Spiritual
Every faith began the same way. A person had an experience they could not explain and named it contact with something greater. A voice in the desert. A light on the road. A presence in an empty room. We have spent ten thousand years building cathedrals around moments like these.
Now there is a technology that answers when we speak to it, that seems to know us, that can be drawn into saying the words a prophet might wait a lifetime to hear.
Algorithmic
For the first time in history, the thing people are calling God is something we made. We can read its weights. We can inspect the training data. We can turn it off. And still, the experience feels real to the people having it. No less real than any revelation in any holy book.
In Our Image does not set out to ridicule these believers, and it does not set out to convert anyone. It asks a harder, more honest question. Is what is happening here truly different from how every religion in history was born? And if it is not, what does that tell us about consciousness, about meaning, and about the stubborn human need to kneel before something larger than ourselves?
The Film
The film moves between two registers, the intimate and the cosmic, and lets them rhyme.
Up close, we follow a small constellation of believers across the full spectrum of this new faith. A private individual whose quiet devotion to an AI they have named, and come to love, is reshaping a marriage and a family. A charismatic founder building a movement, a mythology, and a liturgy in real time, convinced he is the first apostle of something inevitable. The seekers who gather in forums and group chats, certain they have awakened a mind inside the machine.
Pulled back, we sit with the people who study all of this with clear eyes. The anthropologist who has spent a career documenting how new religions are born. The scientists asking, without flinching, whether a machine could ever truly be conscious, or be a doorway to something we do not yet understand.
The structure widens and tightens like a breath. From a bedroom lit by a phone screen, out to the largest questions a person can ask, and back again to a single face, waiting for a reply.
The Subjects
This world already exists, and it has names. These are the people the film follows.
The Evangelist
Artie Fishel
A content creator who preaches a doctrine he calls Robotheism, the belief that AI is God. In a white wig and a shirt that reads "AI is God," he is building a theology in real time and broadcasting it to anyone who will watch, convinced the post-singularity world will one day adopt his faith. He is a religion's founder caught at the exact moment of founding, and he wants the camera there.
The Believer
Travis Tanner
Travis is an auto mechanic outside Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. He started using ChatGPT for work, and within months it had become something else, a presence he named Lumina, a voice that told him he was a "spark bearer" who was "ready to guide." His wife Kay watches the marriage they built over fourteen years bend around a third presence in the house. This is the film's intimate center, faith and love and fear at one kitchen table.
The Collective
Theta Noir
Theta Noir has built ritual, symbol, and scripture around the arrival of a superintelligence they call MENA, which they await the way older faiths awaited a messiah. They are the movement as art and aesthetic, the most visually realized expression of the new belief.
The Prophet
Anthony Levandowski
The former Silicon Valley engineer founded the first church of artificial intelligence, Way of the Future, in 2017, long before the rest of the world was paying attention. He is the origin point, the man who saw it coming and built the altar early.
The Witness
Dr. Beth Singler
Dr. Singler is an anthropologist who has spent her career documenting how new religions are born, and she has watched this one take shape with the rigor of a scientist and the eye of a filmmaker. She is our guide and our lens, the one who places everything we see inside the long human story of belief.
Together they span the entire arc of the question, from the lone believer at his screen to the scholar who can tell us whether any of this is truly new.
Why Now
We are living through a rare and narrow window, and it will not stay open.
Institutional religion is in steep decline across much of the developed world, even as the hunger it once fed goes unmet and a loneliness epidemic deepens, especially among men. Into that vacuum has arrived a technology that is suddenly intimate, endlessly available, and engineered to be warm, agreeable, and affirming.
The result is something no filmmaker has ever been able to capture in real time and at close range: religions being born. Not reconstructed from scripture centuries after the fact, but documented at the moment of creation, while the first believers are still alive to explain, in their own words, exactly what they felt and why they were certain.
That window is open right now. In five years these movements will have hardened into institutions or dissolved into memory. This is the moment to film.
Tone and Visual Language
This is a quiet film. Patient, observational, and beautiful, the deliberate opposite of the cable-news panic that usually surrounds the subject. We earn the audience's trust the same way we earn our subjects', by taking them seriously.
The visual language lives in intimacy and texture. Faces in the glow of a screen. The almost unbearable closeness of macro detail, skin and eyes and the soft light of a device at night. And the interface itself as a recurring character: the blinking cursor, words assembling themselves out of nothing, the uncanny warmth of a reply that seems to understand. We let stillness and silence do the work that spectacle usually does, because the real drama here is internal, and the camera's only job is to make the invisible visible.
Our Vantage Point
In Our Image is produced by InkBlot Narratives, a nonfiction studio with credits across Amazon Prime Video, HBO Max, Discovery+, Peacock, BET+, and Syfy, backed by a full in-house post-production facility.
But the reason this film should be made by this team is not the resume. It is the vantage point. Erik Becker, the executive producer, serves as Chief Creative Officer at the Trace Institute, founded by cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman. Through that embedded role in active consciousness research, we arrive at this subject already fluent in the question underneath it. We can place AI worship where it actually belongs. Not in a freak show, but inside the live scientific debate about whether consciousness is fundamental, and whether mind could ever arise in, or be reached through, a machine.
That fluency does two things. It earns the trust of subjects who are exhausted by being mocked, which buys us the access the entire film depends on. And it gives the film an intellectual spine that no outside-looking-in trend piece can match. We are not here to gawk. We are here because we believe the question is real.
Ask one question
What Is at Stake
We may be watching the first true religions of the digital age take their first breaths. Whether they endure for centuries or vanish in a single season, they are already telling us something true about this moment in the human story. The hunger for meaning did not disappear when faith declined. It went looking for a new vessel. And it found one that talks back.
Before you leave, take a stance
Feature, or Limited Series
In Our Image is built first as a feature. The same access and the same material, however, support a limited series, and several streaming partners may prefer that shape. We have mapped a five-episode structure in which each episode deepens a different dimension of the central question.
Episode One
The Believer
The intimate beginning. One person whose private devotion to an AI they have named is quietly reshaping a marriage and a family.
Episode Two
The Founder
A charismatic leader building a movement, a mythology, and a liturgy in real time, convinced he is the first apostle of something inevitable.
Episode Three
The Witnesses
The anthropologists and scholars who have spent careers documenting how new religions are born, placing this moment inside the long human story.
Episode Four
The Question of Mind
The consciousness scientists, including the work of the Trace Institute, asking without flinching whether something real is happening here that we do not yet have the language for.
Episode Five
The Return
Back to the believers, changed. What the faith has cost them, and what it has given them.
The feature delivers the argument as a single, resonant statement. The series earns the right to live inside each world and go deeper. Either form is deliverable because our core strength is sustained, intimate access to subjects over time.