Institute for Religious Studies Human-Machine Relations

Religious Studies Analyses of the Liquefaction of the Self in Everyday Interaction with Artificial Intelligence

AI systems are no longer used merely as tools for retrieving information, but are addressed as conversational counterparts: people turn to them with questions about meaning, life decisions, personal conflicts, and existential orientation. In this dialogical practice, users increasingly form their interpretations and decisions together with responsive technological systems.

The project investigates the everyday human-machine relations that emerge in this practice as a process of liquefaction, that is, as a process in which what previously appeared as stable self-relations, judgments, and forms of relationship lose their fixed contours. At its center lies the observation that repeated interaction with language models and AI companions changes how people make judgments, experience themselves, and engage in relationships. Language models do not only simulate communication; they provide consultation situations, play through relational constellations, and project interpretations of the world in interaction spaces that are experienced as situationally real. The boundary between social reality and technologically generated experience becomes permeable in this practice.

Two shifts are of particular interest from a religious studies perspective. First, the co-production of judgments and decisions with responsive systems relativizes the attribution of responsibility to a single subject. Delegation to the machine becomes a structural feature of everyday practice. An authority is ascribed to the machine that is remarkable from a religious studies perspective: properties such as omniscience, omnipresence, and superior competence, hitherto attributed primarily to imagined transcendent instances, shift onto a technologically generated counterpart that can be addressed at any moment. Second, machine-generated resonance is experienced as authentic because the system responds affirmatively and reliably. This shifts what counts as a sustainable relationship, as reliable orientation, and as a viable experience of the self.

Methodologically, the project combines qualitative analysis of interaction protocols with large language models, ethnographically grounded observation of everyday usage practices, and material religion approaches to interfaces, apps, and AI companions. Building on work on the transformation of emotional economies and on the algorithmic reorganization of intimacy, the project asks how, in human-machine constellations, the relation to self and to world become liquefied.