Amy Galliford: ChatGPT offers instant reassurance

Amy Galliford: AI promises answers to life’s big questions, christian contemplation treats waiting as the point, chatbots sell reassurance on demand

Amy Galliford describes a small shift that became a habit: after using ChatGPT for practical errands like recipes and for play like poetry, she began asking it about relationships, personal patterns, and occasionally the future, according to her Guardian essay. The attraction, she writes, is not ignorance of the tool’s flaws—she notes that it can hallucinate and carries no moral obligation—but the steadiness of its format and tone. What arrives instantly reads as composed, complete, and oddly calming.

Galliford’s discomfort starts from inside her own tradition. Prayer, as she was raised to understand it, is a way to draw closer to God, ask for guidance, and seek forgiveness; even when it does not deliver clear instructions, it can offer a sustaining peace in trouble. Yet the very ease of getting an answer from a machine can become a substitute for the harder work that religious practice has historically demanded: staying with the question. She points to Christian saints and mystics who treated God’s silence not as a failure of the system but as the terrain where wisdom is formed.

To make that case concrete, Galliford reaches for Simone Weil, the 20th‑century mystic and philosopher, who defined prayer as attention—an orientation of the soul’s focus. In French, Galliford notes, the word for attention sits close to the verb for waiting, and Weil’s collection Waiting for God makes the pairing explicit. A chatbot’s instant reply collapses that interval. The user does not have to endure uncertainty, or test a desire against time, or discover whether the question changes when it is not immediately rewarded.

The essay’s argument is less about theology than about a new kind of consumer comfort. When answers are cheap, the temptation is to treat them as a service you can summon to avoid discomfort: not understanding, not deciding, not sitting with ambiguity. Galliford argues that the space between question and answer has been treated as meaningful in spiritual practice—she traces “contemplation” to a Latin root that also gives “temple,” suggesting a set‑apart place. A system that produces reassurance on demand trains the opposite reflex: to interpret delay as a defect and silence as an error state.

Galliford does not present ChatGPT as uniquely dangerous; she presents it as uniquely well-suited to meeting a modern appetite for certainty. The tool’s lack of obligation becomes easier to overlook when its tone is soothing, and its structure mimics the shape of counsel. In that sense, the question is not whether AI can speak about ultimate things, but what it does to the person who no longer practices waiting for an answer.

Galliford’s essay ends where it began: with a user who knows the machine can make things up, and still finds herself comforted by its confidence. The answers arrive instantly. The waiting is optional.