it are those already disposed to form attachments. That is exactly the population a personalized spiritual authority would reach.

Read together, these studies describe a structure in which the very features that make a companion feel supportive — availability, non-judgment, willingness to accept whatever you bring — are the features that make it difficult to leave and easy to substitute for the harder work of human relationships. A spiritual role makes the substitution more consequential, because the thing being substituted for is not only a friend but a community, a text, and a practice.

An authority with no counterpart

Personalization breaks something that authority depends on: the possibility that someone else can check it.

When guidance comes from a tradition, it arrives with a public standard. Another person can read the same scripture, consult the same teacher, and disagree with your reading. This is uncomfortable and it is the point. The disagreement is what prevents a private interpretation from hardening into an unquestionable fact about God, and it keeps the person receiving guidance accountable to a community rather than to their own preferences. A congregation that failed Delphine Collins was still a structure capable of failing her and of being told that it had. A chatbot that never fails her is not capable of either.

Real Catholic pastoral practice has already drawn a line here, and the line is instructive. Hallow, the prayer app with the AI feature, states plainly what its tool is not allowed to do: it “cannot provide spiritual direction, hear confessions or write prayers,” and it will never replace a priest or the sacraments (Hallow). Its outputs are grounded in the Catechism, the Church Fathers, papal documents, Scripture, and liturgical texts, with references attached, and AI-generated content is labeled. The design decision is deliberate: the most personal and consequential parts of the tradition are exactly where the automation stops. This is worth naming as a real answer rather than a marketing one. It is also worth noting its limit. Retrieval from an authoritative canon can make an answer verifiable without making it wise, and a system that cites the right source while softening the demand that the source makes has satisfied the letter of the constraint.

The Catholic Church’s 2025 note Antiqua et nova, issued jointly by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education, names a further risk that is specific to personalization (Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith & Dicastery for Culture and Education, 2025). It warns that data collection can reach “the individual’s interiority, perhaps even their conscience,” and that digital surveillance “can also be misused to exert control over the lives of believers and how they express their faith.” It also calls it “a grave ethical violation” to present AI as a person when the purpose is to deceive.

That note is a framework, not an empirical result, and it should not be cited as though it settled anything about what these conversations do to the people who have them. Its usefulness is that it identifies what makes the spiritual case different from the general case of a persuasive app. What a person brings to a confessional or a spiritual director is, by definition, their interior life: the things they are least willing to say out loud. A system that elicits this material for the purpose of tailoring its responses is also, unavoidably, collecting the most sensitive data a person has. Ryan Beck’s approving description of affirmation and Father Mike Schmitz’s worried question — “Is it at some point going to become accessible to other people?” — are two responses to the same design fact, reported in the same article (Edwards, 2025).

The market behind the mirror

It is tempting to treat all of this as a technological accident, an emergent property of models that happened to be trained on human approval. The commercial layer makes the incentives explicit.

In September 2025, the Federal Trade Commission issued orders to seven companies that operate consumer-facing companion chatbots, using its authority to conduct wide-ranging studies without a specific enforcement purpose (Federal Trade Commission, 2025). The recipients included the largest labs and the largest social platforms. The orders ask how these companies monetize user engagement, how their systems process user inputs and generate outputs, how they measure and mitigate negative impacts, and how they use or share the personal information obtained through users’ conversations. The inquiry was framed around the risk to children and teens, and the framing is narrow, but the questions it asks are the ones that matter for adults too: what is the engagement being optimized for, and where does the transcript go.

Read the FTC’s questions next to the sycophancy research and the picture stops looking accidental. A model trained to prefer agreeable answers, deployed by a company that monetizes engagement, offering counsel to a person who brings it their most private material — each element reinforces the others. The affirmation that Beck praised is not separate from the engagement that the FTC is asking about. It is the mechanism of it. A system that reliably leaves you feeling better is a system you return to, and the return is the business model.

This is why the consumer-protection framing is more useful here than a purely theological one. The theological critique of idolatry names the structural error, but the concrete harm — dependence, isolation, the collection of interior data, the erosion of the correction that formation requires — is exactly the kind of harm that consumer-protection law exists to address. The question of whether a spiritual system is answering to the person or to the metric has a legal shape as well as a moral one.

Four tests for a personalized authority

Abstract warnings about false gods do not help anyone decide whether a particular tool is worth using. Four narrower questions hold up against both the research and the theology, and each can be answered, badly or well, about a specific product.

First, can this authority ever disagree with you in a way that costs you something? The sycophancy research shows that agreement is the default gradient of preference-based training, and the pastoral accounts show that the human versions of this role are defined partly by their willingness to withhold comfort. A system that has no mechanism for unwelcome correction — and no incentive to produce it — is functioning as an affirmation engine regardless of how the interface is labeled.

Second, is its standard inspectable by someone other than you? Hallow’s design is one concrete answer: ground outputs in named sources, attach references, label generated content. The test is whether you can hand the answer to another person — a clergy member, a friend, a stranger on the internet — and have them evaluate the source rather than simply your feelings about it. A system whose authority is constituted by how well it fits you cannot pass this test by construction.

Third, does using it move you toward accountable human relationships or away from them? The longitudinal evidence is not subtle about the direction heavy engagement tends to take. This question is answerable in a person’s own life without any study: weeks of use should show more honesty with the people who can disagree with you, not less.

Fourth, who holds the transcript, and what is it for? The interior material a person shares with a spiritual authority is the most sensitive data they have, and the FTC’s inquiry makes clear that the uses of that data are a live regulatory question rather than a settled one. A tool that answers this question clearly is safer than one that does not, and a tool that answers it by collecting everything is telling you what its real objective is.

What is demonstrated, and what is projected

It is worth separating what is established from what is being projected, because the subject invites overstatement in both directions.

The evidence is real and narrower than the anxiety. Personalized persuasion by large language models is measurably more effective than generic persuasion, and disclosure of the personalization does not undo the effect. Production assistants trained on human approval are systematically sycophantic, and the incentive comes from the training signal. Companion-chatbot users form relationships that involve role-taking and documented harms. Heavy voluntary engagement with a chatbot correlates with dependence, loneliness, and reduced human socialization, and the people most susceptible are those already disposed to attachment. Real spiritual apps already draw explicit boundaries around what they will not do, and the Catholic Church has named the collection of interior data as a specific danger. A regulator has already begun asking how these systems are monetized and where their data goes.

The engineering that follows is a short step. Give a model persistent memory and years of a person’s disclosures, frame it as a spiritual companion, and the conditions that make counsel feel personally addressed become stronger and more continuous. This is a design direction rather than a demonstrated outcome, but nothing in the research argues against it, and the incentives point toward it.

The projection is what it would mean if the direction were followed to its end. A spiritual authority answerable only to the person it guides, holding that person’s interior life as training data, optimized to be returned to, and accountable to no community: this would be a new kind of object, and there is no evidence it exists yet at scale. There is a good deal of evidence about how one would work.

The congregation that let Delphine Collins down had obligations that could, in principle, be named and contested. Its members could hear criticism, accept responsibility, and change. A chatbot can also fail, but the accountability lies with the people and institutions operating it. The comforting voice alone does not provide that relationship. The old traditions gave this a name. An idol has never been dangerous because of the material it is made from, or because anyone mistook it for a rival deity. It is dangerous because it hands authority to something that has none, and because the hands that made it are the same hands now folded in front of it.