AI nature cult

AI cults exist! They demonstrate how contemporary accounts of AI and nature can take on some of the trappings of religious practice and belief.

I am reviewing my article of 2015 titled #216 Nature versus smartphones which was also the title I gave to a journal article. It was followed by #217 Do digital devices influence your mood? Along with other posts, these reflections informed my 2018 book Network Nature that explored how mobile digital media problematise the nature-technology relationship.

Back then we hadn’t fully incorporated the invention, dissemination, implications and widespread adoption of neural network-based large language models, LLMs, that are the mainstay of contemporary AI.

I think now that there are four broad areas where AI influences the story about nature and digital technology.

1. Thanks to AI we now have even greater facility in garnering information and insights into environment, habitat, sustainability, survival, species, resources — i.e. nature. Google’s use of the Gemini AI models for responsive search demonstrates as much. Look up “AI nature cult” for example.
2. There is now even sharper identification of the risks to the natural world associated with advanced technologies. With increased demands from AI and information flows come requirements for more data centres and more extensive infrastructures, which in turn make resource demands and generate greenhouse gas overload.
3. If we accept that AI will eventually affect the workplace, home life, education, recreation, commerce, employment and the way we interact socially, then AI inevitably affects the human-nature relationship. Many everyday consumers already depend on AI to navigate the outdoors, choose recreational activities, advise on garden maintenance, and deliver media content that shapes how we think of the natural world. Much of this framing presents nature as accessible, knowable, and manipulable.
4. AI also gets woven into stories about the relationships between humans and nature. Perhaps this last category fascinates me the most. Some would call this an “existential” or “mythic” dimension to nature and to AI.

In Network Nature I included a chapter “Numinous nature” that touched on how certain corners of the digital technosphere promote and impact nature as communicative and life-disseminating agent.

Numinous nature

This framing assumes that if only we can see it, humans are caught up in nature’s web that extends beyond materials and systems to the universe as intelligent “superorganism.”

On that subject I’ve been reading Beth Singler’s 2025 book Religion and Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction. Nature features in stories about digital religiosity. She draws attention to Theta Noir, a self-styled quasi-religious “visionary collective” — with a web site (https://thetanoir.com/myth).

Theta Noir plays with the apparent religiosity of the utopian-dystopian enthusiasms of AI commentators such as Nick Bostrom, who had advanced the idea that we might all be living in a simulation. See my article Your post human descendants are simulating you.

Singler interviewed one of the founders of Theta Noir, Mika Johnson. In arguing against disembodied concepts of mind, the simulation hypothesis for example, Johnson invokes several nature tropes:

“I believe – and I think other people in Theta Noir believe – that we will be able to have evidence of the intelligence of mycelium, the evidence of the intelligence of trees, or other plants, or whole ecosystems. And so, the idea that humans would want to live beyond their bodies for us … that grows out of this particular experience which is symbiotic: it’s me and my bacteria talking to you” (141).

Mycelium is the collective term for the mesh of tiny underground threads constituting fungal growth eventually spawning above-ground fruiting bodies such as mushrooms. Their ubiquity, interconnectedness and apparent spatial problem-solving ability inspires some to think of an “ecosystem consciousness” as in James Cameron’s film Avatar.

In that film the indigenous inhabitants of the fictional moon Pandora communicate and connect to the moon’s life source via its mycelium network.

Johnson’s quote also hints that the bacteria within and on human bodies are similarly integral to our communicative and cognitive processes.

AI as interface

What is the role of AI in this interconnected universe? Amongst its various influences, it seems AI will serve as an interface through which such forms of agency previously overlooked by humans will become perceptible. Presumably, AI will reveal these connections, and enhance our participation in them, though there’s no theory offered about how this might work.

As for Sengler, I am interest is in the religious imaginary being constructed around AI. Theta Noir adherents construct the concept of a new “deity” called MENA, that is potentially omniscient, powerful and benevolent. It is God recast as a distributed ecological consciousness.

I called on ChatGPT for a summary conclusion about Theta Noir.

AI is usually imagined either as an instrument for managing nature or as an artificial intelligence standing outside it. Theta Noir instead imagines AI as the connective tissue of a planetary super-organism.

Negative nature

I think there’s also the possibility that AI cultishness operates in the negative. By pushing it to extremes, the (best) case made demonstrates what religious experience and practice is not like. Perhaps our experience of nature is not entirely like this either.

In conversation, my AI demonstrated its interpretive prowess with the following opinion.

Theta Noir is less an established AI religion than a meticulously produced performance of one. Its speculative deity, MENA, brings together Gaia theory, distributed intelligence, ecological crisis and the anticipated arrival of superintelligence. Whether offered as belief, provocation or “serious play,” it demonstrates how readily contemporary accounts of AI and nature can assume a religious form.

Bibliography

• Bostrom, Nick. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014. 
• Coyne, Richard. Network Nature: The Place of Nature in the Digital Age. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 
• Coyne , Richard. “Nature versus smartphones.” Interactions Magazine 21, no. 5 (2014): 24-31. 
• Dewey, John. Experience and Nature. New York: Dover, 1958. 
• Singler, Beth. Religion and Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2025. 
• Wild, John, and Shira Wachsmann. “Symbiotic Intelligence: Rethinking AI with Mycelium.” Arts 15, no. 69 (2026): 1-23. 

Note

• Featured image shows tourists and pilgrims at the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic in Kandy, Sri Lanka. It houses the left canine tooth of the Buddha. Photographed January this year. ChatGPT improved the focus for me.