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In a theological sense, a god is an immortal being that exists beyond time and space. This is clearly nothing like LLMs. In an anthropological sense, however, a god is rather defined as the personified authority of a group through time\u2014a conceptual tool that molds a collective of ancestors into a unified agent or voice. This is exactly what LLMs are. They are products of vast volumes of data, literally traces of past human (speech) acts, synthesized into a single agency that is (falsely) experienced by users as extra-human. This reconceptualization, I argue, opens up new avenues of critique of LLMs by allowing the mobilization of theoretical resources from centuries of religious critique. For illustration, I draw on the Marxian religious philosophy of Martin H\u00e4gglund. From this perspective, the danger of LLMs emerge not only as bias or unpredictability, but as a temptation to abdicate our spiritual and ultimately democratic freedom in favor of what I call a <jats:italic>tyranny of the past<\/jats:italic>.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1007\/s11023-024-09667-z","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2024,4,25]],"date-time":"2024-04-25T17:02:29Z","timestamp":1714064549000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/springer_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":13,"title":["We are Building Gods: AI as the Anthropomorphised Authority of the Past"],"prefix":"10.1007","volume":"34","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-8887-5324","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Carl","family":"\u00d6hman","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"297","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2024,4,25]]},"reference":[{"key":"9667_CR1","volume-title":"The secret history of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and OpenAI","author":"R Albergotti","year":"2023","unstructured":"Albergotti, R. 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