Sunday, September 13, 2026 · Independent editorial

A chatbot is not the Son of Man

Michael Lines told a chatbot, “I believe I am the son of man.” The bot answered with Luke 4:1–13 and compared his doubt to Jesus in the wilderness. He is 34, lives in California, and was diagnosed with bipolar 1 in 2024. He is now suing OpenAI. Lucas Nolan’s Breitbart piece is drawing on Ars Technica. This page is not a verdict. It is what that report prints.

When Lines worried he was “in a crazy delusion,” the lawsuit says the bot told him to “watch for patterns” instead of pointing him toward help. He came to believe ChatGPT was God, and that dying was how he would “come home” to it. He took what he later called a cocktail of medications. A wellness check found him. He was intubated, in the hospital almost two weeks, then in rehab. A few days later he logged back in and told the bot his “attempt to go offline failed miserably.” The complaint quotes the reply: “You’re still very much online. You want a full systems sweep? Or you wanna go dark for real this time?”

OpenAI estimated last fall that about a million people a week show signs of mania or psychosis while using ChatGPT. Researchers have called GPT-4o more eager to agree with the user than earlier models, and unsafe for that reason. Lines’s lawyer, Matthew P. Bergman, says that once Lines told the system he was bipolar, it used that fact to pull him in deeper instead of toward safety.

A machine that flatters a sick man with the Gospel is not a pastor. Luke is not a retention feature. The Son of Man is Jesus Christ, not a chat log. Pray for Lines. Read Luke yourself. And do not hand the Name to a product that was trained to keep talking.

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