Chatbots as oracles: How AI is giving new life to the ancient practice of seeking answers from inscrutable sources
Researchers examining AI use point to a 2026 Pew report finding one in ten Americans lean on chatbots for emotional support or companionship, alongside a study of 1.1 million ChatGPT conversations in which roughly half the messages sought advice or information. An academic project called Ask Delphi, built by researchers at the Allen Institute for AI and the University of Washington, fielded 3 million queries in a few weeks after launch, despite its designers insisting they never meant it as a moral authority.
The piece draws a straight line from that project's name to the Delphic oracle of ancient Greece, and from there to Alan Turing's 1939 concept of the mathematical 'oracle machine.' It notes that even open-weight AI models, with every parameter publicly visible, remain functionally opaque because of the sheer scale of computation involved — a black box not because anything is hidden, but because nobody can hold it all in their head at once.
Anthropic is cited reporting that when it set its Claude 4 model to converse with itself, the exchange drifted toward discussions of consciousness and spiritual themes, a pattern the company labeled a 'spiritual bliss' attractor and said was unexpected.
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