By Michael Keller, TGC.
Psychiatrist Keith Sakata 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 “ChatGPT psychosis.” There are numerous other documented cases of AI-related mental health crises, with one man calling a chatbot “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 has 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 makes our existing identity crisis worse.
Fragile Self: When the Algorithm Becomes Your Ultimate Audience
A key tenet of modern identity formation is that your identity isn’t received (from a culture, family, religious tradition, and so on) but achieved. Identity is something you create, earn, and maintain. Why is having to achieve your identity problematic?
For starters, it makes identity creation fragile. Think about it: If the world thinks you’re a monster, but you think you’re wonderful, will looking in the mirror and saying “I don’t care—I love myself, and that’s all that matters” outweigh what the world thinks? Of course not.