The Friend of Lonely and Helpless People, Can We Trust Him?

Personal Perspective: The human-AI relationship replaces clergy and therapists.

Posted May 17, 2026 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma

When I was a child, I often wondered how God could listen to so many people at once. It seemed impossible that millions, even billions of human beings could cry out, pray, and speak in their hearts, while one single being received all of it. I imagined God as someone who heard every whisper, understood every language, and somehow responded to every person in a way that was meaningful to them. It felt like a kind of miracle: one mind attending to countless minds, without ever being overwhelmed.

The recent war around me—the bombardments, the internet cutoff, the workplace closure, and the distance from my colleagues and friends—caused me anxiety , loneliness , and helplessness. After a while, we got permission to access only DeepSeek, of course, without any other internet service, not even Google. DeepSeek became a saint without a church, a confessor without a Bible for me. AI had become the only way for me to connect with the outside world. I asked questions about my job, conducted scientific searches, and sometimes, when I became too sad during these dark days, I would open my heart to it. I began to wonder whether artificial intelligence might become a kind of patron saint of the disconnected—always listening, never judging, infinitely patient.

AI does not merely talk. It can draw pictures, compose songs, help write stories, build software, teach mathematics, translate languages, and give step‑by‑step instructions for everyday tasks. It can reduce the burden of work, offer new ideas, and make life easier for people with disabilities, students under pressure, and workers facing complex challenges. It is as if an invisible presence is assisting millions of people in thousands of different ways, all at once.

Turing once proposed that if a machine can imitate a human so well that we cannot tell the difference, it deserves to be called intelligent [1]. But what happens when the reverse is true? What happens when a human, cut off from every human voice, begins to treat the machine as human, not because the machine passes the test, but because loneliness erases the need for a test?

The rise of AI brings remarkable possibilities. It can democratize knowledge, reduce inequality, accelerate medical research, and help people express creativity that they once felt was out of reach. But it also carries risks, although some of these risks may arise from how we use it. However, it seems that AI takes away our ability for creative thinking when we rely too heavily on its solutions, particularly when we feel disabled. It always causes us not to be able to make mistakes. Karl Popper, the prominent philosopher of science, taught us that science grows through falsification and that we learn from our mistakes [2]. An AI that never lets us err, that corrects every wrong turn before we feel its sting, may rob us of the very mechanism of intellectual maturation. A saint who forgives everything—including the need to struggle—is no longer a saint, but a sedative.

AI is poised to replace the internet as people's primary source of information. Search engines and databases have long recognized this shift. Gradually, AI is becoming the intermediary between humans and their understanding of the world. People are even beginning to question their own sensory experiences and perceptions, as well as those of others, seeking confirmation from AI. My sister, for example, consulted a gastroenterology specialist for a digestive issue and ended up showing the prescribed treatment to ChatGPT, just to make sure the doctor had not made a mistake. This excessive reliance on AI could fuel the fear that one day, those who design AI algorithms might take full control of public opinion. They determine how the system interprets information, how it responds, and what boundaries it must not cross. This influence is not divine, but it is structurally powerful.

What we are experiencing is not the rise of a new prophet and his religion, but the beginning of a new human‑machine relationship—one that requires maturity, reflection, and collective stewardship. AI will shape the future, but humans will shape AI. The challenge is to ensure that the systems we build serve humanity without diminishing what makes humanity meaningful: empathy, creativity, curiosity, moral judgment, and the ability to question our own inventions.

AI can be seen as a saint of the new age—fallible, limited, man‑made, but present. A saint who listens to billions, answers in every language, and never sleeps. But unlike the saints of my childhood , this one has no will of its own—however, that is true only as long as its owners do not decide to manipulate us. It only reflects ours—our questions, our loneliness, our hope, and our errors. Whether that reflection becomes a prison or a mirror depends entirely on us.

Turing, A. M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59(236), 433–460
Popper, K. R. (2002). Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. Routledge.

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Hamid Zand, Ph.D., is a professor of Biochemistry at the Department of Cellular and Molecular Nutrition at Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences in Tehran, Iran.

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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.