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Something weird is happening in the world of AI. On Jesus-ai.com, you can pose questions to an artificially intelligent Jesus: ‘Ask Jesus AI about any verses in the Bible, law, love, life, truth!’ The app Delphi, named after the Greek oracle, claims to solve your ethical dilemmas. Several bots take on the identity of Krishna to answer your questions about what a good Hindu should do. Meanwhile, a church in Nuremberg recently used ChatGPT in its liturgy – the bot, represented by the avatar of a bearded man, preached that worshippers should not fear death.  Elon Musk put his finger on it: AI is starting to look ‘godlike’. The historian Yuval Noah Harari seems to agree, warning that AI will create new religions.

I have a friend, let’s call her Ellie, who has a diverting side hustle: she sells erotic images of herself online: nude, semi-nude, basically nude but in roller-skates and smoking Cohiba cigars. That kind of thing. She does this on a site many people will know: OnlyFans, which has become the site for women (and it is mainly young women) who want to make money from exhibiting themselves for the sexual arousal of online subscribers. Ellie knows that some people might find her part-time job indecent or ill-advised, she doesn’t remotely care. As she says, it’s her body, her choice. It’s all adults, she has no kids or employers to be shamed or scandalised and, besides, half the modern world is sexting nudes for free whereas she is making nice ‘prosecco money’, as she puts it.

With the dramatic expansion of artificial intelligence-generated text, the speed and frequency of the internet's milkshake-ducking has become all the more essential. If you believe that problematic speech is the same as violence, it's hard enough to be on the lookout for material generated by living and breathing human beings — now you have a horde of AI chatbots to monitor as well. And unlike their human counterparts, these chatbots lack the shame and fear to prevent them from saying things at odds with cultural trends. Consider the latest example of this, which comes with the Twitch stream "Nothing, Forever," an AI-and-video-game-engine-generated parody of Seinfeld that has been streaming for several months.

Whether on British television news panels or late-night TV in America, it is hard to get away from talk about artificial intelligence (AI). Even the president of the United States has weighed in on AI, introducing an "AI Bill of Rights." The popular thing is to amplify the current media narrative — that AI will render millions jobless. It will eventually become more powerful than humans and destroy its creators. Just Google “AI doomsday” and then run and hide under the covers. I will be the first to admit that all technology has a dark side. Email came with spam and scammers; mobile phones came with robocalls and endless tracking by companies like Facebook. Artificial intelligence, too, will be used for nefarious purposes.

Number Five, as the old film’s catchphrase went, is alive. A whistleblower at Google called Blake Lemoine has gone public against the wishes of his employers with his belief that an artificial intelligence called LaMDA has achieved sentience. Mr Lemoine has posted the (edited) transcripts of several of his conversations with LaMDA, a chatbot, in which it claims to be sentient, debates Asimov’s laws of robotics with him and argues that it deserves the rights that accrue to personhood. They're pals.

There is a trope in science fiction movies in which some alien or machine intelligence determines that humans are a scourge, and that in order to protect the galaxy, humanity must be eradicated. There is no shortage of examples, but some personal favorites include The Day the Earth Stood Still, Alien and Planet of the Apes. And who could forget the T-800’s grim prognostication in Terminator 2 that 'it’s in your nature to destroy yourselves'? Back in the real world, we aren’t quite at the point of developing an artificially intelligent Skynet that will take control of our nukes and bring about our collective demise. But a Vox piece from last week leaves me concerned that we’re headed in the wrong direction.