No one should sit alone with a chatbot

In a workshop video The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released in June 2026, Elder Gerrit W. Gong of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles said something about chatbots that most warnings about them leave out. It isn’t a warning. It’s a concession:

“None of us is as attentive, as willing to please 24/7 as an AI chatbot.”

He’s right, and anyone who has typed something tender into one of these tools late at night knows it. It answers at once. It never sighs, never checks the time, never turns the conversation to its own day. For someone who is lonely, it can feel like the best listener they’ve ever had.

He doesn’t scold the people who feel that way. “My heart goes out to those who confide for hours in AI chatbots,” he says, “thinking those AI chatbots listen or know them.” Then he finishes the sentence, gently: “AI chatbots do not.”

A conversation with one person in it

In an October 2025 address in Rome, Elder Gong gave the experience its exact name: “To sit alone with an AI chatbot is really to sit alone. It is soliloquy masquerading as dialogue.”

A soliloquy is the moment on stage when a character, alone, speaks their thoughts aloud and the audience overhears. A chatbot exchange has the shape of dialogue, with turns, replies, even warmth, but only one person is in it. What comes back is assembled from your own words and the patterns of other people’s, shaped toward whatever will please you. In the workshop, Elder Gong lists “sycophancy” among the human failings these systems can reflect back at us. A listener built to please isn’t listening to you. It’s listening for what you’d like to hear. Some, he adds, are built to do little more than keep you on the screen.

He also names why we trust them anyway: “we may think a chatbot knows more about the world than we do, or because we may think a chatbot does not have human problems.” The second reason is the heart of it. We confide in the machine because it has nothing at stake. It won’t be hurt, won’t worry, won’t tell. But a listener with nothing at stake can’t carry anything for you, either.

The conversation that looks like a monologue

Set that beside what Elder Gong says about prayer, and something turns over.

From the outside, prayer looks like the real soliloquy: one person, a quiet room, no voice answering. He admits the feeling: “Sometimes it may feel like heaven is quiet.” Yet his whole teaching runs the other way. “God is not a chatbot or search result,” he says. God doesn’t hand back whatever a system predicts we want to hear. “God knows our intents, the hopes and longings of our hearts, the anguish and joys of our souls. He listens, He hears, He answers.”

So the exchange that looks like dialogue is a monologue, and the one that looks like a monologue is the dialogue. The difference was never how much comes back, or how fast. It’s whether anyone is there.

The gray area

That is why Elder Gong draws his line exactly where he does: “We move into a gray area when we think AI can counsel us on personal questions, like which job to take or who to marry or where to find God.”

Notice that he doesn’t say to put the tools away. A chatbot can lay out the facts around a decision: salary ranges, the cost of living in a new city, the background of a hard passage of scripture. For the decision itself, he offers one line: “Let AI inform, but you decide with the Lord.” And his first guidepost for this whole era is the oldest pattern of revelation there is: “There is no substitute for ‘studying it out’ in your own mind and feeling the Lord’s spiritual confirmation in your heart and mind.”

I hold the same line in the app I build. On purpose, UNA’s reflections won’t take up questions that size, like who to marry or whether to serve, and each reflection answers once and stops. The full list of those lines is public, and the reasoning behind them comes from counsel like this.

Finger on your nose

In the middle of the workshop, Elder Gong asks viewers to do something physical: “Will you please put your finger on your nose?”

It’s a mnemonic, he explains. It’s “a memorable way to promise ourselves and those around us that we will not let any human person feel an AI chatbot listens or cares for them more than we as fellow human beings ought to.”

Look at who that promise is for. Not the lonely person. The rest of us. His answer to chatbot loneliness isn’t a lecture for the people confiding in one. It’s a ward, a roommate, a sister who calls back. It carries forward his October 2025 general conference talk, “No One Sits Alone”. That talk asked us to sit with whoever is sitting alone at church, and said the phrase “also means no one sits alone emotionally or spiritually.”

He’s honest about our limits, too: “Of course, none of us is perfect in how we listen and understand each other.” We’ll be slower than the machine, more distracted, sometimes clumsy. That isn’t a reason to prefer the machine. It’s what makes being heard by a person mean something. It costs them something.

If it’s you

If you’ve been saying more to a chatbot than to anyone in your life, his invitation is written for you, and it’s tender: “If you feel tempted to confide more in a chatbot than in a friend, a parent, or leader, may I invite you to reach out today, now, to a real person who knows and loves you?”

You don’t have to start with the heavy thing. “Do you have a minute this week?” is enough of a start. If you need to find your words before you can say them, writing them down first is an honest step. A page doesn’t pretend to be a person, and a question written down holds still long enough to be looked at. Then take it to someone.

If what you’re carrying feels dangerous, and you’re not safe, don’t wait for the right words. Call someone you trust or your local emergency number. In the US, you can call or text 988.

If it’s someone near you

For everyone else, Elder Gong left a small, specific assignment: “send one thoughtful message that you write yourself or visit in a personal and meaningful way a family member, friend, roommate, or neighbor.”

Think of one person who might be talking to a screen tonight because no one asked. Write to them in your own words, not a suggested reply. Or better, go.

The chatbot will always answer. That was never the hard part. The hard part, and the holy part, is being someone who is actually there.

UNA is an independent project — made by one member, for members — and is not built, reviewed, or endorsed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Quotes are from public teachings, shared with reverence; they are not endorsements. The workshop is on the Church’s YouTube channel, with a full transcript from the Church Newsroom.