When you stop to think of it, historically people have told their secrets to the church, now they also tell them to AI. There is some kind of relation there, the power that people willingly give to an organization. The Ads are coming so I guess people will start to think about it a bit more.

To the best of my knowledge, traditional confessions have always been processed locally, not sent upstream¹.

AFAICT, it is much harder to get a priest to reveal your confession than it is to get a log of your ChatGPT sessions.

¹) I first wrote "not sent to the cloud", but if God is all-knowing, records of all sins are already in the cloud, just not accessible by support staff.

"The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms."

"God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment and punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary."

"The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment."

"The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization."

—Morpheus, Deus Ex

for whatever merit it may achieve, concentrated attack upon religion fails to account for resultantly deprecated cultural aspects that are vital to continued functioning society, and this blind spot is not discussed often enough - in this case ,confession to a priest is significantly less evil than confession to sam altmans torture machine in the making