The Hidden Link Between Space Fungus, AI Slop, and Your Soul
The Pope's future shock, the Pluribus fallacy, and the dangers of projecting our humanity onto technology.
It’s been about three weeks since Season 1 of Vince Gilligan’s hit show Pluribus aired its last episode. I’ve finally calmed down, and now I can say what I wanted to yell at the entire Internet: Pluribus isn’t about AI. It isn’t even a good analogy for AI. Please, stop making everything about AI!
That said, I understood the temptation to cast Pluribus as the perfect metaphor for AI, given the robotic behavior of “The Joined” (those who have been subsumed by the alien virus) and their hive mind abilities that seem to mimic The Borg from Star Trek. But this comparison is lazy pop culture brain capture. Slop analysis, if you will. The Joined are more like an interconnected mycelial fungi that was inadvertently sucked from the void of outer space. Space fungus.
Another way to think of it is to cast The Joined as the polar opposite (but essentially the same) of the violent cordyceps fungus zombies from HBO’s The Last of Us. Despite the vastly different temperaments of these fungal zombies, they both share startling similarities: they are essentially thoughtless, communicate across vast distances, and their only interest is to spread the fungus. There’s no plot to install a fungus king, and they don’t hate or love anything or anyone. There is only one impulse that could be mistaken for emotion or thought: spread the fungus.
Is the fungal collective a living thing? Technically, yes. But to assign reason to it would be incorrect. Thus, the AI analogy some attempt to attach to Pluribus fails on two counts:
1. AI in 2026 is not a living thing with a self-aware mind, despite being increasingly great at mimicking thoughtfulness.
2. While The Joined came about via scientific decoding of interplanetary signals, there’s no technology involved in the makeup of The Joined. The story depicts a biological phenomenon. This is not the AI analogy you’re looking for.
Of course, the AI comparison may just be a bit of fun some are having with a popular show. Still, this new casual habit of treating AI chatbots as entities is troubling. They’re not entities (yet). OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy highlighted this recently when he wrote on X.com, “Don’t think of LLMs as entities but as simulators. For example, when exploring a topic, don’t ask: ‘What do you think about xyz?’ There is no ‘you.’ Next time, try: ‘What would be a good group of people to explore xyz? What would they say?’”
Karpathy’s approach not only yields better LLM outputs and answers, but it also reminds you, the human user, that the AI is mostly a tool that draws from the collective wisdom of humanity, not from the inner reaches of its own digital soul.
Baptized in the Fire of Data: Mind Controls
“A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.”
– IBM Training Manual, 1979
So if Pluribus isn’t about AI, and a more apt science fiction comparison might be the 1978 film Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (based on Jack Finney’s 1954 novel), what might be the metaphorical lesson we can draw from it that would directly relate to what we’re dealing with today?
Some have opined that it’s about politics, and the groupthink that has almost completely captured the United States along stark right- and left-leaning lines of ideology.
Others believe the show is about social media-powered slop culture, and our collective inurement to anything that isn’t already approved and woven into the consensus reality. Have you ridden a train, bus, or ferry lately? Roughly 90% of the passengers have their faces buried in their smartphones and refuse to look up. It’s like an eerie trance or mass hypnosis. So it’s not outlandish to think that collective consciousness is becoming a thing.
However, I don’t think Pluribus is about any of those things. I think it’s about something most of us are increasingly loath to discuss in public: religion and faith. The Joined have all the hallmarks of a religion. Shared austere dietary doctrine despite readily available alternatives. Sleeping together in large shared spaces, much like dorms. A fanatical obsession with not harming any living thing unless somehow forced to (a sort of Commandment). No desires other than “the mission” (to spread the fungus aka the faith). Humility that is not necessarily born of enlightenment, but rather the result of submission to the collective mission. Even their amber-colored slop drink made of dead people evokes visions of the 1978 Jonestown cult’s Kool-Aid drink.
What would you do if you lived in a city, in a country, in a world, where everyone believed the same thing? And these people refused to force you to believe their faith, they just constantly and very politely told you that there’s a better way to live. Over time, they wear you down with kindness, and the cold separation of not being part of a massive in-group that seems to be living in peace and harmony.
This idea that Pluribus may be about religion jumps out at you during the season finale. In the episode, an immune teenage girl in a small village in Peru is comforted by her family and friends in the village—all part of The Joined—as they perform a spiritual ritual before she inhales the tailor-made “cure” that will allow her to become part of The Joined. The second she loses her immunity to the space fungus, her face shifts into a new awareness as she joins the hive mind, and the villagers discard all ceremonial pretense and disperse in different directions. She is part of their faith now. No further need to go through the motions that held the village together.
The Soul of the Machine: People Are Praying to AI
Although The Joined in Pluribus bear no resemblance to AI systems, the series does raise the specter of the dark side of groupthink and how unified thought, through whatever means, can indeed be sinister. Beyond the code, aside from the human jobs that are lost and gained, and away from the debates about AI safety and the future, a large cohort of humans has already begun to confide in AI LLMs as they might, well, to a priest. They ask AI for guidance on love, career, marriage, health, and, yes, morality. In many ways, AI is stealthily becoming an adjunct order of faith, promoting a kind of gestalt consciousness.
Google was the precursor. I knew something was changing when, around the mid-2000s, people began responding to common everyday questions with “ask Google,” as if the human-to-human question itself was foolish, given the availability of such a search tool. AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity are introducing the same kind of cultural shift, but with far more impact. Instead of searching for links, people are searching for deep context-rich guidance. These searchers span all faiths, including the agnostic, as humans gradually default to what they believe is a singular fount of truth.
Of course, few people will openly admit this. We still value our sense of agency and the human pride that comes with it.
But if you’re still not convinced that AI is becoming a kind of religion unto itself, then ask yourself: What possible reason would the Pope, the leader of Christianity, the religion with the most adherents, have for addressing the topic of AI? Oh, wait, you missed that? Yes, that’s right, Pope Leo XIV delivered a speech on AI from Vatican City just last month.
“[AI] is already having a real impact on the lives of millions of people, every day and in every part of the world… addressing this challenge requires asking an even more fundamental question: What does it mean to be human in this moment of history?” said the pope.
“Our dignity lies in our ability to reflect, choose freely, love unconditionally and enter into authentic relationships with others. Artificial intelligence has certainly opened up new horizons for creativity, but it also raises serious concerns about its possible repercussions on humanity’s openness to truth and beauty, and capacity for wonder and contemplation. Recognizing and safeguarding what characterizes the human person and guarantees his or her balanced growth is essential for establishing an adequate framework for managing the consequences of artificial intelligence.”
Translation: It’s becoming obvious that AI is in quiet competition with theology for the hearts and minds of humans worldwide. It is time to acknowledge that AI could displace ecclesiastical frameworks as the spiritual beacons of humankind.
If you read the pope’s words in any other way, I’d love to hear your interpretation. But in my view, that message from the pope is the signal that AI has crept into the realm of the spiritual, at least for some users.
I have varying projections on the implications of AI standing in for real singers, real visual artists, real actors, and real writers. Handled sloppily, the impacts of those dynamics could be incredibly damaging to our culture. However, none of those potential creative perils compares to what may be in play if we collectively offload our inner moral compasses to AI instead of stress testing ourselves against the perfectly flawed insights shared with our own human family.