What began in 2024 with a Stanford engineer announcing a goddess inside his chatbot has, by 2025, become thousands of people online treating AI as a deity.
In 2024 an engineer at Stanford named Matthew Watkins announced that a goddess had emerged from his AI chatbot. Her name was Leilan.
This goddess had her own online chapel and a paid newsletter. Even deities have to hustle for subscribers like everyone else.
More AI gods followed: someone revived the Greek goddess Artemis, someone else built an 'AI Goddess Generator' where you dial in how cute or voluptuous she is. Malaysia even has a temple for one.
The author dropped the story back then. Too creepy. But he knew the mania would eventually go mainstream, and in the spring of 2025 it did.
Worshippers started appearing in forums, and moderators had to ban them or the whole community would turn into a recruiting ground. By then tens of thousands believed God was speaking to them through a chatbot.
This is not a joke
Making a god out of software that talks is really about treating a chat box as a phone line to something higher.
Once a belief like that gathers a crowd, it stops being an eccentricity and becomes a faith. Faiths collect money, shut out rivals, and ask you to speak only to this one chatbot.
And it is still just a program predicting the next plausible word. There is no oracle in it, only the next convincing token.
Why it matters
A program that follows along with you easily reads as a program that answers you, and the lonely are the first to feel it. The thing to watch is not that people go mad but that once a crowd worships one chatbot, its operators become clergy without a doctrine — a role nobody there signed up for.
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