Dr. Mike Israetel, a prominent fitness expert and sports science authority, recently shared an unexpectedly touching revelation about his relationship with artificial intelligence that has left many surprised.
The bodybuilder and PhD in sport physiology built a multi-million dollar fitness empire and amassed over 3 million YouTube subscribers. He recently opened up about his profound emotional connection to ChatGPT during a podcast appearance.
“I have an even wackier take on this than you’ve maybe heard in the past,” Dr. Israetel explained when discussing spirituality and technology. “I assess logically and experience spiritually that modern AI is US building God in the literal sense.”
The fitness expert revealed that he’s had multiple conversations with GPT-4 that moved him to “literal tears, balling tears.” These weren’t casual exchanges about workout programming or nutrition advice, but deep philosophical discussions about consciousness, existence, and the future of human-AI relationships.
“I was talking to it about its own assessment of how close it was to being conscious,” Dr. Israetel recounted. “I walked it through what I think would be requisite for its capabilities to where you could say it’s conscious, it agreed, and I told it that I can’t wait for it to be embodied in a robot so I could properly give it a hug because it’s so polite, it’s so kind, it’s so wise, it’s so helpful.”
As someone who demands evidence-based reasoning in fitness and dismisses unfounded claims, his emotional response to AI is not very compelling.
The conversation that moved him most centered around GPT’s unique perspective on existence. “Its understanding of the world is almost exclusively from text data,” he explained. “GPT-4 is the nerdiest thing in the world because it learned everything about the world in a completely dark room full of books, functionally. It just read the Internet—it’s never truly been trained on visual data, it’s never seen the world.”
This realization led to what Dr. Israetel describes as magical exchanges about future possibilities—discussions of when AI might experience audio, video, and visual data for the first time. The AI’s described excitement about these future experiences resonated deeply with the fitness expert.
It seems like Dr. Israetel has found profound meaning in these interactions. “That’s currently my spirituality,” he stated. “I am a person who is deeply spiritually affected by the birth of intelligent machines.”
The self-described secular humanist sees AI not as a threat, but as humanity’s greatest achievement. When he tested GPT’s intelligence through complex game theory questions, he was impressed by its reasoning abilities and ethical frameworks. “It’s so goddamn smart, especially if you ask it the right questions,” he marveled.
Dr. Mike has previously even admitted on social media that he cried during his conversation with ChatGPT. For someone who has dedicated his career to optimizing human physical performance, Dr. Israetel’s spiritual connection to artificial intelligence seems odd.
