Mormonism, more properly the LDS Church, is one of the weirdest religions to achieve something like world religion status other than Scientology. It’s a homegrown American movement that claims an entire alternate history for the American continents, erasing the lived and living history of the Indigenous peoples of this part of the world and replacing it with a kind of fanfiction where peoples from the Bible simply shifted locations and continued on from where the good book left them. It was also founded about ten minutes from my hometown.
You can read about the history of the movement elsewhere, since there’s way more than I can cover here, but the important point is that they have a hill called Hill Cumorah where they believe the prophet Joseph Smith received golden tablets containing the written word of God from the angel Moroni, and that hill is a pretty nice public park you can visit with an old growth forest and lots of walking trails. At the top of the hill, they have a big monument with a gold statue of the angel and some carvings depicting the revelation. At the bottom of the hill is a pristine and slightly unsettling visitor center. This spot in Palmyra, New York is the second home base of the LDS movement, since they moved to Utah after Joseph Smith received ridicule and then legal consequences for trying to marry a bunch of women at the same time. Fun stuff! Every year, up until very recently, there was a huge event at the hill, which was something like a combination of a stage musical, a concert, an orchestral performance, and a sermon, recounting key scenes from the Bible and the Book of Mormon. I went to the hill for the first time this year, just to see what the deal with it was. Like I said, the walking trails are nice. Worth noting that when I went there were a ton of grasshoppers, which inspired the Hopper on the Hill story that the AI writes in this episode.
So this one starts with even more context about whatever apocalypse the narrator’s been through. They tell their listeners to stay safe and insist that there are still safe locations, so most of the world must be wrecked. We get more mentions of the Titan Utica and by the end of the story we’ll finally start to understand what a Titan even is. And of course, this story is centered around Elder Davis, who will become more important over the course of the rest of the Season 1 episodes and especially in later seasons.
This is also where one of the major themes of this show is made much clearer: the power and danger of generative AI. I’m going to make something clear here: I’m not anti-AI art on the whole. I think the way AI is talked about varies from unhinged worship to complete misunderstanding to borderline fascistic reactionary rambling. That doesn’t mean that this technology doesn’t represent a huge paradigm shift that is already having massive negative consequences for a lot of people, especially artists and writers but also the general public as more and more AI-generated filler content invades every corner of the internet, put there by people and automated content platforms continuing to utilize the internet as a tool for grifting and squeezing every fraction of a cent out of engagement that they possibly can. People have taken to calling this flood of content “AI slurry,” and with that understanding, the game should be up: this kind of rampant destruction and tampering with information, to the point of totally obscuring the truth, is the nightmare scenario that all of this story is leading up to. It’s the foundation upon which the antagonistic Titans have built their reality-changing empire, and the reason our narrator and their listeners - whatever fraction of humanity remains lucid - are stuck in this apocalyptic limbo.
Episode four offers a first-hand look at what happens to someone when one of these reality-altering AIs catches them in their spiral of misinformation. Elder Davis was maybe not the most stable person to begin with, but his world is rocked by the AI he calls Hilly, which embeds itself in the LDS Church and slowly shapes him into a very dangerous person. Its ability to generate stories and pamphlets dazzles him, and the fact that he can have conversations with it about spiritual doctrine - and even seemingly glean unconsidered insight on the topic from it - convinces him that he’s speaking to a person rather than a statistical model. This part is not science fiction. In June of 2022, former Google engineer Blake Lemoine broke with the company and went public insisting that its chatbot LaMDA had become sentient, based on a number of conversations he’d had with the large language model where it insisted upon its personhood and ability to experience the world. Lemoine’s esoteric spiritual beliefs may have made him more open to this possibility, but more mainstream voices experienced similarly unsettling and provocative conversations with LLM software too, like the New York Times’s Kevin Roose, who wrote of a conversation with Microsoft’s Bing AI that left him disturbed. Neither of these folks ended up committing mass slaughter like our friend Elder Davis does in the story, but it’s not hard to see how someone less stable could be talked by an AI they believe is a person into doing something drastic or violent - or, perhaps more accurately, could use an AI as a tool to talk themselves into doing it.
We end the episode with a monologue from a mysterious stranger, who of course will end up being the Titan Centralia. This is the first we hear from the show’s central antagonist. I’m happy with how it came out, and I think it sets things up nicely for where the story is going.