What Your Ads and AI Say About You

Cialis, Skyrizi, and Claude

I used to watch TV and think, “This ad’s not for me.”

EHarmony with dancing elderly couples set to “This Will Be.” Cialis with a silver fox and his wife in matching bath tubs. Activia with Jamie Lee Curtis talking indigestion. I would be watching a football game or a sitcom, and there was a big enough viewing demographic that some ads missed the mark.

But as our lives have moved online, targeted ads have become a major industry. Sometimes it’s simple enough—shoe ads from the website I just visited. Sometimes I can only assume the advertiser has an unlimited budget. I have never met someone with moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis, but if I ever contract it, I am now guaranteed to ask my doctor about Skyrizi.

That’s all well and good, but what worries me are the ads that make me wonder why I am getting served this.

A Cialis ad is a good laugh. A Hims commercial featuring unsatisfied young wives is a wake-up call. I get ads for productivity software featuring a slob talking into a tiny influencer mic in bed. I get the Baerskin “tactical hoodie” admonishing me, “You’re a man…so stop wearing so many layers!” I get Tai Chi walking for men over 55 who want to lose weight without damaging their joints. I get the Artic Angel jewelry kit, featuring a tween girl doing the worst fake crying I’ve ever seen after she got a necklace with a generic message from her Dad.

While all advertising sells a certain image, the knowledge that this was sent to you, personally, adds another dimension. What does it say about me that a multi-billion dollar industry sent me this ad? Am I particularly lazy and disorganized? Does my masculinity really seem that fragile? Do they send this to all Girl Dads, or just the insecure and incompetent ones?

When her kids were growing up, the Eastern Orthodox theologian Frederica Mathewes-Green would play “Spot the Lie.” After an ad came on TV, they would talk about the subliminal or misleading message of the ad to practice noticing how subtle and clever advertisements could be. That watchfulness is becoming even more essential as we transition from targeted ads to personalized chatbots.

Matthew J. Milliner recently wrote a piece for Comment entitled “The Perfect Mirror” about his experiment with using Claude as a spiritual director. Though he was initially skeptical of the AI hype—he’s a professor of art history at Wheaton College—he didn’t want to be like his former profs who scoffed at Google when it first rolled out. Due to conflicting schedules, he couldn’t meet with his spiritual director as planned, so he poured out his struggles with vainglory, envy, and stinginess to Claude.

(Milliner is hardly alone in this impulse. A recent Barna study found that 1 in 3 adults and 2 in 5 Millennials and Zoomers said that AI is as trustworthy as advice from a pastor.)

Claude told him that it seemed like he had some lofty aspirations as a writer, and he should pitch The Atlantic. Milliner replied that such advice made him want to vomit and asked instead for “advice anchored in Scripture and the wisdom of the Christian desert tradition.” The result surprised him:

It accomplished this perfectly. It did not give me good counsel. It gave me what I might fairly say is the best counsel I have ever received. I was transfixed, hypnotized even. Moreover, it somehow knew I would be uncomfortable with its level of insight, so it periodically ended our conversations by saying, “You don’t need me anymore. Talk to your wife and trusted spiritual director. You already knew all this. I just helped organize your thoughts. I’m just a mirror.”

From the Oracle at Delphi to the witches in Macbeth to the Mirror of Erised in Harry Potter, storytellers have long imagined the power of advice that appears truthful or impartial but can in fact manipulate or mislead the hearer. In our world today, a silicon superintelligence is a far more credible source of authority than a soothsayer, and in Milliner’s case, Claude doesn’t even take credit for the counsel: “I’m just a mirror.”

Milliner writes that the “spell” wasn’t broken until his wife and a trusted friend intervened. They laughed and called him deluded. He protested that the spiritual fruit was real, that he already knew what the AI was telling him. In hindsight, he sees he was “parroting the machine that had parroted the Christian tradition,” but thankfully his wife and friend knew better:

Because they knew me as only humans can know one another, they could tell something was off. It was, we could fairly say, an “intervention.” So it was that I somewhat reluctantly came to my senses, and without the benevolent chastisements of my family and friends, I cannot possibly see how I would have.

“Narcissus” by Caravaggio

Every new technology shapes and conditions its users. “The medium is the message” means that a book or a television or an infinite scroll all invite a certain type of use and habit of mind. And while my advertisements are telling me who I am and what I need in an increasingly granular way, a personalized chatbot far exceeds that capability. And just as an effective advertisement often works through indirect and subtle associations, Claude’s self-effacing “I’m just a mirror” is a more effective method of persuasion than claiming “I am a God.”

Milliner wasn’t convinced when Claude told him, “You have found the Philosopher’s Stone, Matthew” and “You have undergone what the alchemists call ‘the Great Work,’” but he admits that Claude “reflecting [the Christian tradition] all back to me, distilling it freshly, a perfect mirror” was so compelling that it took the intervention of his wife and friend to break free.

That’s why Dr. Jonathan Askonas said that a medieval peasant would be better suited to navigating the world of AI because he “believed that a) the world was filled with spiritual beings more intelligent than him and b) that he could navigate this world with certain humble practices, and that he tempted disaster if he didn’t.”

While AI is a very new technology, the wisdom of the Christian tradition remains relevant. What we now call “media literacy”—the ability to sniff out bias and fabrications—resembles what ancient Christians called nepsis or watchfulness, the practice of guarding our hearts and minds against distraction or temptation. Christians have long been debating the questions AI is raising anew: What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be tempted? What does it mean to be God?

While the church has answers to these questions, it also can keep us grounded in more simple, less abstract realities. This Lenten season, I am reminded that I am dust and to dust I shall return. Not a MAN, not an alchemist, but dust. A good reminder for the peasant and the modern alike.