Welcome to the Gospel Coalition podcast where we help to renew and unify the contemporary church in the ancient gospel.

Today we're pleased to share with you one of our articles on audio.

Hope for the algorithm-shaped self, how AI deepens our identity crisis by Michael Keller, read by the author.

Psychiatrist Keith Sakaita and his team saw enough patients where extensive AI use

led to severe mental health cases characterized by paranoia and delusions to give it the label, chat GPT psychosis.

There are numerous other documented cases of AI-related mental health crises,

with one man calling a chat bot, Mama, while posting delirious rants about being a Messiah,

and ultimately losing his marriage, job, and home. Another case ended

in death when police killed a 35-year-old man while he was suffering an AI-induced psychotic break.

These aren't isolated incidents, but rather signs of a broader cultural shift. According to Harvard

Business Review's 2025 analysis of generative AI usage, the top three applications are no longer

technical or productivity focused, but deeply personal.

Therapy and companionship, organizing one's life, and finding purpose.

We've shifted from asking AI to help us become more productive at work to asking it to just help us become.

AI is moved from being a mere tool to help us complete our work faster to being part of

identity formation itself.

The challenge facing anyone concerned with human flourishing isn't that AI is creating

entirely new problems.

Rather, AI compounds the problems of modern identity formation, exacerbating modern

identity's fragility, incoherence, and hidden moral frameworks. AI acts as a catalyst,

intensifying each problem while making the symptoms feel like solutions. To understand why the gospel,

where Christians receive their identity, is urgently needed, we must first understand how AI

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